Torontology

White Noise alchemy: poetry for the next millennium. In a world where the poet is a filter, a cultural recombinator, Torontology sifts through the blur of data and stimulus to find the gold in the dross. From OuLiPo to Vispo to post-LANGpo, Stephen Cain explores the poetics of constraint and the practice of unconstrained writing. In Torontology, Grendel meets Beowulf on the College streetcar, Eliot interrogates Atom Egoyan’s Prison Tattoos while enjoying Vacillation in a Blanket,  and Guided by Voices is both a brilliant band and an oblique love poem. For Cain, Sir Thomas Browne is on equal footing with James Brown. That pop song buzzing through your head? The TV show that’s become a guilty pleasure? That flock of pre-teens behind you on the subway? They’re all as “real” and poetic as classical tropes, archetypes, and forms. Torontology: a philosophy of Being in the “centre of the universe”? Or merely the urban landscape at the turn of the 21st century? Either way, in Cain’s terms, context is always as important as content, and the quotidian is more expansive than you’ve ever imagined.