Loomings: Joan Naviyuk Kane, Lyric Refractions, and the Poetry of Arctic Melt

Abstract This article examines the affordances of Indigenous experimental lyric in a melting Arctic. In conversation with geographer Jen Rose Smith’s turn to foreground “experiential and imaginary geographies of Arctic space,” the author explores how the poetry of the North American Arctic represents experiences ranging from colonial extraction to climate disruption. The analysis centers on Joan Naviyuk Kane’s 2019 “Citation in the Wake of Melville” and contrasts her disorientation of a canonical settler American text (Moby-Dick), which the author argues is animated by the Inuit concept of sila, with two lyric texts that contemplate John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to the Northwest Passage: Stan Rogers’s folk revival anthem “Northwest Passage,” and “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” a British broadside ballad from the mid-nineteenth century. The phrase one warm line, from Rogers’s refrain, links this uneasy collection of lyric texts and connects contemporary experiences of climate change to the ongoing colonial extraction transforming the North American Arctic. This article derives its critical method from Arctic loomings to reveal the distortionary impacts of climate change on human perception, navigational practice, and poetic representation and to offer a literary method for navigating a warming world.