Remembering Kevin, our friend who gave this world so much

Kevin’s family and friends are hosting a tribute and reading with a reception to follow for Kevin on July 11 at 6 pm at Tube Factory artspace at 1125 Cruft St. In lieu of flowers, a fund is being established in support of Kevin’s children. Details forthcoming.

By Jim Walker

Let’s call this a love poem to Kevin McKelvey. I’ve written many love poems to my wife and to our kids. But losing Kevin as our world did — suddenly, unfathomably — makes me know I should more often share love poems with others I love while they are alive.

Kevin knew I loved him. And I knew I was somewhere on his list. First, always, was his wife, Lakshmi, and their kids and families. From there, his list of those he cared about, those he shared with and gave to, was long. He kept literal lists of people: like all the folks he gave — often by delivering himself — baby plants that he grew from seed into starts.

Many of those plants are now sprouting peppers and tomatoes in people’s gardens all over Indiana. This was a social practice art project for Kevin. His art was in the process of growing, the process of communicating with friends and acquaintances and sometimes strangers, the process of meeting up and handing people these plants he grew and talking a bit and being a neighbor. Making life a little better.

That’s what Kevin’s art was about: Life. He lived his practice and process as an artist and a poet (which is the same thing, really) and as an ecologist and as a farmer and as a teacher. Sometimes people have trouble understanding his kind of art that’s about building community and bringing people together even more than it is about making things or places. But Kevin, of course, was so good at both kinds of building. He loved hard work, getting grimy, planting seeds and saplings, handling soil and stone and wood.

Kevin built — in his 18 years with us as an artist with Big Car — miraculous garden beds on a mall parking lot that grew enormous sweet potatoes and okra and Thai basil. He sawzawed extra pine rafter boards from the ceiling and sledgehammered old walls at Tube Factory when it was a vacant mess, pulled up out front with his gray pickup bed and flatbed trailer full of variously shaped stone to create Tube Factory’s front porch, spent hours — days into night — (twice) placing the pastel-colored hexagonal pavers for our Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary. He guided group after group of volunteers in fixing and painting our buildings. He worked with teens two summers ago to build three bocce courts on our campus for people to play and be friends and love each other.

Kevin worked this all in while also giving to others through his teaching in the English department at the University of Indianapolis, where he was a tenured professor, and where he also started (with me) and ran the school’s social practice art and placemaking graduate program — one of only a few like it in the world. He worked this all in while putting his kids first and always being there for his dad and his sister.

He worked this all in while writing and publishing his poetry about the natural world he loved so much, about the country, about Indiana, about farms and trees and birds and bugs and gas stations. He worked this all in while still sharing and sparking ideas about art and place and community with people in small towns and state parks gathered at Carnegie library basements or around campfires or in canoes.

He worked this all in while travelling the world. He was just in South America for a college friend’s wedding. And he told me the last time we talked on the phone that a big part of why he wanted to go was to visit the bike shop owned by a former Colombian pro cyclist he liked. He worked this all in while still rolling out sometimes on his oversized road bike (I struggled to keep up the times I rode with him) — soaking in midwestern back lanes, stopping when he wanted along the way (if there was a way), and enjoying a beer or two when he was done.

Somehow, this time of year (early July) Kevin figured out how to work in staying caught up with the 23-day Tour de France — following all the breakaways and sprint finishes by streaming it on his laptop in the middle of the night or in the early morning. Maybe he did this while grading papers for a summer class, or while fixing something for the house in his tool shed, or while cooking a stew in the kitchen, or while revising a poem, or while emailing a friend, or while texting me to see if I was watching the Tour too, or while doing all of these things (and more) at once.

As I sit here writing this a few days after his death, it is very difficult for me to believe or accept that I won’t be seeing Kevin walk in the side door of Tube Factory or roll up out in front of our house in his truck. I fully expect, right now, for him to be here in front of me, his hickory-stripe bib overalls covered in dirt after working on some big project, his red t-shirt soaked with sweat.

He is always here in the places and people he helped build and grow and be happier and be better and be more alive.

I love you, Kevin.

From Dream Wilderness Poems, A Trail Guide by Kevin McKelvey

Blowdown

Through the canopy’s aperture
Turkey Vulture shadows blade
across me and the forest floor,
their white underwings
the sky’s only white.
I am the second thing
the sun touches.
No foliage mottles the light
as leaves brown in the jangled crown.
The root ball forms
a cellar door to the trunk
that now soars on the wrong axis.
Wind, ridge, and rot calculate
what falls and what stands.
Already, oaks and hickories sprout
among mayapples, the sun
the seed bank’s only farmer.
I can leaf out if I stand
in this gap long enough.