Sudbury poet laureate helps celebrate Northern Lights Festival's 50th anniversary

To help celebrate its 50th anniversary, Sudbury's poet laureate has written a poem about the Northern Lights Festival Boréal (NLFB).

Kyla Heyming, the city's seventh poet laureate, wrote a piece called How Like the North, which she will perform at the festival.

"It was a really great opportunity to be able to write this poem because the Northern Lights Festival is celebrating its 50 years, which is a great milestone for our community," she said.

"And so I was able to use an archive of newspaper articles and clippings that they collected over the years about the festival. And through some, you know, key phrases and fun headings, I was able to use that as inspiration to write this poem."

The poem celebrates the festival's history and its return to in-person performances after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Krishna Patel, the festival's executive director, said that for its 50th anniversary NFLB will celebrate its history by featuring a lot of returning artists.

"So the big reunion aspect of it is going to be very exciting and then we've got a really awesome lineup for this year," she said.

For Heyming, the project comes early in her tenure as the city's youngest poet laureate.

"It's been wonderful. It's been really busy," she said.

"It's only been two months, but I've really kind of hit the ground running out in the community, trying to see what kind of collaborations and what kind of opportunities would present themselves in which I could either contribute to, or kind of create."

Heyming said poetry, performed in front of a live audience, seems to be making a comeback.

"There is a revival of spoken word and slam poetry coming up, performance poetry," she said. "And we find that becoming a very popular outlet for some of the younger poets as well."