Episode #083 Warming - dg nanouk okpik Close Talking: A Poetry Podcast

Connor and Jack explore the poem "Warming" by dg nanouk okpik. They discuss the poem's interplay between intense specificity and figurative language, climate change as context, and the fact that ice worms are really actually real.

More about okpik here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dg-okpik


Warming
By: dg nanouk okpik

She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench.
She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup.
She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks
to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman.
She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver
body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North
Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation
for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced
to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s
to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter
or a cavern. She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles
of roe and pan reservoir dust from a shelter for the ice worms. Because the earth is
molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.


Find us on Facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking

Find us on Twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking

Find us on Instagram: @closetalkingpoetry
You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.