(inspired by Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)
………………………………………………………………………
(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)
High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold
(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)
Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity
(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)
Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms
(When men live in the North their values change…)
permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes
(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)
blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point
(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)
brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata
(Something really does happen to people up here…)
ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound
(It cares so little and sort of diminishes you…)
pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine
(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)
chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index
………………………………………………
The ultimate performance of this signature poem about Canadian winter was performed by my performance trio (Glen Kirkland and The Legend of Dean McKenzie) at Block 1912 in the dead deep-freeze of Edmo in January
(live at the old Woodward’s Books, Southgate Mall, on a Saturday afternoon, 1990ish, bringing shoppers to a halt!)