Poems will spread across the floor tonight at the Omineca Arts Centre.
The downtown community gallery is well known as a display space for the visual arts, it has hosted concerts, and tonight a pair of writers will speak the words they've published on the page.
Local poet Al Rempel will be the opening act in tonight's duo, followed by visiting writer Sean Arthur Joyce introducing audiences here to his most recent book The Price of Transcendence.
Joyce will also premiere in Prince George his "wild yet wise character" Dead Crow in Dead Crow: Prologue, a dramatic performance with original music composed by Noel Fudge.
Readers might well recognize the author's name from another genre of writing.
Joyce is also the expository scribe behind the book Laying the Children's Ghosts to Rest. It was a non-fiction examination of the 100,000 poverty-stricken British children sent to Canada in the mid-1800s to work as indentured labourers.
He has also written two books of local history for the Nelson area of Kootenays where he lives.
But he has family in the Prince George-Cariboo region, he lived in Mackenzie as a youth and he is also no stranger to poetry.
"I actually started as a poet," he said. "In the 1980s I used to read and tour with other poets in the Lower Mainland and started publishing then. The economic realities being what they are, I had to go more into journalism to earn a crust. I trained at Selkirk College in journalism and started training on my own as an independent reporter. I managed to never be a staff writer, but I kept poetry up all the while."
He has two previous books of poetry entitled The Charlatans of Paradise and Star Seeds.
His written work has earned public praise from the likes of Tom Wayman (who edited The Price of Transcendence), bill bissett, Gary Geddes and other literary heavyweights.
He is in Prince George at the behest of UNBC English professor and novel/poetry writer Rob Budde. Joyce will be a guest presenter in Budde's class. This, like tonight's event, insists upon the words on the page being treated with voice.
"From the very beginning, for me, performance was a huge part of poetry," Joyce said. "I cut my teeth reading things like Dylan Thomas and Russian poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko. From those two I learned right away that the 'mumbling in your soup' presentation style wasn't the way you had to go."
Theatre is as much a part of Joyce's creative thinking as writing. That comes to particular use with the Dead Crow: Prologue piece. It was penned to be performed.
"The 'spoken word' revolution in poetry is nothing new, but its influence continues to resound among poets seeking new ways of expressing their art," Joyce said.
"A quick search on YouTube will find many poets using video to augment their writing and expand their audiences."
He called his Dead Crow piece a "narrative epic poem" in the likeness of a fable or legend told in ancient times, out loud, ideally in a communal setting like a campfire or longhouse or amphitheatre.
"Imagine a creature tens of thousands of years old, exiled on Earth as a Watcher by a shadowy race of gods," he explained.
"Now imagine that he's equally capable of appearing as a crow or a human, with a bad attitude to match, and you have Dead Crow's personality profile. Dead Crow: Prologue has also been produced as a video poem and can be viewed on YouTube for a taste of this unique hybrid of myth and man."
To see it in person, along with the spoken poetic word of Al Rempel, attend tonight at the Omineca Arts Centre (Third Avenue and George Street) starting at 7:30 p.m.
