Interesting article - about possible future direction for poetry

Eco-pop: Songs in the key of life
What does a plant sound like? A new breed of eco-pop artists is making musical 'soundscapes' that get closer to nature than ever before. Alasdair Lees reports
Of all the myriad absurdities of last year's Live Earth concerts – the absence of world musicians, the sponsorship by DaimlerChrysler, Chris Moyles as a host – the one highlighted by the environmentalist George Marshall was among the most glaring.
Marshall, director of the Climate Outreach Information Network, noted that "the music will contain virtually no mention of climate change, and will lack the anger, fear and aggression needed to galvanise change". With the exceptions of David Gray and Damien Rice's misanthropic cover of "Que Sera", and Terra Naomi's YouTube sensation "Say It's Possible", there was a dearth of songs about the issue at hand, and none with the muscle of say, Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven".
"That's where we're different from Live Earth," says David Buckland, the director of the Cape Farewell Project. "Most bands at Live Earth didn't know squit about climate change. We're taking a whole lot of people from the music world to this extraordinary place, a tipping point of a planet that is changing incredibly fast, with a fantastic science team on board, and we're going to see if they can really engage with climate change."
Since 2004, Buckland has been taking artists such as Rachel Whiteread and writers such as Ian McEwan to the North Pole alongside scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. The only musicians to have made the trip so far are Manchester singer-songwriter Liam Frost and the singer and percussionist Aminatou Goumar of the Touareg band Toumast. This year's expedition, to Disko Bay in west Greenland, though, will be dominated by high-profile pop, rock and classical musicians, including Jarvis Cocker, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Led Zeppelin's bassist, John Paul Jones.
The Cape Farewell Project is not alone in its vision of a fruitful exchange of ideas between the worlds of popular music and science. In September, as part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture celebrations, the Hive Collective, comprising some of the city's experimental electronica musicians, has organised four audiovisual events under the title Hive Twilight City. For the third event, it has commissioned Chris Watson, the wildlife sound recordist, to "document" Antony Gormley's Another Place, the sculptor's installation of 100 life-sized iron casts of his own body on Crosby Beach.
Intriguingly, researchers from the University of Liverpool have discovered that the statues host a colony of barnacles, Elminius modestus, a cross-fertilising hermaphrodite native to Australia. "The statues are providing an island for this species amid an inhospitable environment," says Dr Leonie Robinson.
Once Watson has finished recording around the statues, he will hand over his tapes to the house-music producer Matthew Herbert, who will then perform a live "sonic experience" of Another Place based on Watson's findings. Herbert is best known for his production work with Bjork and Roisin Murphy, and for his innovative use of samples and found sounds on albums such as Plat Du Jour, a polemic about the science of food production, which features a chicken being killed.
How Watson and Herbert will make music from statues is anyone's guess. But collaborations between the worlds of art and empiricism are vital in the context of global warming, believes the composer David Dunn. His The Sound of Light in Trees, a soundscape that tracks the devastation of pines in New Mexico by bark beetles that has been used by forestry managers and the chaos scientist James Crutchfield to look at how insect-driven defoliation is adding to climate change and how sound might be used to control it.
More accessible instances of such collaborations can be seen in the work of musicians such as the electronica artists Mileece and Mira Calix. In 2006, Mileece was commissioned by the London School of Economics to develop a "generative plant biofeedback system". She discovered a way to make sounds out of the electromagnetic impulses of plants and is now creating a website to host data-streams from specimens all over the world.
Making music from plants is also being explored by the Edinburgh band Found in a project in May at the Scottish capital's Royal Botanic Garden. Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo will involve the five-piece improvising around a midi-controller "operated" by plants, turning the electrical resistance generated by flora into beats and bleeps.
Scientists are increasingly reaching out to musicians to engage the public in their work. In 2002, Mira Calix, who is signed to Warp Records, was commissioned by Geneva's Museum of Natural History to compose a piece of music from the sounds of 150 different species of insects. The result, Nunu, was performed live with the London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall. She is now working with David Rothenberg, Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, on a "remix" of the songs of beluga whales.
David Dunn sees such strategies as the way forward. "We require a merger of art and science – as a dance between metaphor and mechanism – that encourages both to contribute to a collective environmental activism."
Putting its faith in metaphor is The Blacksmoke Organisation, which is planning a multi-disciplinary campaign in the form of its Danger Global Warming Project, which has recruited the likes of actor Viggo Mortensen and designer Philippe Starck to "transform the world into an activist art gallery" . Its "Danger Global Warning Theme", written by Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers, is being remixed by acts including Goldfrapp and Coldcut to highlight "the art of the remix as an allegory for recycling", with film directors such as Tony Kaye creating the promos. Blacksmoke uses a Jack Kerouac mantra as its slogan: "Don't use the telephone. People are never ready to answer it. Use Poetry."
But, believes David Dunn, it may be time for poets to start working the phones. "The art world needs to ground imagination in a deeper understanding of the natural world."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/ecopop-songs-in-the-key-of-life-794840.html