Richard Outram

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Richard Outram
The poet Richard Outram in 1980
Born(1930-04-09)April 9, 1930
Oshawa, Ontario, Canada
DiedJanuary 21, 2005(2005-01-21) (aged 74)
Port Hope, Ontario, Canada
NationalityCanadian
SpouseBarbara Howard

Richard Daley Outram (April 9, 1930 – January 21, 2005) was a Canadian poet. Often regarded as a poet's poet, he wrote eleven commercially published books of poetry in addition to the many collections of his poetry and prose published under the imprint of the Gauntlet Press. In 1999 he won the City of Toronto Book Award for his sequence of poems Benedict Abroad.[1]

Life

Outram was born in

First World War. By profession, he was an engineer. The couple moved to Toronto. From 1944 to 1949, Outram attended high school in Leaside, which was then still on the outskirts of the city.[2]

From 1949 to 1953, Outram was enrolled in the Honours B.A., English and Philosophy course at

Halifax, Nova Scotia.[2]

After graduation, Outram worked with the

The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. Speakers included film director Ted Kotcheff, literary critic Alberto Manguel and poet Peter Sanger. An edited video recording of the memorial can be viewed here
.

Work

Gauntlet Press broadsheet, 1977

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 issued over a dozen other collections of poetry and prose under the imprint of the Gauntlet Press, a small private press which he founded with his wife in 1960.[3] 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.[1]

The Gauntlet Press also issued a series of broadsheets of Outram's poems throughout the 1970s and 1980s, all of them designed (and many 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. Examples of the Ms Cassie broadsheets can be seen on the Porcupine's Quill web site.[4]

Digital facsimiles of the books and broadsheets of the Gauntlet Press in the collection of the Memorial University of Newfoundland can be viewed at the website dedicated to The Gauntlet Press of Richard Outram and Barbara Howard,[3] together with extensive background material and an exhaustive bibliography.

The poetry

In a 1988 essay titled "Hard Truths", the 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.” [5] 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.[6] It has been said that the best companion a reader can have when trying to fully appreciate an Outram poem is an etymological dictionary.[6] It has also been argued that there is, at the same time, an ‘other’, more intuitively accessible side to his poetry.[7]

Many years before his death, Outram wrote what he often referred to as his own epitaph:[8]

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.

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Anthologies

Works about Outram or the Gauntlet Press

Books

Special issues and magazine features

  • The Antigonish Review 125 (2001). A feature on Richard Outram’s work, comprising Peter Sanger’s ‘Richard Outram: A Preface’ and twenty poems by Outram. This feature was later revised and republished as Richard Outram: A Preface and Selection, with a (corrected) cover image by Barbara Howard (The Antigonish Review Occasional Paper Number 3; Antigonish, Nova Scotia, 2001).
  • Canadian Notes & Queries 63 (2003). A special issue on the work of Richard Outram. Guest ed. Michael Carbert. Comprising: William Blissett, ‘Collecting Gauntlets’; Terry Griggs, ‘Wordman’; Amanda Jernigan, ‘Hiram on the Night Shore’; Guy Davenport, ‘Entropy’; W. J. Keith, ‘Outram’s “Stage Crew”’; David Solway, ‘Reading Richard Outram’; Caroline Adderson, ‘Mogul Recollected’; Michael Darling, ‘A Chance Encounter with Richard Outram’; Eric Ormsby, ‘Banjo Music’; Jeffery Donaldson, ‘Encounters and Recollections in the Art of Barbara Howard and Richard Outram’; Carmine Starnino, ‘The Other Outram’; Peter Sanger, ‘A Word Still Dwelling’.
  • DA: A Journal of the Printing Arts 44 (1999). A special issue on the Gauntlet Press, guest ed. Alan Horne, comprising: Alan Horne, ‘Editorial’; Richard Outram, ‘A Brief History of Time at The Gauntlet Press (Or, Some Days the Earth Moved)’; Barbara Howard, ‘A Painter Pressed into the Service of Poetry’; Donald W. McLeod, ‘A Checklist of The Gauntlet Press, 1960-1995’.
  • The New Quarterly 21.4 (2001/2002). A feature on Richard Outram’s work, comprising Peter Sanger’s introduction, ‘The Sounding Light: Richard Outram and Barbara Howard’, and four poems by Richard Outram.
  • The New Quarterly 89 (2004): 25-73. Three Encounters with Poet Richard Outram, comprising: Amanda Jernigan, ‘Graceful Errors and Happy Intellections: Encounters with Richard Outram’; Michael Carbert, ‘Faith and Resilience: An Interview with Richard Outram’; Richard Outram, ‘Rage and Outrage: Poetry and the Media’.

Articles, interviews, reviews

(in alphabetical order)

Obituaries and memorial poems

Musical settings of poems by Richard Outram

  • South of North (song cycle), set for baritone/mezzo-soprano and piano by Srul Irving Glick; includes the poems ‘Wilderness on Centre Island’, ‘Vane’, ‘Grace’, ‘Northern River Falls’, ‘Privity’, ‘Stripe’, ‘Congregation at the Shoreline’, and ‘Windmill’. The cycle was commissioned by the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto to celebrate the Club’s Ninetieth Anniversary. It was premiered at the Arts and Letters Club on 6 Dec. 1998, performed by James Westman (baritone) and Albert Krywold (piano). It was later recorded in performance at the Great Hall, Hart House (Toronto), by Valerie Sirén (soprano) and Cecilia Ignatieff (piano), October 1999. This recording appears on the Doremi CD Toward the Sun (DDR-71136).
  • Spinnaker, a setting of the poem of that title from The Promise of Light, done by composer Roger Bergs at the behest of Hilary and Rosemary Kilbourn, in memory of William Kilbourn. Premiered as part of The Toronto Songbook, a collection of five songs by five Toronto composers, 30 April 2000, in the concert "Toronto, A Musical Century".[10]

Public collections of the Gauntlet Press

References

  1. ^ City of Toronto Book Award 1999
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-1-55447-061-7
  3. ^ a b The Gauntlet Press of Richard Outram and Barbara Howard
  4. ^ Broadsheets on Porcupine's Quill
  5. ^ Alberto Manguel: "Hard Truths", Saturday Night, April, 1988
  6. ^ a b "Richard Outram: A Preface and Selection by Peter Sanger", The Antigonish Review, 2001
  7. ISBN 0-88984-241-8
    )
  8. ^ Michael Carbert: Faith and Resilience: An Interview with Richard Outram, The New Quarterly #89, Winter/Spring 2004
  9. ^ "Review of The Essential Richard Outram". Foreword Reviews. 22 December 2011. Retrieved 30 October 2018.
  10. ^ "The Aldeburgh Connection » Commissions".

External links

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