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Issue # 125
| Peter
Sanger
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Richard
Outram :
A Preface and Selection |
Richard Outram is one of the best poets now writing in Canada. He is,
for example, among the few who can be discussed concordantly with A.D.
Hope, Richard Wilbur or Geoffrey Hill. But little is generally known about
him or the full range of his work. Commonly, even many diligent readers
of Canadian poetry are familiar only with Outram's name and with a slightly
misremembered title or two from among his books. Additional might be an
imprecise memory of contents, usually acquired from two or three lines
in a portmanteau review calculated to conceal that Outram's work leaves
the reviewer capable of saying little because it eludes whatever affective
and academic clichés of pseudo evaluation happen to be current. Given
this situation, it seems best here first to record straightforwardly a
few biographical and bibliographical facts; second, to suggest briefly
the shifts of premise and kinds of further knowledge Outram's poems require
of some readers; and, third, to offer a necessarily compressed selection
of Outram's poetry, indicating dates and sources for publications still
in print or readily available through public libraries.
Richard Outram was born in Oshawa, Ontario, in 1930. His mother, neé
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, University of Toronto. Two of his teachers, the philosopher
Emil Fackenheim, and 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. 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 nine commercially published collections
of poetry. In the list of them which follows I have added after the dates
of publication abbreviated letter forms of the titles which will be used
to indicate sources in the selection following this preface. The collections
are Exsultate, Jubilate (Macmillan of Canada, 1966, 89 pages: E.J.);
Turns and Other Poems(Chatto and Windus with the Hogarth Press and
Hugh Anson-Cartwright Editions, 1976, 48 pages: T.O.P.); The
Promise of Light (Anson-Cartwright Editions, 1979, 117 pages: P.O.L.);
Selected Poems, 1960-1980 (Exile Editions, 1984, 106 pages); Man
in Love (The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 1985, 60 pages: M.L.);
Hiram and Jenny (The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 1989, 131 pages:
H.J.); Mogul Recollected (Porcupine's Quill Inc., 1993,
82 pages: M.R.); Benedict Abroad (St. Thomas Poetry Series,
1998, 43 pages: B.A.); and, in March of this year, Dove Legend
and Other Poems (The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 2001, 173 pages: D.L.).
Benedict Abroad won the City of Toronto Book Award in 1999. 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 1960's. Throughout
the 1970's and 1980's, The Gauntlet Press was one of the most distinguished
letterpresses in Canada. 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 works of extraordinary beauty. For some people (I am one)
these editions come closer to the effect Blake's illuminated books have
upon them (especially the Songs of Innocence and Experience) than
any other modern books they have seen. The Gauntlet Press also issued
a series of broadsheets or single or double-page booklets of Outram's
poems throughout the 1970's and 1980's, all of them designed and many
frequently illustrated by Howard. In the early 1990's The Gauntlet Press
switched to electronically based production with a verve, resource and
respect for quality commensurate with its letterpress standards. As well
as his poem and prose broadsheets, the press during this electronic phase
has 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); and,
most recently, Ms Cassie (2001). Most of the poems from these Gauntlet
Press publications have been gathered into Dove Legend and Other Poems,
with the exception of the Ms Cassie sequence. The original settings
by Howard of some of the broadsheet material produced by the Gauntlet
Press during the 1990's, particularly of the Ms Cassie sequence,
may be seen on-line on the website of The Porcupine's Quill, Inc. (www.sentex.net/~pql).
Barbara Howard is the creator of the image on the front cover of this
pamphlet.
I will end this preface by saying something about the structure and nature
of Outram's poetry, although I cannot say as much here, for reasons of
space, as I wish. In Her kindled shadow... An Introduction to the Work
of Richard Outram (The Antigonish Review Press, 2001, 309 pages, 50
copies, ISBN 0-920653-05-7, $50.00) I have tried to offer a preliminary
commentary. Some of the chapters in this book may soon become available
on The Antigonish Review's website which is presently under
construction. In what remains of this preface I can offer only aphorisms
and provocations.
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 (sometimes
quite 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 soliloquys voiced for outrageously imagined
characters, including some animals. His diction may range from that of
an aureate refinement, replete with significant capital letters and philosophical
abstractions which modernism would have us despise, to that of a supple
and frequently bawdy demotic. Outram may write straightforward narrative
poems in which, as is not usually the case in contemporary narrative poems,
things really do consecutively happen. He can also write subtle parables
and allegories, or commit squibs and puns or propose riddles and anagrams.
Unlike much recent Canadian poetry, his must be read while attending to
the meaning, the full meaning, of every word. If the reader of one of
Outram's poems feels the burden of an increasingly required concentration
as the poem proceeds, it is because he or she is being asked (and being
honoured by being asked) to read, simply to read. The best companion a
reader can have when trying to understand an Outram poem is an etymological
dictionary. In this respect, Outram's work resembles the work of two Canadian
poets almost as neglected by critical attention as he, Margaret Avison
and Jay Macpherson.
As a logical consequent, Outram is also a most referential and allusive
poet. Anyone sympathizing with those Canadian poets who want only themselves
and a few certain, chosen contemporaries to be read in their best of all
possible worlds will find little of flattering predictability in Outram's
work. His etymologies are frequently imbedded in the context of usages
defined by the King James version of the Bible and by, in particular,
Shakespeare, Milton and Blake. Among the other poets Outram alludes to
most often are Herbert, Vaughan, Marvell, Pope, Smart, Arnold, Emily Dickinson
and Wallace Stevens. In its own way, Outram's work is as much a supple
discourse with tradition as the ballets of Balanchine, the music of Benjamin
Britten or the paintings of William Bailey. Just as a gradually increasing
understanding of the work of these artists will release a spectator or
auditor into an apprehension that the art of the past is that of the future
or, to put the matter more accurately, into the intelligence and delight
of knowing that past and future art are nothing else but eternally present,
so also will a careful reading of Outram's poems.
If his poems have one single theme for a reader, it is that of the transfiguring
power of the imagination. Like Blake's, Outram's work is concerned with
the cleansing of the gates of human perception. His poetic universe, like
Blake's, is theistic, but it is a universe where Sophia, or wisdom (as
a Blakeian emanation, not a spectre) may be human intelligence and feeling.
For Outram, affective and intellectual knowledge are never disincarnate.
Love can only be incarnate. So also must be poetry. Outram's is not a
dualistic universe in which mind and body, reason and emotion, are necessarily
antagonistic. If we hear his poems as inflexible dialogues, we can be
sure that the two voices we hear are not Outram's. They are our own, and
we are engaged in the abstract severance of ourselves from minute particulars,
a modern form of angelism from which the necessary angel of earth and
metaphor has been emptied. It is an angelism unaware of the inevitable
physical consequences of itself, namely the divinization of matter and
its own inevitable imprisonment in an ecological entropism of feeling
and intelligence, mind and body. Against this form of abstract angelism
Outram's poetry is most radically in opposition.
For Outram, metaphor is real, not nominal. Words, or the act of imagination
by which words exist, are the essential structure of the universe. By
words this universe falls and is re-made in a cycle of apocalyptical imaginative
renewal involving entities as simple as Jerusalem and as complex as the
rose revealed by the crumbling of fire and the dissemblings of water when
it reflects the leonine sun at midnight.
Imagine the greatest poets whom we have not read waiting for us to find
them. We are still unformed. We have yet to make them out of ourselves.
Such is the import and effect of Outram's achievement.
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