A Poet at the End of the Earth: Jynne Dilling Martin on All Things Considered

Weekend All Things Considered's host, Arun Roth, spent time this weekend chatting with poet Jynne Dilling Martin. Martin is the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant to travel to Antarctica and write about her travels there. From NPR:

Last year, a poet arrived at the end of the earth: Jynne Dilling Martin spent six weeks, funded by the National Science Foundation, living in Antarctica.

She spent the summer (winter, to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) shadowing scientists as they went about their work, and writing about the people who call the icy continent home.

Out of that project emerged many of the poems in her new collection, We Mammals In Hospitable Times. She sat down with NPR's Arun Rath to talk about living in a place most people will never visit — an unfathomably remote frozen landscape, with surprisingly good internet access.

On living in Antarctica

One of the funniest things about Antarctica is that you go to the bathroom in a bucket, you're heating frozen meals over a tiny little Coleman camp stove in an igloo or in a small tent, but there is Wi-Fi all over the continent. It's really because a lot of the science happening down there requires regular transmission of its data and details back to the States. In fact a lot of the Weather Service apparently gets [its] data from Antarctica. So there is in fact Wi-Fi even though there's almost no other imaginable creature comfort. [...]

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