In 2019 I edited this book of poetry written by my father. With my mother Christy, we published the book on Kindle Digital Press, formatting it both for print and eBook.
Afterword
Written by Chris McCue, Edited by Christy McCue
My father Kevin was a source of warmth and comfort for all who knew him. His poetry reflected his innate desire to brighten the lives of those around him. Out of the hundreds of poems he wrote, for this book we’ve selected what we feel represents his work best. Much of his work is comforting and heartwarming, but he articulated a huge range of emotional experiences and moody observations about the world. He was a romantic with a sharp sense of irony. He saw the absurd in human institutions, especially when compared with the necessity and power of nature. With this insight, his dark poems have as much power to validate the reader as his light poems. That has influenced our selection.
It is 2019 and Kevin has been gone for two years. As you’d imagine, we were devastated by his loss. To remember him, my mother Christy and I re-read his work, pulling from the literary magazines, loose printouts, legal pads and old hard drive he’d left behind. We felt it was a shame that most of these poems were never widely shared, and started selecting poems that represented the range of themes on which Kevin wrote. Through these you may get some sense of who Kevin was as a person, but I felt some additional background about him here would enrich the experience of the poems.
If you’d asked Kevin to define himself, this is what he’d say: an Irishman, a Clevelander, a husband, a father and a storyteller.
Kevin was born in 1951 in Tucson, Arizona, and reared in Canoga Park, California. He was the oldest boy in a family with nine children: Mary Rita, Lindy, Kevin, Genie, Susan, Joan, Erin, Johnny and Patrick. It was rough—they rarely had enough food and his parents, strict Roman Catholics naturally, were always at their wits’ end. They moved to Cleveland Heights when he was a teenager and he went to St. Anne’s, then Notre Dame Cathedral Latin, in a tough neighborhood downtown in the late ‘60s. He played free safety at Notre Dame. He was one of the smaller kids on the field, but it was good conditioning for the neighborhood brawls he got into.
He went on to Xavier University, where his earlier altar boy experience led him to consider the priesthood. Through his study of theology, he began to understand that he liked girls too much to continue this course, and transferred to Cleveland State University. He met Christy, who was recently divorced, and they fell in love. His parents and the church couldn’t accept his marriage to a divorcee, but they married anyway in a different church. Their love for each other and the written word inspired stories, poems and songs.
Though he wasn’t born here, Kevin was as Cleveland as it gets. He was a janitor, a line cook, steelworker, a landscaper, a cab driver and a tutor at CSU. Wanting a more cerebral job, he went for a position in “word processing” which he thought would mean dealing with cognitive linguistics. It was less to do with Noam Chomsky than he’d hoped, a straight desktop publishing job, but still better than getting cursed out in Italian for laying sod too carefully. It was his first work in business writing.
In his heart he was always a working-class guy, though by the time he was thirty he was ascending the ranks of respectable white-collar jobs. He was what’s called a “business communicator.” We still have the plaques and engraved Lucite disks that say he was great at it. He brought these things back from parties thrown by big corporations where he wrote internal documents and external releases: Gould, Westinghouse, Baker & Hostetler. He was proud of how high he’d climbed—by retirement age he’d made it up to Chief Marketing Officer at the Cleveland branch of a multinational law firm. He loved that his hard work had been recognized, but that life couldn’t satisfy his soul. As far back as I can remember, he wrote poetry in the mornings before work on his yellow legal pads, reading us the ones he liked best on the weekend.
In the mid ‘80s, some of Kevin’s short stories were published in the Plain Dealer under the name A. Christopher. (The A was for Alice, my sister, and Christopher was Kevin’s middle name and my first.) The stories were I Married a Floater, A Special Delivery, The Cookout and The Trip, all mostly-true stories about our family. He was most proud of my sister and me, and told everyone he thought of as a friend about how he delivered me into the world when my mother went into labor early and couldn’t make it to the hospital. By now half of Cleveland knows me by reputation—the boy born on the couch.
He kept his head planted firmly in the clouds and his Oxfords stomping around Euclid Avenue, alternating between his corner office and the Corner Alley. He was a regular at the Winking Lizard, The Clevelander, Panini’s and Moriarty’s, playing storyteller and swapping jokes with rapt bargoers and tenders. The way he would shine when he was entertaining, people gravitated to him. He made friends easily and kept them. It kept his blue-collar cred intact, and fit into an idea of the Irish spirit he’d grown up with.
Kevin was a prolific poet, yet his poems went largely unpublished. Some of Kevin’s poems were released in the self-published Light Blue and Clear, again under the name A. Christopher, and one poem (“Reds as Tiny Blues”) he mistakenly got published in a book of poetry by and about the mentally ill. Though he was never sure he was entirely sane, and had nothing against the mentally ill, that one came as a surprise. Depression runs in his family, and they developed a sometimes-morbid sense of humor to cope with the stress they were all under. (See “Wrench” and “Radio”, two of my favorites.)
I believe that as you read his poems, you will get a strong sense of the man’s spirit. I hope you will feel some of the warmth and compassion I received from him as his son.
—Christopher McCue
Painesville, Ohio, August 2019