A Week of Scream-ing
My Adventures with The Scream Literary Festival
By Kerry Wright Zentner
Posted July 16th, 2007
Ironically, after a week full of amazing literary events I am finding it very difficult to find words to describe it. They have all either been exhausted or their meanings commandeered by poeticism to such a degree that they no longer function in the organization of ordinary thought. Maybe that's okay. To describe poetry in non-poetic terms is a self-defeating exercise. That, to me, is the beauty of poetry: it's a singular entity, the effect it has on the mind cannot be matched by any description of the effect. Description is simply inadequate. This notion was driven home to me repeatedly over the course of the last week or so. Sure, I could tell you that I sat in the abandoned Don Valley Brickworks and listened to Christopher Dewdney read A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario in its entirety while sampling some of the finest gourmet food I have ever eaten and watching the sun set, but it doesn't do justice in conferring to you the feel of the experience itself. You might instead feel a sense of loss at not having been there yourself. Perhaps a momentary strain of second-hand beauty will awaken within you and you will remind yourself to be more observant. Yet, for whatever reason, I will now attempt to describe that which has already gone before. Maybe you will decide to join us next year.
Excerpts from The Scream Literary Festival #15, 2007:
July 6th
The Dewdney Principle: A Book-Length Dinner Reading
Crossing under the immense and beastly body of the abandoned building I approach the dining area. The sky is singing, the way it often does in actual unfiltered nature. I sit down directly across from the sun. I can see that it is tired of trying to communicate the day to us. We do not really understand what it means. The building observes us. It is listening with absurd silence to our conversations, waiting for a book to be read into its crumbling body. Eventually a man comes along to negotiate our own silence. Behind him stretches a large, murky pond. He tells us to gaze into the endless present, to watch the burnished, luminous sky whilst the birds and eventually the bats skim its transformative catacombs. The man begins to read. Immediately everything around me is relevant, everything is well placed. The ground, the brick, the insects, all vibrate with delicate and sexual necessity. I notice that every surface is ringing with sound. The alcove of the building is humming along with the man. It has been waiting to hum again since its death. I get up and climb around it. The I-beams holler inaudibly through the rubble at the crumbling frontispiece, unconcerned with their own rusted extinction. Raccoons clamber around like maggots in the great distended head of the building, the unstoppable progenitors of decay. The frogs, owls, and spiders have all allowed us to be here, to read to them in their unrestrained natural sanctum. The building now knows that, in actuality, it is teeming with life, and beyond that, it is also teeming with existence. The man finishes reading. I am back in my seat, the taste of music fresh and honey-like on my tongue.
July 7th
Poets in Their Natural Habitat: A Field Trip
The two of us stand opposite each other, reading out our poetry as a dialogue, one sentence at a time. Angela radiates beauty and energy. My father approaches, leading a group of poetically-inclined adventurers. They encircle us, listening in to what we are saying. Their laughter frightens me and I camouflage myself as a rock, tucking my head down to my knees and dropping to the ground. Simultaneously, Angela hides against a tree, implementing a leafy tree branch as concealment. My father and his safari-conducting accomplice, Nadia Halim, begin to talk excitedly about us, our habits and predilections. It is, after all, quite a thing to discover poets in their natural habitat, unconfined to the stage. And it is not often that so many of them are spotted in a single day. As the tour continues we are treated to many poet sightings, including not one, but two encounters with a William A. Davison (one of whom was poeticizing from a small aperture in the ground). We capture and tag a live Hugh Thomas, whereupon we convince him to beguile us for a short time with his writings. We see the Myna Wallin strutting her plumage at an ice cream shop, while nearby a passing Nicholas Power invokes his mating call. We observe the congenial Luciano Iacobelli elucidate his childhood from the patio of Dooney's Café, a territory which indisputably belongs to him. So many poets are encountered and in such quick succession that it defies me to recount. The expedition comes to a close at the Victory Café, where many of the poets we have seen join us to scavenge for food. After all is said (and done), new bonds are formed amidst a cornucopia of intriguing thought. I will cry if this does not become an annual event.
July 9th
Behold What We Have Wrought: Welcome to the Laboratory
My artistic collaborators and I descend into the basement of Type Books. We are suddenly in a sarcophagus. Strange masks dangle ribbons of literature from the walls. The communist manifesto weaves, bloody and outstretched into the dead space. The lights go off and we listen to Dr. Frankenstein recount the formation of what was his highest achievement and, simultaneously, his greatest blunder. It's a tale of scientific knowledge used for disturbing ends in the creation of a monster, which, aptly, is the very thing we have all assembled here to accomplish on this humid July evening. The term Exquisite Corpse was happened upon by the surrealists and without any direct reference to Mary Shelley's infamous monster, though he does embody the idea (and the term) in many different ways, including literally. The idea here is for multiple participants to compose a work collaboratively, using many distinct and separate elements, placed together in an order, to form a continuous whole. In this instance we are given several tomes of science text to carve into, neatly adhering to this year's "Science" theme at the festival. I've done this sort of thing before (quite often, as a matter of fact) but never with so many people. The room is soon filled with the sound of twenty-some clacking scissors and, a short time later, our monster is constructed: a three-part opus as envisioned by our evening's host, Mark Higgins. The thing is a gnarled and ungainly scroll and reads as if a malfunctioning robot had decided to spew out its most arbitrary articles of science trivia in one long entreaty, requesting...god-knows-what. These collaborative efforts are usually a hit-or-miss endeavour, and the result of this particular experiment is surprisingly good for the amount of people involved. It serves to illustrate the interesting types of people who attend the Scream Literary Festival every year. This type of collaborative activity and exchange of ideas is a near necessity when a bunch of neat artistic people are gathered together and I'm severely glad that it has happened. I leave just as "the Squirm" begins, and stumble home like Frankenstein's monster.
The festival is in its fifteenth year, and continues to grow in scale with each one that passes. This year's events yielded some legendary new classics which are sure to become future staples. In addition to the three here detailed (which are but a small sampling of the activities), I attended several other events including the one that incited the whole festival: The Scream in High Park. I can now earnestly say that the Scream is easily one of Toronto's most interesting and intelligent festivals. It stimulates, indeed activates, something within us which is too often neglected: The Poetic Mind (cue spooky, Twilight-Zone music). It has renewed in me a romantic sense of nature and exploration inside the mind and out. Moreover, it has instilled in me the importance of participating in these beautiful and unusual moments and events that make Toronto such an interesting place to occupy. Next year, you will join me.