Billy-Ray Belcourt — Subarctica
3/2/202618 min
Will you leave this episode feeling uplifted, envious, curious, or something else entirely? Yes. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poem “Subarctica” transports you to a vividly specific time — “the coldest December / on record, I haven’t left my mother’s / house in over a week” — where the primary view is of poplars in “a tiny schoolyard”. Amid the simplicity and snow, the speaker shifts their perspective, seeing beyond their past and towards the wonder in their present and in what is to come.
We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a writer from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is the author of six books, including the Griffin Poetry Prize-winning debut This Wound Is a World. Belcourt serves as the Canada Research Chair in Queer Indigenous Cultural Production at the University of British Columbia and also edits poetry for Hazlitt.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPádraig Ó Tuama· Host0:00
[gentle music] My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and years ago in my late 20s, I was doing a meditation practice, and the instruction was each morning to spend 10 minutes in silence or something and to ask yourself what emotion was coming to you. And, you know, I, I suppose maybe because of some pain and also a propensity to melodrama, you know, I was quite prepared for pain or difficulty or struggle or all kinds of things to come towards me. And when I finished this meditation practice, it was because one morning, with the absolute clarity of dawn, it became clear to me that on the horizon for me was happiness. And I got up and walked out of the room where I was doing the meditation, thinking, "Absolutely not. I can't cope with that." I would have rather faced pain than face happiness. And I was shocked to think, "How did that happen?" My body made the decision. What was my rejection of that? How was I so fundamentally oriented against something that might be good? It took me a long time to reflect on that [chuckles] and to, in a certain sense, both physically as well as emotionally, and maybe with something like maturity, go back into that room. Subarctica by Billy-Ray Belcourt. Because it's the coldest December on record, I haven't