Richard Outram

Poet Richard Outram, who died in January, 2005, has been quietly lauded as a major figure in twentieth-century English-Canadian literature. Yet in his lifetime, despite international attention, he received only minor recognition from Canada's literary establishment. Born in 1930, in Oshawa, Ontario, he studied English and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Northrop Frye and Emil Fackenheim, who were among his professors, remained important figures for him in the example they had set of "living an examined life, the life of the mind". Outram married the artist Barbara Howard in 1957, and under their Gauntlet Press imprint, they produced many fine collaborative books and broadsides. Between 1966 and 2001, Outram also published nine collections of poems with commercial presses, of which Benedict Abroad won the 1999 Toronto Book Award.

This volume presents the first posthumous panorama of Outram's work and achievement. It includes an interview, a lecture, an elegy, and new essays by poets and writers who admire Outram's commitment to "concision and precision" in language—Brian Bartlett, Michael Carbert, Robert Denham, Jeffery Donaldson, Steven Heighton, Amanda Jernigan, Eric Ormsby, Ingrid Ruthig, Peter Sanger, and Zachariah Wells.