Surkan (pictured) said these prompts are meant for people to slow down, take a second, and engage with the present moment. (Lauryn Mackenzie/CHLY 101.7FM)

The City of Nanaimo wants to give opportunities to community members to stop and reflect on the space around them with a new poetry trail.

In collaboration with City of Nanaimo Poet Laureate Neil Surkan, the City has placed three “viewfinders” in three different downtown and south end areas to invite those who pass by to engage with poetry in their everyday life.

CHLY met with Surkan at the Bing Kee Food Forest, where one of the viewfinders is located along the Bing Kee Trail.

Surkan said that since becoming poet laureate at the end of last year, he wanted to create a project that gives opportunities for his neighbours and the rest of the community to pause and be prompted to think about the place they live, to create their own poems.

“When this opportunity came up to put poems as prompts into the public space, [where] instead of me offering my own words or my own reflections, giving space for community members to come up and see what strikes them in their own lives in a poetic sense, I just jumped at it,” Surkan said.

Each viewfinder on the poetry trail comes with a unique prompt questioning the space they are in through poetry. Each viewfinder also has a frame, framing a particular ecological space.

“I'd love to ride my bike around town, it's one of my favourite ways to be in an urban space,” Surkan said. “So having these points to maybe stop and reflect and kind of consider more broadly what it means to be here, amidst all my histories and contexts and amidst the histories of this place is just, I think, a great way to merge getting a little bit of fresh air, getting some exercise, and also churning over the muscles of memory and working through imaginary zones.”

The three stops on the poetry trail are at Queen Elizabeth Promenade, looking out to the water and Saysutshun Island; another along Front Street, overlooking the downtown harbour; and the last in the south end on the trail next to the Bing Kee Community Food Forest.

Along with the prompts are scannable QR codes where people can submit their own poetic responses.

Selected submissions may then be shared by the Poet Laureate and the City of Nanaimo on social media.

Surkan said these prompts are meant for people to slow down, take a second, and engage with the present moment.

“So these prompts are meant to encourage that engagement without feeling like you need to aspire to some sort of publishable creation on first go, because no one really writes that way,” he said. “We tend to just keep scattering things and working through drafts until something we're happy with emerges, and the joy in that process is what's so great about this art form, in my opinion. The polished stuff is great to be proud of or to share, but also just those personal initial scraps, those little happenings, are the true thrill of being alive in language.”

Surkan said he is excited to see the responses people come up with from the poetry trail and connecting with the space around them.

Additional locations are planned for the north Nanaimo area next year.

The three viewfinders along the poetry trail. From left to right: Bing Kee Trail, Front Street, and Queen Elizabeth Promenade. (Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm)

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.