Prize poet
Apr. 21—SPRING THAW
by dg nanouk okpik
A remnant conceals
things I can't
change, a blue
glacial memory
reveals:
light's sharp edges—
I lean.
As if my body—
subdued
by brittle, gutter, brim
ice. Finding a chickadee's
feather on a snowflake,
while lost in slumberous,
smooth, blue, smoke.
I awaken to a chirping,
flock fly overhead.
Indeed grace.
Excerpted from Blood Snow (2022, Wave Books) by dg nanouk okpik. Reprinted with permission from the author and publisher.
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dg nanouk okpik's debut poetry collection is Corpse Whale (2012, University of Arizona Press). Her latest collection is Blood Snow (2022, Wave Books). Her work is featured in the newly released Infinite Constellations: An Anthology of Identity, Culture, and Speculative Conjunctions (2023, Fiction Collective 2).
The poet writes in clusters, letting the words spill out of her mind, without adhering to the constraints of spacing and punctuation.
Ultimately, she connects the dots in her prose. But if you ask dg nanouk okpik, she'll tell you that she doesn't own the words in her award-winning collections of poetry any more than she owns the traditions of her ancestors.
"I let these words come in and out of me," says okpik, who late last month was named as a recipient of the $175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, a Yale University prize designed to spotlight literary achievement and enable writers to focus on their craft.
"I have someone beside me from 4,962 days in the past, and I have someone on my other side who's 15,800 years in the future. I sit in the middle, and as the words flow through us, we're hollow bones. These words have already been spoken. These words have already been written. They're not ours to own, but they do flow through us as we sit there and that story continues."
The 56-year-old poet, who is one of eight Windham-Campbell recipients this year, says that her journey as an Iñupiaq-Inuit artist has been about self-discovery as much as it has been about literary exploration. She was raised by adoptive parents in Anchorage, Alaska, and attended public schools, and her love affair with the written word began early in her life.
Her mom was a voracious reader, okpik says, and she would pick up books after her mother read them. Then at the age of 10 or 12, she began a lifelong habit of journaling that continues to this very day.
She writes down stories of her life.
She writes down small ideas for poems to explore later.
And she has stacks and stacks of these books going back decades.
"I think it's a ledger of my life," she says of her journals. "It's somewhat daunting to realize what it takes in this world to express yourself in ways that can be accepted or that can be put to the forefront. I have to be very careful of what I say and how I do it so I can walk a straight line of beauty."
As she was growing up and studying, okpik was already beginning to take on causes bigger than her own. She went to Washington, D.C., as a student representing the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and learned how to lobby for greater funding for tribal colleges.
While there, at just 25 years old, she met Ted Stevens, who served as a U.S. senator from Alaska from 1968 to 2009. She told Stevens about the circumstances of her birth, and he ultimately helped her find her birth certificate. It took several years, but she always believed she would find her birth family. Eventually, she changed her name — from Donagene Margaret Stearns to dg nanouk okpik — and put herself in a place where she could meet her birth family.
"Just before I went to Alaska, they had a ceremony for me in Montana," says okpik, who had been a student in Pablo, Montana, at Salish Kootenai College, which is dedicated to supporting American Indian students. "The elders told me in a sweat lodge, 'dg, you're going to meet your family when you go home.' They said, 'Go meet them, and then come right back so we can help you with the transition.' So I did."
She went back home to Alaska. She worked at Costco. She took classes at a university, and one day, almost by accident, it happened.
The poet says she was at the dentist, and the woman checking her in was Iñupiaq and recognized her name. Her first name, dg, was a family name made up when her adopted brother couldn't pronounce the name Donagene. But the woman at the dentist recognized the clan names nanouk — which means polar bear — and okpik, which means snowy owl. And the woman told her that one of okpik's relatives worked at the hospital where her dentist was, and if she could wait until her lunch break, she'd take her to them.
"I didn't have time to think about it. I just waited outside her door," says okpik. "She brought me up to a hospital room, and the lady who stood up from the bed walking toward me was a spitting image of my face. All I could say to her was, 'My birthday is May 17, 1966.' And she said, 'Oh my god, you're my daughter.'"
Over the years, okpik met the rest of her birth family, and she says it's beautiful to have them in her life — it's been a great honor to meet them and to learn about her heritage. It fulfills a dream she's had her entire existence.
"I grew up in Anchorage, not in the village, but now I know the village as my home," she says. "Barrow is my home ... the furthest most northern point in North America — is my home."
It's her home and is also the focus of her award-winning work. okpik enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2000 and later earned a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast College. She is currently a Lannan Foundation Fellow at IAIA and found a writerly family and community here in Santa Fe, including IAIA professor and mentor Arthur Sze, who wrote the forward for Corpse Whale, her first published collection of poems. Corpse Whale won the American Book Award in 2012, and her second, Blood Snow, was long-listed for the PEN America Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection in 2022.
So, does the Windham-Campbell prize and other accolades make her confident in herself as a writer?
"I didn't really think of myself as an accomplished writer before," she says. "Even my first book, I thought, 'Well, maybe this is a fluke. The second book's got to come out — and the third — to make sure it's not just a passing journey.'
"To win three awards for the first book, I was just amazed. I still am. And then this book came out, and it was up for the PEN America award. That was all enveloping. I didn't know what to do. I was beside myself."
Writing, says okpik, is like breathing to her — she does it to live. She says she collects words and builds her own lexicon, and she even chides herself for literally reading through dictionaries. An idea may take months to develop, and she may write around it in many ways before she's able to efficiently tell her story.
Then, when she has dozens of poems, the theme for a collection begins to take shape. And that part can take even longer.
"I have a select group of friends I went to college with and we work one-on-one," she says. "We read through each other's manuscripts. We discuss it, and we might have different ideas but in the editing process, we need each other. We need to know whether it's good or not-so-good. It's a process, and it takes quite a few years for us to do it together. We just work tirelessly. And we love it all."
Even then, okpik says, you have no idea how the collection will turn out, and she's been thrilled with the reception she's received. okpik says she already has about 40 poems written for her next book.
When asked what kind of advice she'd give to future generations of writers, okpik says that it's important to believe in words, to take in what we need and leave the rest for someone else to find along their way.
"I think that's very important in today's world to know where we are and where we're going. And to love words," she says. "Words can be magical, and you can make them into something that is so beautiful that people love. It's a healing process once you bring the writing to the page and the page to the world."
