The Scream and back again

Posted by admin on July 18th, 2008 filed in The New Illiterati

Poetry. It’s what we all know and love. It’s what moves the earth and breaks our hearts, the ebb and flow of our spiritual lives - makes the world go round, makes the merry-go-round go round, feeds the wallets of artists and the bardic hunger of aficionados.

I just got back from the Scream Literary Festival in Toronto. I went to Niagara Falls, up the CN Tower, and poetried a duett with Paul Dutton. Ate persian food with a.rawlings and Derek Beaulieu, went to the movies with my beautiful wife, bought one million books and marvelled at a Jack Spicer impersonator. We had breakfasty dinner and watched different people read from Gwendolyn MacEwens A Breakfast for Barbarians, took a workshop on Naive Translation, saw apropriators agree on their profession being a good thing (and agreed with them, but missed copyright nazis from the panel), admired the dancing skills of computer-game characters of Machinima and watched the indie-rock band the Bicycles be too indie and not enough rock. Icelandic krútt-músic has nothing on Canadian cute-music.

Also: Fantastic Vocable workshop with Angela Rawlings and Ciara Adams; and loads of great readings, most memorable of which were Alixandra Bamford’s beautifully chaotic style (with Steve Venright), Mariko Tamaki’s reading of a comic book, Sonnet L’Abbé’s O’s, Sina Queras’ repetitions, Kenny G’s court transcripts, Rob Read’s bird-sounds and Beaulieu’s How-To’s.

Travelling home was a bitch, as such things tend to be. The plane was small and filled with people, whom at the time I felt deserved to get shot, but have since taken a more lenient, more humane stance.