5 questions with Neil Surkan, the City of Nanaimo’s new Poet Laureate

VIU English Professor Neil Surkan’s love of poetry goes back to when he was a teenager.  

“Initially, I think I liked the idea of poetry more than I liked the rigour and difficulty and possibility of poems themselves,” he recalls. “But at university, I fell in love with the feeling of being stumped, of hitting the limit of my understanding and thinking. The way that poems demand and then hold our attention is one of the genre’s greatest attributes.”

Now, that love and passion for poetry has led to Neil being selected as the City of Nanaimo’s Poet Laureate, a position he will hold for the next two years.

His new role began on December 1. “I feel honoured to accept this role,” he says. “I applied because I want to engage with my broader community about this art form I love so much,” he explains.

We caught up with Neil to find out a little more about his new position and what he hopes to accomplish, his passion for poetry, and where he finds inspiration for his work.

How does it feel to be selected as Nanaimo’s Poet Laureate? 

I feel honoured to accept this role. I applied because I want to engage with my broader community about this art form I love so much; in turn, I hope to invite my neighbours — across generations, and in light of (rather than in spite of) our discrete histories and contexts — into encounters with attentive, imaginative, reflective, playful, grave, melodious, precarious, whittled, expansive, and daring arrangements of language: i.e. poems! 

As Laureate, I want create opportunities to experience the bewildering haphazardness of communication: in reading, writing, and reflecting together, I hope we can enrich each other’s lives by increasing our sensitivity to the subtleties of the ways we welcome, the ways we love, the ways we advocate, the ways we grieve, the ways we take accountability, and the ways we celebrate.

What excites you the most about this position? 

I’m most excited about opportunities for collaboration and creation, many of which are already in motion (yes!). I’m especially focused on making spaces where participants or passers-by can choose to accept a prompt-like invitation to germinate a poem in their own discrete, multitudinous present moment.  My hope is to also bring poets from outside the Nanaimo region into conversation with local writers.

How did you decide you wanted to pursue poetry as part of your career? 

 Starting out as a teenager, I honestly think I liked the idea of poetry more than I liked the rigour and difficulty and possibility of poems themselves. At university, I fell in love with the feeling of being stumped, of hitting the limit of my understanding and thinking. The way that poems demand and then hold our attention is one of the genre’s greatest attributes.  

Poetry — my love for it, my obsession with trying to write it — eventually became central to my graduate studies and my decision to pursue a career in teaching and publishing in the fields of English and Creative Writing. Though I don’t often introduce myself as a poet, I think of myself as an artist more broadly because I believe that the arts are central to the kind of life I want to live, and savour, and cherish (a present life). 

Where do you find inspiration for your poetry? 

I find inspiration by reading other poets whose works are impossibly good (for instance, recent books by Craig Santos Perez, T. Liem, Steve Collis, CA Conrad, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Prathna Lor, Victoria Chang, and Nick Laird, to name a few). And from that resulting humility, I keep trying my best. The interplay of sound and texture and form and intimation and protest and wonder and surprise that poems can (often simultaneously) contain feels truly bottomless to me. Only a few other areas of my life share that quality of infinite possibility, of exhilarating depth. 

Any advice for new or budding poets? 

My advice would be to seek out the poets who kindle something refreshing in your own imagination — in magazines, at festivals, and even on social media! — and then buy their collections. And then buy the collections of the other poets they quote and/or thank! Soon, you’ll have your own dog-eared, personalized library perched on every surface of your home to relentlessly remind you how myriad the genre is — so myriad that you, too, belong there. Thank goodness for that!  Also: share drafts with trusted friends. It’s a singular vulnerability! It’s life giving!