Richard Outram’s Early Poems (1957-1988): A Critical Introduction with Annotations

Abstract

The thesis comprises an introduction and annotations to Collected Poems of Richard Outram, Volume One (1957–1988), a planned critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram (1930-2005), Canadian poet and printer. It tells the story of Outram’s published oeuvre, beginning in 1957, when he published his first work in collaboration with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), up through 1988, when Outram and Howard published the last of their hand-printed, letterpress collaborations. Jernigan asserts that Outram’s oeuvre is characterized by a reiterative poetics, in which the poet “reads” individual poems into the public record of his work on multiple occasions, allowing the poems’ meanings to be shaped by the changing context of an unfolding oeuvre, as well as by changes in material context and addressed readership — an assertion reflected in the structure of her edition. At the same time, she speaks to the collaborative context of Outram’s published work, all of which was made in explicit or implicit conversation with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926 – 2002), while also being shaped by the sorts of communal forces famously noted by D.M. Mackenzie. Both the introduction and the annotations demonstrate the close link between composition and publication for Outram, poet-printer. In her introduction, Jernigan considers how this link complicates the traditional dichotomy between genetic and bibliographic approaches to textual criticism. Throughout, Jernigan establishes an updated bibliographical and biographical context for Outram’s work, enlarging upon the seminal scholarship of Peter Sanger, and contributes to the existing scholarship on Outram’s personal and publishing life with new archival research in the Gauntlet Press fonds at Library and Archives Canada, the Richard Outram papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the Allan and Nancy Fleming fonds at York University, and the Macmillan and Key Porter fonds at McMaster University.