Richard Outram

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Richard Outram (April 9, 1930 – January 21, 2005) was a Canadian poet.

Richard Outram, the Canadian poet, in 1984
Richard Outram, the Canadian poet, in 1984

Contents

[edit] Biography

Richard Daley Outram was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1930. His mother, née Mary Muriel Daley, was the daughter of a distinguished Methodist minister centrally involved in the negotiations which led to the creation of the United Church in Canada. While working as a schoolteacher, Outram's mother met and married his father, Alfred Allan Outram, in Port Hope, Ontario. Allan Outram, son of the owner of the hardware store in Port Hope, served and was wounded in the First World War. By profession, he was an engineer. The couple moved to Toronto. From 1944 to 1949, Outram attended highschool in Leaside, which was then still on the outskirts of the city.

From 1949 to 1953, he was enrolled in the Honours B.A., English and Philosophy course at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. Two of his teachers, the philosopher Emil Fackenheim and the critic Northrop Frye, with the latter of whom Outram studied Milton, Spenser and (when E.J. Pratt became ill) Shakespeare, had a profound and lasting effect on him. During the summers of 1950 and 1951, Outram also served as an officer cadet in the reserve system of the Royal Canadian Navy, aboard frigates in the Bay of Fundy and at HMCS Stadacona in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

After graduation, Outram worked with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a television stagehand for a year, then he moved to London, England, where he worked as a television stagehand for the BBC between 1955 and 1956. During those years he began to write poetry. During them also, he met his future wife, the Toronto painter and wood-engraver Barbara Howard. They returned to Toronto to marry in 1957. Outram went back to work with the CBC, first, again, as a television stagehand, then as a stage crew foreman, a position he held until early retirement at the age of sixty in 1990.

Between 1966 and 2001, Outram wrote ten commercially published collections of poetry (South of North: Images of Canada, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald was published posthumously in 2007). In addition to these commercial publications, Outram has issued over a dozen other collections of poetry and prose under the imprint of The Gauntlet Press which he founded with his wife, Barbara Howard, in the 1960s.[1] Its limited editions (60-80 copies) of four small collections by Outram, Creatures (1972), Thresholds (1973), Locus (1974) and Arbor (1976), illustrated with wood-engravings by Howard, are prized by collectors and can be found in public collections such as the University of Toronto Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, which is also the repository for Outram's personal papers and manuscripts.

The Gauntlet Press also issued a series of broadsheets of Outram's poems throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all of them designed (and many frequently illustrated) by Howard. In the early 1990s The Gauntlet Press switched from letterpress to digitally based production on the computer. As well as his poem and prose broadsheets, the press during this electronic phase issued nine small books by Outram in limited editions. Among them are Around & About the Toronto Islands (1993); Tradecraft and Other Uncollected Poems (1994); Eros Descending (1995); Ms Cassie (2000) and Lightfall (2001). Many of the poems from these Gauntlet Press publications (with the exception of Ms Cassie and Lightfall ) have been gathered into the commercially available Dove Legend and Other Poems.

[edit] The Poetry

In a 1988 essay titled Hard Truths, the noted literary critic Alberto Manguel wrote: “Richard Outram’s metaphysical message is neither fashionable nor easy to grasp, but he is one of the best poets writing in English.” [2] Outram's work transcends fashion, expressing a private voice of public consequence in poems of great formal variety and range of tone. He is a most mercurial writer, delighting in satire and farce, in low and high comedy, in metaphysical poems of intricate philosophical complexity and dignity, in straightforward or not so straightforward lyrical love poems, and in dramatic soliloquies voiced for outrageously imagined characters, including some animals. Outram may write straightforward narrative poems in which, as is not usually the case in contemporary narrative poems, things really do happen consecutively. He can also write subtle parables and allegories, or commit squibs and puns or propose riddles and anagrams. His poetry must be read while attending to the full meaning of every word. It has been said that the best companion a reader can have when trying to fully appreciate an Outram poem is an etymological dictionary.[3] It has also been argued that there is, at the same time, an ‘other’, more intuitively accessible side to his poetry.[4]

Many years before his death, Outram wrote what he often referred to as his own epitaph:[5]

Epitaph for an Angler

To haunt the silver river and to wait
Were second nature to him, his own bait:
Unravelling at last a constant knot,
He cast his line clear: and was promptly caught.

[edit] Books of Poetry Published

  • Eight Poems, Tortoise Press, Toronto, 1959.
  • Exsultate, Jubilate, Macmillan Canada, Toronto, 1966.
  • Creatures, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1972.
  • Seer, Aliquando Press, Toronto, 1973.
  • Thresholds, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1973.
  • Locus, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1974.
  • Turns and Other Poems, Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press, London, 1975. Anson-Cartwright Editions, Toronto, 1976. ISBN 0-919974-00-7
  • Arbor, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1976.
  • The Promise of Light, Anson-Cartwright Editions, Toronto, 1979. ISBN 0-919974-05-8
  • Selected Poems (1960-1980), Exile Editions, Toronto, 1984. ISBN 0-920428-85-1
  • Man in Love, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 1985. ISBN 0-88984-069-5
  • Hiram and Jenny, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 1989. ISBN 0-88984-118-7 [3]
  • Mogul Recollected, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 1993. ISBN 0-88984-174-8 [4]
  • Around & About the Toronto Islands, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1993.
  • "And Growes to Something of Great Constancie ...", being a SYZYGY, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1994
  • Hiram and Jenny, Unpublished Poems, Food for Thought Books, Ottawa, 1994.
  • Peripatetics, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1994.
  • Tradecraft and Other Uncollected Poems, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1994.
  • Eros Descending, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1995.
  • Benedict Abroad, St. Thomas Poetry Series, Toronto, 1998. ISBN 0-9697802-0-x (Winner of the 1999 City of Toronto Book Award) [5]
  • Ms Cassie, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 2000.
  • Dove Legend & Other Poems, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 2001. ISBN 0-88984-221-3 [6]
  • Lightfall, Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 2001.
  • Nine Shiners, Port Hope, 2003.
  • Brief Immortals, Port Hope, 2003.
  • South of North: Images of Canada, with drawings by Thoreau MacDonald, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 2007. ISBN 978-0-88984-298-4 [7]

[edit] Anthologies

  • Christian Poetry in Canada, David A. Kent, ed., ECW Press, 1989. ISBN 1550220152
  • Literature in English, W. H. New and W. E. Messenger, eds., Prentice Hall, Scarborough, ON, 1993. ISBN 0135347777
  • In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry, Kate Braid & Sandy Shreve, eds., Polestar/Raincoast Books, Vancouver, BC, 2005. ISBN 1-55192-777-2
  • Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets, Zachariah Wells, ed., Biblioasis, Emeryville, ON, 2008. ISBN 978-1-897231-44-9

[edit] Bibliography

  • Hubert de Santana: Monarch in Mufti, Books in Canada, September, 1976
  • Louis K. MacKendrick: Richard Outram, "Man in Love", Journal of Canadian Poetry 2, 1985
  • Paul Roberts: Selected Poems 1960-1980, book review, Books in Canada, June/July 1985, p.26-27
  • Alberto Manguel: Hard Truths, Saturday Night magazine, April, 1988
  • Fine Printing: The Private Press in Canada, The Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, 1995. ISBN 0-7727-6015-2
  • Alberto Manguel: Waiting for an Echo: On Reading Richard Outram (from Into the Looking Glass Wood, Alfred Knopf, Toronto, 1998. ISBN 0-676-97135-0)
  • DA: A Journal of the Printing Arts, Number 44. Special Issue on the Gauntlet Press Spring/Summer 1999, Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, ON
  • Peter Sanger: "Her Kindled Shadow ...", An Introduction to the Work of Richard Outram, The Antigonish Review, 2001. ISBN 0-920653-05-7
  • Jeffery Donaldson: A Light Blaze in Rare Air: Richard Outram, Books in Canada, 2001. Book review of Dove Legend[8]
  • Robert Moore: Poems for the Soul Reborn into an Age of "Stringent Myths", Books in Canada, 2001. Book review of Dove Legend[9]
  • The Sounding Light: Richard Outram and Barbara Howard, The New Quarterly, Vol.21 No.4, 2001/2002
  • CBC's The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright, 7 April, 2002. One hour interview with poet Richard Outram. Available on CD by order.
  • Canadian Notes & Queries, Number 63, 2003, John Metcalf, ed. Special issue devoted to the Gauntlet Press and the work of Barbara Howard and Richard Outram.
  • David Solway: ‘Reading Richard Outram’, Director’s Cut, Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, Ont. 2003.
  • Carmine Starnino: The Other Outram (from A Lover's Quarrel: Essays and Reviews, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin ON, 2004. ISBN 0-88984-241-8)
  • Three Encounters with Poet Richard Outram, The New Quarterly #89, Winter/Spring 2004

[edit] Public Collections of the Gauntlet Press

  • The National Library of Canada, Ottawa
  • The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
  • Memorial University of Newfoundland Libraries, Rare Books Collection
  • The Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta
  • The University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver, BC
  • University of Western Ontario, London, ON
  • The MILLS Research Collections, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON
  • The University of Calgary, Alberta, Special Collections
  • The Berg Collection, New York Public Library
  • The Harris Collection of Poetry and Plays, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
  • The Library of Congress, Washington, DC
  • University at Buffalo, New York, Special Collections
  • The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass
  • The Bodleian Library, Oxford, England
  • The British Library, London, England

[edit] References

  1. ^ A Brief History of Time at The Gauntlet Press (Or, Some Days the Earth Moved) [1]
  2. ^ Alberto Manguel: Hard Truths, Saturday Night magazine, April, 1988
  3. ^ Richard Outram: A Preface and Selection by Peter Sanger, The Antigonish Review, 2001 [2]
  4. ^ Carmine Starnino: The Other Outram (from A Lover's Quarrel: Essays and Reviews, The Porcupine's Quill, Erin ON, 2004. ISBN 0-88984-241-8)
  5. ^ Michael Carbert: Faith and Resilience: An Interview with Richard Outram, The New Quarterly #89, Winter/Spring 2004

[edit] External Links