The latest book by B.C. poet Cecily Nicholson is called From The Poplars and some of the trees in that conceptual forest might well be found in Prince George.
Although she has never done a reading in Prince George she has visited here, spending an extended visit with longtime friends Paul and Aidyl Jago (well-known in Prince George music circles) last winter.
"I finished my most recent book in their basement," she said.
After it was done she sent it to her go-to poetry advisor, the SFU poet and professor Stephen Collis.
That connective thread was still alive on Thursday when The Citizen reached Nicholson at her Vancouver home.
"I'm just watching the arrests happening right now on Burnaby Mountain. I will be helping with what comes out of that," she said.
Collis was one of those named in a lawsuit by oil company Kinder Morgan in the dispute between the corporation and protesters attempting to block expansion of their pipeline. On Thursday morning, a days-old court order to move out of the way of industrial research crews was finally exercised.
The lawsuit was filed in late October alleging some of the main protesters had cost Kinder Morgan millions they were responsible for repaying. The matter is still before the courts.
"Steve's had his poetry read out in court as evidence against him - an interesting moment in the history of Canadian poetry," said Nicholson.
She is familiar with the push and pull of confronting societal issues and taking stands for grassroots and street-level concerns. She has worked with women of the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver since 2000. Her two previous books - Triage published in 2011 and Anamnesia: Unforgetting published in 2012 - are populated with the themes of gender violence, poverty, marginalization, human displacement and similar others.
She is not a formally trained social worker but is a veteran of social services in key roles with drop-in centres, women's centres, frontline street interventions, and even now in what could be seen on the surface as a desk job as administrator of Gallery Gachet. But the gallery is itself a social development facility located only a block from the infamous intersection of Hastings and Main on the downtown eastside.
"My work now is not dissociated from that kind of work I was doing before," she said. "Gachet is an art gallery mandated to centre on mental health, marginalized community, using art and community to strengthen the social network of our urban region."
Nicholson will be reading at a Prince George public event on Monday at UNBC, an event organized by university professor and fellow poet Rob Budde. She said she will also include some previous work "because I've worked so long in the downtown eastside of Vancouver I like to remind people of my vocation and do that in a way of evocation of that community."
She is looking forward to her first up-close view of a Prince George university audience.
"I enjoy being among students and meet the up-and-coming poets in the crowd who haven't maybe gotten to that part of their expression yet," she said. "It is always a way to get to know the culture of a place."
Her reading is at 11:30 a.m. in lecture theater 7-158.
