Words can move us deeply, and sometimes we can move for words.
The area's poets have, over the years, been inspired and empowered by local places. Points of local interest drew their attention and they drew their word-paintings from it.
Now those places and those poets are points of interest in a whole other way.
The Prince George Public Library is the starting point for their first Poetry Walk this afternoon. Those who go for this stroll will get a guided tour of spots in the city's downtown that have special meaning to the poets of the area.
There will be a reading of that poetry at each stop, some lively information about the poetic significance, and even appearances by some of those poets.
"The Prince George Public Library has had success with history walks in the past, where someone leads a tour showing off historic landmarks. This is the same except it shows off literary landmarks," said Gillian Wigmore, one of the PGPL's staff members and also one of the city's leading poets.
"We have had people writing high quality poetry in and about Prince George for a very long time," she said. "A poetry walk has such potential to grow. We already found too many places to include in this first attempt. The more people who write about this place, the more the consciousness of this place grows and the more we can build on that. Community pride comes from the creation of a mythology of a place and the only way to do that is through art. People have to see themselves reflected, and that's what stimulates a sense of self. When there are paintings and sculptures and architectural expressions that form a local identity, a place develops a positive personality. The first artistic expression humans tend to turn to for expression is poetry."
It is there in our everyday lives. Songs are founded on poetry. It's in advertising, it's in greeting cards and most subliminally but pervasively it is in our regular speech. Poetry - not the rhyming kind but the concrete form - is the basis for daily communication. We humans do not speak in complete sentences or in formal paragraphs. We speak in fragments, slang, acronyms, compound phrases, bits and snippets, even words invented on the spot that still convey our meaning.
Those manners of communication are the board members around the conference table of poetry.
"It is an ancient art form, it goes on year after year in basically every culture, always changing with the times, and it reflects humanity. Maybe poetry is a clearer reflection of our daily humanity than prose," said Wigmore.
Some of the local people who put this humanity to page are Jeremy Stewart, Rob Budde, Ken Belford, Si Transken, Jacqueline Baldwin, Mary MacDonald and Wigmore herself - all featured on the poetry walk. Where and how their works mesh with our specific landscape will be revealed on the one-hour moving event.
There are 12 stops altogether, starting at the Bob Harkins branch of the Prince George Public Library.
The walk begins at 2 p.m. and it's free of charge.
