To Toronto!

Sounds like some of us Indyishers may be heading to the TDot to take in some of the theatre we missed seeing while working the Fringe here. Yes, yes, Toronto Fringe kicks off tommorrow. But if you’re lucky enough to be kicking around the Kensington Market area in Toronto this evening, and if you like poetry or science or the people who do both together, please find your way to the launch of this Matrix issue, and then, heavens, tell me how it goes!

Looking for a universal solvent, elixir of life, spontaneous gold?

Expect science and poetry to bond in startling ways during our critical panel. Moderated by Clive Thompson, panellists Christian Bök, angela rawlings, Ken Babstock and postdoctoral candidate, Lisa Betts (who is studying the neuroscience of vision at York) will set their giant brains to task on the emerging transmutations taking place between science and poetry. The discussion will be followed at 9 pm by the launch of the newest issue of Montreal’s Matrix Magazine with readings by the panellists and others who have engaged science in their poetic practice.

Want to know about more about these folks who’ll be panelling?

Clive Thompson writes for Wired and New York Magazine and his blog. (robot lover. huge robot lover. that’s what i heard anyway).
Christian Bök is that Canadian poet who wrote the famous lipogram Euonia which uses one vowel per chapter. Most amazing for not reading like an excercise, but more like a sad falling down of stairs made by language streamlined by a rule. If you know what I mean. It’s surprisingly narrative, though constanly reshaping itself to meet the words available. It would be great to hear his thoughts on whether his process or product is like science.
angela rawlings is a poet who crosses imaginary lines into dance, theatre and performance art, and I bet there’s alchemy involved in that process of page to play.
Ken Babstock is poetry editor for the most famous and important-to-our-literary-history Candian publisher, House of Anansi. (informative pdf’s here!)
Lisa Betts, as the blurb says, studies vision, light, neurons and the ways our eyes turn light into messages for our minds.

Aw man. Science and poetry are cool. Describing all this only makes me wish to be there more, but this eve we’ll be cozying in to a wifi hotspot near mount royal parc here in Montreal instead, for a kind of State of the Union indyish team meet, and that’ll be grand too. We’ll be trying to get our heads screwed on straight and wrap them around the poetry/science of mapping the future of our project; web and event collaborations. So it’s similar to the Matrix launch, I swear.