Richard Outram

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.

From 1944 to 1949, Outram attended high school in Leaside, which was then still on the outskirts of the city.

From 1949 to 1953, Outram 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 (CBC) as a television stagehand for a year, then he moved to London, England, where he worked as a television stagehand for the British Broadcasting Corporation 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.” 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.

It has also been argued that there is, at the same time, an ‘other’, more intuitively accessible side to his poetry.

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

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.

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.

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, together with extensive background material and an exhaustive bibliography.

In 1999 he won the City of Toronto Book Award for his sequence of poems Benedict Abroad.

Outram was born in Oshawa, Ontario.

His mother, née Mary Muriel Daley, was the daughter of a Methodist minister centrally involved in the negotiations which led to the creation of the United Church of 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.

Having lost his wife in 2002, Outram took his own life, dying of hypothermia in Port Hope, Ontario.

On April 1, 2005 a celebration of the lives of Outram and Howard was held at 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.