Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008

Edmonton Poetry Festival

A platypus is the perfect metaphor for Edmonton's misunderstood poets

The website for the third annual Edmonton Poetry Festival features questions some of the attending poets have sent in. One of the more colourful participants asks, “I like to read my poetry whilst holding a live platypus. I have a license for him and everything, I just need to make sure it’s OK to bring Percy to the festival.”
 

It doesn’t get much better than seeing live, local, experimental poets share their work as they wield an egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal. And you can do precisely that from Sep 11 to 13 at various venues on or about Jasper Avenue.
 

“We all learn about language from the time we’re in our highchairs,” says Alice Major, Edmonton’s first Poet Laureate (now Emeritus) and the festival’s kingpin. “How it moves, sounds, refers to the world. It’s about participation, dialogue.”
 

The festival is scaled down somewhat from last year, when Edmonton Cultural Capital funding allowed the Stroll of Poets Society to program a full week of events, but Major is still happy for what she calls a “renewal of local energy.” Participation ranges from the young, hip-hop faction to middle-aged poets who are only now coming out of the poetry closet. And while attendees will get to see plenty of local poets, they’ll still be treated to a few established Canadian artists like Toronto’s Christian Bök and Vancouver’s Brendan McLeod.
 

The Stroll of Poets has worked hard to make poetry more accessible to a generation with an attention span measured in seconds. The Killer Blinks, which will kick off this year’s festival, features rapid-fire poetry: 60-plus poets, 30 seconds at the microphone each, all done to the beat of a live drummer. It may sound easy, but brevity and economy aren’t easy things to master.
 

 “Poetry has a bad rap for being tired, old, confusing and making you feel stupid,” explains Major. “When I was Poet Laureate we’d do readings for groups of Rotarians, business associations, city council. Afterwards many of them would say, ‘Thank heavens it wasn’t bad.’”
 

Major hopes to continue that kind of audience-broadening with the festival. After all, we’ve all written a poem at some point in our lives, some intensely personal verse penned at 4 am, rich with simile, alliteration and pathetic fallacy. We’ve all stumbled across those poems years later in some deep, dark recess of our lives and winced at our furtive fumbling toward eloquence. But now is our chance to see a few brave souls with the courage to read that stuff out loud. 

And potentially to see the world’s only egg-laying mammal. V 
 

Thu, Sep 11 - Sat, Sep 13

Edmonton Poetry Festival

Various venues, various times

Visit edmontonpoetryfestival.com for full details

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