Nanaimo’s new poet laureate looks forward to sharing poetry and language

Surkan (pictured) said that as the Poet Laureate he is interested in shifting the idea of offering poetry to the community by instead inviting the community to engage with it themselves. Photo: Lauryn Mackenzie / CHLY 101.7fm

Neil Surkan is excited to be a literary ambassador as he is to be appointed the City of Nanaimo’s newest Poet Laureate.

Surkan is an English professor at Vancouver Island University and has an extensive list of published works including his newest chapbook Ruin published in 2023.

Now he is taking on the role of poet laureate to connect people with poetry through projects that reflect the voice of the community. Surkan came down to CHLY’s studio to talk about his poetry work and his excitement about the role.

Surkan said he started writing poetry when he was growing up and wanted to be in a band.

“I was obsessed with the idea of playing music live, and that was my goal, actually. When I started at university, I just wanted to be a musician and then I took a modern poetry course,” he said. “It was my first ever university course in English, and I fell in love with the difficulty or the complexity of it, so I started writing my own stuff.”

He said it took him another 10 years before he started sending out publication inquiries for his work and fell more deeply in love with poetry and the act of writing it.

“So what's kind of happened in my own writing has been that I think my first book, which was called On High, came out in 2018 was still just writing a series of almost love letters to the poets who had kind of lit me up. It wasn't until this second collection that came out in 2021 called Unbecoming, where I really found that my own voice started to feel true and that came down, in a lot of ways to having a child,” he said. “So when my son was born, I just suddenly realized that a different kind of frankness was required of me–I wanted to just show up in the world in a way that I could be proud of to my son.

He said he applied for the poet laureate position as he is invested in getting his neighbours and wider community into having conversations about the language they use and how poetry allows people to find new ways to express themselves.

“Because often I hear–especially around poetry specifically–that people are like, ‘Oh, it's not for me. I can't I don't really know how to engage with that form or that kind of writing,’ and I always just see it as our most precise language,” he said. “So I think of it in every conversation where we're trying to convey something we really mean, that's our opportunity to to speak to one another more deeply.”

He said that as the Poet Laureate he is interested in shifting the idea of offering poetry to the community by instead inviting the community to engage with it themselves.

“So my goal is to kind of sprinkle the wider city with little opportunities to stop and reflect on our own histories and contexts while we're in a definitive place,” Surkan said. “So thinking about the histories and the context of this place alongside what we bring in our own stories.”

Much like what he teaches his students, Surkan said the more people think about their language and the responsibility around it, the more fascinating and dynamic their lives can be.

Another idea he said he has is to put on a reading series where before the audience hears from the readers, there will be a reflective workshop where the audience members can create a space to connect with the poems themselves.

He said having a Poet Laureate for the city is important because now is the time to pay attention to the weight that words have behind them and to engage in how complex they can be to convey a message.

“So I think that's something that everyone should be invited to engage with and to reckon with, because it's a tricky reckoning. I think it can also just lead to so many illuminating and inspiring moments in our personal lives when we think about the role of the poem in our own vicinity,” he said. “So I want to bring that to the city–I want to advocate for it. I think I'm just at a juncture in my life where advocating for the arts just feels really, really compelling and really important, and I just feel so delighted that I get to have the opportunity to to put that forth.” 

He said his approach to how he will write his work as the Poet Laureate will be similar to how he often wrote poems for his last collection which was set in Nanaimo. He said while writing about the city, places, creatures, and plants would pop up, guiding him through his writing.

“That's why I like to walk around with a notebook, and it's just noticing someone, something in someone's front yard, or noticing a particular kind of dynamic draft going through the streets, whipping up something,” Surkan. “Those are those moments where I just let my body be permeable and let things affect me, and I think that they show up in the poems in interesting ways.”

Taking on this new role, Surkan said he wants residents of the community to know while they may have an idea that a poet may be someone who is “displaced or squirrelled away,” that is not how he sees the role.

“I'm so excited to hear the language that y'all are going to create together, and I'm so excited just to hear the stories of your lives as you, as you start to craft your own poems,” he said. “That's what I think is l going to be the biggest gift for me–the opportunities where I can converse and share and take risks together and be present together.”

Surkan’s two-year term as Nanaimo’s Poet Laureate will begin on December 1 of this year followed by a free holiday poetry showcase at the Harbourfront Library on Thursday, December 5 at 6 p.m. There will be readings by Surkan and youth poet laureate Paige Pierce.

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