Ah, and just when you thought our fine festival season was over. Along comes another. Next Monday, at City Hall, Edmonton’s first week-long poetry festival takes flight.

Kids will scribble poems all over Churchill Square, Metro Cinema will show video poems, and wordsmiths of all stripes will infuse the U of A hospital with verbal medicine.

The highlight though, might be The Roar Festival of the Spoken Word, which will (one supposes) be roaring through various downtown venues for three days starting on September 21st.

Thomas Trofimuk, festival director of The Roar, nicely summarizes the fest’s inspiration.

"Way too much wine. A shitload of wine."

But as our conversation continues, it quickly becomes clear that there’s a lot more than alcohol at the root of The Roar.

The Raving Poets, a literary society of which Thomas is a founding member, gave birth to the event last year. The Roar offers a place for poets "to land," Thomas explains. It’s an inclusive celebration of "words in the air." The annual event welcomes anybody and everybody to come and stir up the poetic stew it serves; after all, with over 100 readers, there’s more than enough to go around.

"The idea was to invite every single group," Thomas stresses, "and break down all those [barriers]".

Thomas’s passion for spreading the spoken word is irresistibly contagious, not to mention inclusive. By the end of our conversation, I found myself on the schedule of performers.

"I’ll just put you down," he confirmed. "And you’re gonna get applause no matter what you read, even if you read the phone book. [But] if you strike a chord, if you make that communication with people, they’re gonna applaud wildly... and that’s what poetry’s about–about communication."

One of The ROAR’s headlining performers, Sheri-D. Wilson, spoke to me from her hometown of Calgary, or "Calgaria," as she calls it.

"I think Alberta is the hot spot," she exclaimed, "and I usually choose hot spots to live in, which is why I’m here."

Sheri-D.’s blazing presence is only making Alberta hotter. And with performances like hers next Friday night–which, she informed me, will include her infamous sacrilegious panty piece (just wait and see)–Edmonton might be in for a poetic heat wave.

Among Sheri-D.’s six collections of poetry are Girl’s Guide to Giving Head and Between Lovers. But the poet is most known for her colourful, dynamic, and incredibly engaging spoken word performances. Having seen Sheri-D. perform in the past, and long overdue for a serving of her sexy wisdom, I’m dying to see her next week.

But when all I wanted to hear about was her, her, her, Sheri-D. reminded me that the beauty of a poetry festival goes way beyond the intrigue of an individual performer.

The beauty of a festival depends on the coming together of poets with different backgrounds, experiences, and ages.

"It’s not just one poet," Sheri-D. stresses. "It’s this big event of all these many things and you have to go experience as much as you can handle... when I as a poet come to read at a festival I think about myself as part of a continuum... and that’s what really excites me, being part of something that’s larger than myself."

Sheri-D., despite living in our rival sister city to the south, expresses an infectious optimism towards Edmonton’s growing poetic scene.

"I love coming to Edmonton," she exclaims. "I’ve performed there off and on for many years and it’s just so great that they are finally getting this great community excited about [the spoken word]. I think it’s going to develop into quite the festival of word and of thought."

Sheri-D.’s enumerations on the oral tradition reveal the genre’s massive potential.

"[It’s] hip-hop, jazz, dub; it’s beat poetry; it includes slams and story-telling, and it’s really the poetry of the people." As she maintains, with so much going on, no matter who you are or where you come from, you’ll have the chance to experience an unforgettable performance, a performance "that really does speak to you, that inspires you, that makes you think, that makes you laugh, that makes you cry."