Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy

(May 7, 1953 - September 30, 2022)

Praise for Singing Lessons

These deceptively conversational pieces are poems at ease and at attention both. In them, we find healing everywhere along with the damage and danger to heal from. The poems glide forward on an abiding undercurrent of constant humanness, and are, finally, small equations of love. “What’s the deal that he thinks his saved life is a big deal?” Big is regularized here, as we are brought down from the heights to the baseline feelings that hold them up. Further, “…for twelve seconds we were the same / man, the very same,” these poems connect us to each other, over and over, in a recurring, redemptive spirit. Finally, we are asked to “Find where the sparks come from. / Find what the fire will become.” These poems, in their rage, their sadness, and their joy, speak to our common fire.

—Alberto Rios, Arizona Poet Laureate and author of Not Go Away Is My Name

Singing Lessons is luminous and gritty, meditative and cacophonous, darkly funny and celebratory. It is both dance and musical composition—parts classical, blues, and avant garde—a waltz at its center reminding us of what language can never completely express: “what was, what      is—if words / were what      a dancer does,” its final notes heartbreakingly prescient.

—Polly Buckingham, author of The River People

Kevin McIlvoy’s superb Singing Lessons tells stories with a Frost-like respect for the terror, longing, and absurdity of everyday intersections with archetypal forces, and the difficult necessity of saying anything about what happened afterward. The stakes here are so high that it’s a surprise when the poems are also, often, shockingly funny: in one almost-epic, McIlvoy does for couples’ dance instruction what Homer did for war, only funnier and sexier. When I fed this book into one of those online analyzers that shows which words are used most often, it seemed telling that one is “us.” Also, “one,” “time,” “sing” and “inside”—once upon a time, a man sang about what is on the inside. Shakespeare believed that with his poems he could make people speak his beloved’s name “[w]hen all the breathers of this world are dead,” and he was right. The Kevin McIlvoy we loved is gone, but such virtue had his pen that he still lives, “Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.”

—Patrick Donnelly, author of Willow Hammer, Little-Known Operas, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, and The Charge

For all of us who knew Kevin McIlvoy as a peerless fiction writer and miraculous teacher, here is the posthumous gift of his first poetry collection, Singing Lessons. Mc was a musician who found his truest instrument in words. Meditating on love, addiction, family, distance, the poems trace the dances we make, the songs we sing as we are shaped by what Keats called “this vale of soul-making.” In scope and sheer vitality, we hear echoes of Berryman’s Dream Songs; the visionary exactitude of poets like Lynda Hull, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly; also, the grit of the blues, twang of steel guitar, howl of harmonica—our haunted history as a nation. Yet the wild beguiling music of this work is all Mc’s own: a dazzling dance in which “together we sweeten.” 

—Sheila Fiona Black, author of Radium Dream and co-editor of Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability 

More about Kevin “Mc” McIlvoy

Mc was a legendarily innovative and much beloved teacher and mentor; a meticulous, sought-after manuscript editor, and a tireless activist for the arts and marginalized people. For twenty-seven years he was fiction editor and editor in chief of the national literary magazine, Puerto del Sol, and for twenty-five years volunteer facilitator of a writers’ group at the Munson Senior Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico, guiding many toward first-book publication in their 80s or beyond. He was instrumental in raising $2 million to preserve the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces. He taught creative writing at the New Mexico State University from 1981 until he retired, as Regents Professor, in 2008; he helped found the MFA program at NMSU while teaching in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Creative Writers from 1987 until 2019. He received numerous awards for teaching excellence and editorial vision as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction.

Mc served on the board of directors of both the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. He was among the fiction faculty at numerous national conferences, including the Ropewalk Writing Conference (Indiana), the Rising Stars Writing Conference (Arizona State University), the Writers at Work Conference (Utah), and the Bread Loaf Writing Conference (Vermont). He served as a manuscript consultant for University of Nevada Press, University of Arizona Press, University of New Mexico Press, Indiana State University Press, University of Missouri Press, and other publishers. From 2017-2020, with his wife, writer Christine Hale, he was a fiction editor for Orison Books in Asheville, North Carolina.