New City of Nanaimo project combines poetry and nature

Parmar says she hopes this project will strengthen people’s love for poetry and discover the poems they could make themselves. Photo: City of Nanaimo

The City of Nanaimo through poetry is adding art to the natural landscape of Bowen Park.

The City’s Poetry in the Park project featuring Nanaimo's Poet Laureate, Kamal Parmar has started. Smartphone-readable QR codes have been placed throughout the park with links to five poems Parmar has written and recorded. The poems highlight the beauty of nature and give the listener a new perspective of the park.

Parmar became the city’s Poet Laureate back in 2021. She said her goal and objective in the position is to connect the community with poetry.

As a nature poet, she said there is a symbiotic relationship between poetry and nature. She writes passionately about the environment, encouraging readers to take the time and slow down to enjoy what is around them.

“Life is also stressful, often stressful at times, and I'm a firm believer that if you slow down for a few minutes from this fast-paced life and focus on something that is nature–for me, nature is really healing,” Parmar said.

This is one of the latest projects she has done to add poetry into the cityscape. 

In 2022, Parmar worked on the City’s Hidden Messages Poetry project that saw haikus she wrote combined with public art. Hydrophobic materials were used to install the poems along active transportation routes in ten locations across the city where the hidden messages are revealed when it rains.

Parmar said this project first started coming together in the fall of last year, a season she said is the best for writing poetry. 

“Fall is a season where you see nature displays ready same colours, colours that leave us breathless and wonderstruck,” she said.

She said fall was a great time to write poems about the park as the season changes the scenery around it.

“It's beautiful, breathtaking. With the pond, with the ducks there and the yellow leaves falling from the various cypress [trees]. I mean, it gives away a surreal kind of experience,” she said.

She said she tried to match each of the five poems with the various nature scenes in the park.

Although this project started in the spring and the QR codes were recently placed in the park, the poems used are those she wrote and recorded during the fall. Parmar does say she hopes to work with the city to create spring or summer poems for the project.

“But I suppose you know, what we the City is looking at is just to connect people with nature whether it's fall or spring or summer or winter,” Parmar said.

She said this project is to allow those to interpret how nature is programmed to allow changes from one season to the other.

She said the QR codes are a wonderful option to use technology to connect those with the poems so anyone can listen to them no matter where they are in the park

She said it is an honour for her work to become a part of the park's atmosphere. 

“You can take me anywhere and make me sit in the forest. You know, now these days, they have such a thing as forest bathing,” she said. “There's lots of people who even say, it helps you heal mentally and physically [to] walk in the forest or go to a park. So I think it's really a wonderful experience. Even for me to think how poetry and nature–I mean, it's there, it's always there, but now it gives a practical shape is absolutely wonderful.” 

She said she hopes this project will strengthen people’s love for poetry and discover the poems they could make themselves.

“So I want them to understand the vital relationship between poetry and nature, you know, so you can write the best and happiest chapters in their life,” she said.

When asked whether or not she had a favourite poem among the five, she said she does not have a favourite. Instead, she read a new poem she wrote upon completion of the project, about the feeling of hearing the poems while taking in the nature of the park.

“I feel a strange sensation come over me, a wave of euphoria washing me off my feet, taking me higher and higher into a realm of happiness. I feel joy coursing through my veins. I am speechless.”

She said she hopes people will have the same experience not just from the poems but from what nature and poetry can offer to mankind.

Parmar’s poems can be accessed through the QR codes located around Bowen Park or the City’s Youtube channel.

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