Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, has said that poets have a unique role to play in conveying the realities of climate change. After a visit to the Arctic, which he described as “life-changing,” Armitage said that artists can express the impact of environmental change in ways that are distinct from and possibly more effective than those offered by journalists or scientists. “It’s occurred to me recently that we are doing terrible damage to the planet, and the planet can’t speak up for itself. It doesn’t have an articulate voice,” he said. “And I started to think that that might be part of the role of the poet in the contemporary age – to speak up for nature, rather than just use it in a poem.”
During his time in the Arctic, Armitage witnessed the impact of rising temperatures and the melting of glaciers. In one of his poems, he describes how a polar bear crosses a melting glacier and has to roam ever narrower circles in search of food. In another, he imagines the remains of a “marbled” empire of snow, and in a third he describes the discovery of plastic in the stomach contents of seabirds. Armitage has developed a BBC radio series based on his Arctic experiences, in which he interviews scientists and discusses his own response to what he saw.
Armitage studied geography in the 1980s and did not encounter the concept of climate change at that time. This made seeing the impact of rising temperatures in the Arctic all the more profound for him. “It exists in pockets and patches,” he said. “But it’s not there any more. It’s a kind of fiction. That’s this really heavy sense that I’ve come back with, or it’s some kind of awakening to a situation.” Armitage believes that poets can use metaphors to communicate the impact of climate change in ways that statistics cannot, saying, “When you use one effectively, people don’t just understand the comparison, they actually experience it.
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More