Nick Drake poem performed by Fleabag's Andrew Scott
Star of Fleabag and Sherlock Andrew Scott, along with his sister Hannah, were filmed giving a powerful reading of Nick Drake's poem 'The Future'. The film was made by Culture Declares for the Climate Action Week, 15- 28 April 2019. The poem is included as a 'Letter to the Earth' for performance across the world. The video was viewed over 26,000 times in the week since it was posted on 12 April.
'I am the future, but before I appear,
— CultureDeclaresEmergency (@CultureDeclares) April 12, 2019
Please - close the scrolls of information,
Let the laptop sleep,
Sit still
And shut your eyes.
Listen - Things are going to change'#Fleabag star #AndrewScott with his sister Hannah present @nickfdrake 's #LetterToTheEarth pic.twitter.com/UgpJmRSlKr
Letters To The Earth is part of the movement Culture Declares Emergency, supporting the call of Extinction Rebellion that Governments should declare a climate and ecological emergency.
Over 1000 Letters were submitted by writers including Yoko Ono, Nick Drake, Rebecca Solnit and Kate Tempest in response to the current climate and ecological emergency, and were read by the public and performers including Andrew Scott, Alison Steadman, Tamaryn Payne and Alex Lawther, at more than 50 venues on April 12th 2019 and online. All the Letters to the Earth videos are posted here.
'The Future' was originally published in a slightly different version as the third of 'Three Arctic poems' in Nick Drake's fourth collection Out of Range (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). The collection explores some of the most pressing issues of the early 21st century, such as climate change and the devastating effect of single-use plastic waste. It includes elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples. The poems in Out of Range expand on environmental concerns raised in his last collection The Farewell Glacier, Nick Drake’s book-length sequence of poems set in the High Arctic.
Nick Drake reads the same poem as Andrew Scott in a film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce. Nick introduces and then reads his poem 'The Future' (Dear mortals...) from 4.50. The poem is written in the voice of the future. It is one of a number of poems about climate change from Out of Range read by Nick Drake on this film.
Click here to read Nick Drake's blog on Climate Cultures. He discusses three poems from Out of Range.
'This is absolutely modern poetry, at once haunting and unsettling, but in other places funny and moving. It weaves together these various strands of wonder and horror and in so doing, captures the confusion we all live with as we navigate the planet as human animals in the 21st century.' - Oxford Poetry Library (Book of the Week) on Out of Range
[16 April 2019]
