Rational Geomancy

The Toronto Research Group was an eighteen year collaboration and friendship between the late bpNichol and Steve McCaffery.

In addition to reports on translation; the book-as-machine; and the search for non-narrative prose; this collection includes an informative introduction by McCaffery; a new report on performance; ‘Reading and Writing: The Toronto Research Game’; and much hitherto unpublished material. From scholasticism to pop-up books, the Book of Nature to comic strips, these frequently witty, often irreverent and methodically mischievious reports document a vital era, not only in the intellectual growth of two individuals, but in the history of critical collaboration in North America.

With a revised format, additional bibliography and profuse illustrations, this book will prove to be of inestimable value to anyone tracing the poetic archeology of the seventies in Anglophone Canada.

Steve McCaffery
Steven McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. McCaffery’s poetry attempts to break language from the logic of syntax and structure to create a purely emotional response. He has created three-dimensional structures of words and has released a number of sound and video works, often in collaboration with other poets. Two of his books of poetry, The Theory of Sediment (1991) and Seven Pages Missing (2000) have each been nominated for a Governor General’s Award.