'Ilissiverupunga,' Beathe Møldrup muttered. I'd only recently learnt the word. It meant 'Damn! I've put it away in a safe place and now I can't find it.'

Mornings at Upernavik Museum: an endless round of kaffe and conversation as local hunters dropped by to discuss ice conditions. Hoping to make progress in research on Greenlandic literature, I'd asked Beathe, the museum director, whether she had any poetry books. The bibliographic collections held mainly photographic records of the settlements and kayak manuals.

'Illilli!' Beathe called an hour later, 'There you are!' She emerged from a doorway almost obscured behind a stack of narwhal tusks and proudly presented me with a 1974 hymnbook with a cover flocked in several shades of pastel.

*

Upernavik is a small, rocky island on the north-west coast of Greenland. At 72º N, it is well within the Arctic Circle, and the museum claims to be the most northern in the world. The region's coastline is described as 'an open-air museum'. That is to say, people suspect there are interesting artefacts lying, undiscovered, everywhere under the ice. No matter that they cannot be seen. They exist; and the empty museum building awaits their arrival patiently. One of the museum's prize possessions is an old motorboat in which, during the short summer, Beathe visits people in distant coastal settlements who claim to have found an interesting specimen, perhaps a carved flinthead or an unidentified bone. As these visits are often combined with trips to distant family members, and rarely seem to result in artefacts being brought back to the museum, the institution evidently fulfils a social function, knitting together isolated communities along the shores of Baffin Bay.

During my stay on Upernavik as writer-in-residence at the museum, I didn't discover any contemporary Arctic poetry. The local people denied any knowledge of such a thing. But my experience of the hunters' conversations, and a growing awareness of the elusive nature of oral literature, gave me a new perspective on the practice of poetry in Britain.

Beathe's hymnbook was a perfectly logical offering. In Arctic tradition, verbal ingenuity resulted in songs rather than poems, particularly songs with numinous overtones. Some were used in shamanic rituals to cast spells or cure illnesses. Others were performed at feasts and flyting matches, accompanied by drumming and dancing. When the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen[i] began to transcribe them, he declared that his 'neat written language and ... sober orthography ... couldn't bestow sufficient form or force to the cries of joy or fear of these unlettered people' (Eskimo Folk Tales).

The measure of  'poetic' success was that a work was worth listening to, as the poet Tom Lowenstein demonstrates (in his translation of Rasmussen's transcription of a song by Piuvkaq):

'I recognise what I want to put into words,

but it does not come well-arranged,

it does not become worth listening to.'

Lowenstein describes the intense performance anxiety the poet might suffer: 'Forgetting the words, in a culture without paper, would be like losing the song. No one would be there to prompt. It would be as if the words no longer existed at all.' This fear of forgetting is resonant, considering the losses faced by Inuit culture today, now that traditional singing practices have fallen out of common use.

For a long time the Inuit 'did not know how to store their words in little black marks' (Rasmussen, ibid.). One might add, they had no inclination to. Had they felt a need to apply their technical ingenuity to the problem of recording language, the course of bibliographic history might have been altered. As it is, publishing technology was introduced to Greenland, fully-fledged, by Danish colonists during the nineteenth century. The printing press preserved some legends, but poetry - partly because of its strong shamanic connections - was suppressed. The drums used in shamanic rituals were burnt in an attempt to oust 'heathen' beliefs, an act as sacrilegious as a book-burning in Europe.

Hushed and drumless, the Danes tried to locate the rich sounds of Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language, within a known orthography. The Roman alphabet was introduced to facilitate printing, with conventional metal types imported from Europe. Kalaallisut is caught between cultures, one of the few Eskimo-Aleut languages to be written with the Roman alphabet and not with the Inuktitut syllabary. Yet what impact has two hundred years of printing made? Kalaallisut was added to UNESCO's list of the world's endangered languages in 2009.

*

When I began to learn Kalaallisut I had to ask for each word to be written down before I forgot it. People were bemused that I found this more useful than hearing it spoken. Each time a word was written it would be spelt differently, and so the bemusement was soon passed on to me. I was told that schools are not overly concerned about spelling: little children are bamboozled by the long words, and surely it is understandable that they get lost in the middle and miss out a few syllables? Teachers are much more inclined to indulge the children than instil superficial spelling conventions.

All the islanders could write, but they found self-expression through writing difficult. The postman, who spoke English with the eloquence of Robert De Niro, would leave cryptic notes at my door when I was out. Seldom more than ten words long, these writings capture none of his garrulousness ('YOU BIG LETTER SHOP'). Speech is still the touchstone for communication: mobile phones and Skype are even more popular in Greenland than they are in the UK; emails are approached with far more dread. It seems inevitable that future Arctic archives will be as sparsely furnished as those of the past.

I began to find English finicky and prim in contrast with Kalaallisut. As though they were knucklebones used in a game of dice, I shook up my tiny words and scattered them before my audience, having little influence on the score. Kalaallisut is more densely woven than English, with its smaller alphabet (18 letters) and polysynthetic words. When it is spoken, the suffixes are uttered so softly that an untrained ear cannot hear them. Sentences seem to trail off into silence.

Kalaallisut will use a single word to express a concept that English tiptoes around with a phrase. I was delighted to find signifiers for 'the sea rises and falls slowly at the foot of the iceberg' (iimisaarpoq) and 'the air is clear, so sounds can be heard from afar' (imingnarpoq). The language is famous for its many words for snow. This wide vocabulary for environmental conditions is of fundamental importance in understanding the Arctic ecology. As Barry Lopez points out in his book Arctic Dreams, contemporary scientists who arrive in the Arctic to assess climate change without a grasp of Kalaallisut risk being as crude as the early explorers who rushed to make their conquests of the North Pole without using established Inuit techniques for transportation and survival on the ice.

A map by the cartographer R.T. Gould in the National Maritime Museum delineates the last known steps of one such expedition led by Sir John Franklin, an ambitious Victorian quest to find the North-West Passage (1845-8). Gould's map depicts a land characterised not by geographical features but by ominous 'x's: caches of letters, pemmican and bones found by search parties. These clues to Franklin's disappearance, linked by a red dotted line, eventually peter out in a question mark surrounded by blank paper.

The North-West Passage can be located by satellite these days, and few uncharted regions remain for those wishing to make their reputation as explorers. Yet despite advances in our knowledge of Arctic geography, it still challenges the complacency of the modern traveller. Much of the visible Arctic environment is characterised by transience. The Pole is a shifting entity rather than a fixed point. Icebergs drift along the horizon, an ever-changing mountain range. The pack ice forms an increasingly unpredictable border between land and sea; it disappears almost as fast as the tracks that pass across it. The geographer Nicole Gombay writes that these conditions 'require an awareness that the future cannot be predicted. As a result, people must focus on the present. Inuit have often told me, 'Today is today, and tomorrow is tomorrow. Don't bring today into tomorrow, and don't bring tomorrow into today.'[ii] People's distrust of fixing future plans is balanced by 'an ability to let go of the past'. As Heraclitus might have said, it is impossible to step on the same ice floe twice.

*

On some days in Upernavik the sea was a 'black cauldron covered with dark frost smoke' (as Scott described it in his Antarctic journals). Other days, it was hidden by ice, and as I sat down to write I watched the hunters make their way across the perilous expanse until they were just little black marks in the distance. They seemed unperturbed by the fact that several men had drowned by falling through the ice that winter. Perhaps they were too driven by hunger to care. The intense dangers faced during such hunting expeditions had once inspired the composition of songs.

The hunters' ramshackle workstations awaited their return. These illukasik had no walls, no roofs and no doors. There was nothing to obsure a hunter's view of his terrain, and nowhere to hide a secret. Domestic objects were left to rust under the open sky. The snow was a part of these skeletal structures as well as their backdrop; deep drifts were conscripted as tool racks. Ladders were lashed to the upright timbers, but rather than providing a means of ascent they held struts together or secured them to the ground. Green twine wound about the cornices in endless orbits that stood in for more sturdy knots. The whole island appeared to be held together by an armature of twine and chicken wire beneath the snow.

Illukasik evolve. Beams are nailed to the joists, clothes racks tied to the beams. Sealskins are sewn to stretching frames, and fish are hung up to dry out of reach of ravenous dogs. An accumulation of clothes pegs, knives and beer bottles adds a distinct signature to each hunter's creation. Between snowfalls, the outer boundaries of the illukasik are pitted with holes cast by plegm, drops of oil and cigarette butts. Fresh lines of blood are traced across the island nightly as seal carcasses are hauled from the successful hunter's plot to waiting kitchens.

Sometimes, silhouetted in twilight, the illukasik looked like creatures rising from the sea. In these man-made objects I sensed something more than functional architecture. Folk tales describe hunters who created living monsters, tupilak, from sticks and stones and breath. Inuit religion is animist, and the culture is strongly influenced by the belief that an inue or soul imbues every material thing, from a rock to a harpoon head, informing its purpose. And so, as the wind howled around the illukasik, I thought of them as expressive marks on the landscape, almost akin to song. While Inuit songs were intensely personal (singing another's composition was frowned upon), they employed respectful variations on traditional forms and themes. Likewise, the design and materials of these improvised buildings diverged little from those I had seen in early photos in the museum. Here was the continuation of a creative tradition that I sought.

*

I returned from the Arctic with an ambivalent attitude to publication. After all, when you store something away in a safe place, there's always the danger you won't find it again. Perhaps it is simpler to accept loss at the outset. The absence of language in the Arctic seemed to hold more poetic resonance and more potency than much that was tangible in British literature. I began to wonder whether a poet writing in English could be active without publishing, and even whether there might not be a case for self-censorship and silence as a poetic stance in a culture so unremittingly orientated towards preservation and self-promotion.

It is increasingly obvious that our planet, including all its museums and libraries, is facing a devastation even more terrible than that of the great Alexandrian repository. Gombay addresses Western society as well as that of the Inuit, saying, 'In the face of knowledge that ultimately we are at the mercy of forces over which we have no control, how are we to react? We can choose to ignore such awareness - dig in our heels and do all that we can to find a means of establishing supremacy over the essential instability of existence, or, we can give in to it and accept that our experience is ephemeral.' (ibid.) When the last of the ice has melted, the vanished tracks upon it will be the least of our concerns. No one will be there to prompt. It will be as if words never existed.