Simon Armitage says poets have had their money's worth from nature and it's time "to pay something back"After a "life-changing" visit to the Arctic, poet laureate Simon Armitage says poets can convey what's happening with climate change in a way that scientists and journalists can't.
In another work, Armitage describes his boat drifting through the remains of an "ancient empire of snow" that appears to have been smashed to ruins, leaving the "marbled wreckage" of imagined icy temples, palaces and tombs. "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."His interest in the environment goes back further - he studied geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the 1980s. Back then, "climate change was barely there as a topic", he says.
Seeing the effects of climate change for himself was "a life-changing experience" and made him come to the conclusion that the planet as we have traditionally thought about it "doesn't exist any more". "Part of the project was to come back and talk about this stuff, maybe in a slightly different language - in artistic terms - because scientists, by their own admission, don't always have the have the language to convey , or facts and figures aren't often what people want to want to hear."
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