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Richard Outram's House at 81 Pine Street South, Port Hope
Site ProfileTrains and more trains crash
across the deathless viaducts.
Given
we must burden love
the Town Hall clock strikes just
eleven.
— Richard Outram, "Silence in Port Hope" (Remembrance Day 2002)
Canadian poet Richard Outram (1930–2005) has been quietly lauded as a major figure in twentieth century English-Canadian poetry. Yet in his lifetime, despite international attention and winning the 1999 Toronto Book Award for his collection Benedict Abroad, he received only minor recognition from Canada’s literary establishment. Aside from a short time living in London, England, where he met his future wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), Outram spent most of his life in Toronto. He grew up there, graduated from the University of Toronto, then worked as a stagehand crewleader for the CBC. A little more than a decade after his retirement, Richard and Barbara decided it was time to leave the city that had been their home for so long.
The house at 81 Pine Street South, Stewart Plan Pt. Lots 46 & 47, in Port Hope, Ontario was built circa 1850, a short distance from the railroad tracks and viaducts that skirt the north shore of Lake Ontario and the south edge of town. And just to the east, down the hill, the Ganaraska River wends its way to the lake. According to the Port Hope Archives, 81 Pine Street was originally owned by James and Susan Grant. By the time Richard and Barbara came to live in the two-storey house, in the summer of 2002, it had long settled into its red brick skin, shuttered windows, and vine-shaded front verandah.
For Richard, it was something of a homecoming — his grandfather had been the owner of the local hardware store; it was in Port Hope that his father, Allan, met his mother, a schoolteacher; and as a boy, Richard had frequently visited his grandfather in the lakeside community. Their exciting move out of the city and into the Pine Street house also afforded Richard and, especially, Barbara more studio space. They continued to collaborate, as they had always done, planning and executing new projects that they published together under their own beloved Gauntlet Press imprint. Over the years in Toronto, they had produced many fine letterpress broadsides and books, combining his words with her images. This new small-town life offered fresh possiblities, fresh images and experiences.
Their time together in Port Hope, however, would prove tragically brief. In December 2002, Howard fell and broke her hip. While undergoing surgery in Peterborough, she suffered a pulmonary embolism and died on the operating table. Outram was devastated by the sudden loss of his partner and muse, and found it difficult to continue alone. He did write, printing a few new poems on his own, and gathering together the manuscript which became his collection South of North: Images of Canada, published posthumously by the Porcupine’s Quill in 2007. Despite the care and concern of friends and neighbours, after two years of existence without Barbara, Richard Outram could no longer go on. In January 2005, he took his own life, freezing to death on the front verandah of the home they had made at 81 Pine Street.
Landmark curated by Ingrid Ruthig
Ingrid Ruthig, a poet and artist, is the editor of and a contributor to Richard Outram: Essays on His Works, Volume #28 in Guernica Editions' Writers Series (2011). Her artist’s bookwork Slipstream was published in 2011.
Author ProfileText drawn from the biography in Richard Outram: Essays on His Works (Guernica Editions, 2011)
Richard Daley Outram was born on April 9, 1930, in Oshawa, Ontario, the son of Mary Muriel Daley and Alfred Allan Outram. Daley’s father was a distinguished Methodist minister who was centrally involved in the negotiations which led to the creation of the United Church in Canada in 1925. Allan Outram, whose father owned the hardware store in Port Hope, Ontario, was an engineer by profession; he served in the artillery in the First World War and was wounded at Ypres, Belgium. While working as a schoolteacher, Daley met and married Allan Outram in Port Hope. Shortly after the birth of their younger son (Richard), the couple moved to Toronto.
Richard attended high school from 1944 to 1949 in Leaside, which was at that time on the outskirts of the city. As a teenager, as in later life, his interests included music and botany. From 1949 to 1953, Outram studied English and philosophy at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College. Two of his professors were the philosopher Emil Fackenheim and the critic Northrop Frye (with whom he studied Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare). Both men profoundly influenced Outram’s view of himself and the world, and the effects endured through his life. During the summers of 1950 and 1951, Outram 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.
After graduation with an Honours B.A from U of T, Outram found employment for a year with the CBC, as a television stagehand. He then moved to London, England, where he worked in the same capacity for the BBC between 1955 and 1956. During his stay in England, he began to write poetry. He also met the artist Barbara Howard (born in Toronto in 1926), who was then studying abroad. They returned to Toronto and married in April 1957. Outram returned to the CBC to work once again as a television stagehand, then as a stagehand crew leader, a position he held until his retirement at age sixty in June 1990.
Outram and Howard’s partnership not only comprised their life together, but also a deep, artistic understanding and collaboration. Between 1960 and 2001, together they produced many fine books and broadsides, showcasing word and image, under their Gauntlet Press imprint. Outram’s work was published in many magazines and periodicals in Canada, England and the United States. He also published nine collections of poems with commercial presses, and in 1999, one of those books, Benedict Abroad, won the Toronto Book Award. Outram was a member of PEN Canada, and The Arts and Letters Club of Toronto. His numerous public readings included Toronto’s Harbourfront, as well as a one-person reading at The National Library of Canada in Ottawa, which coincided with the opening of an exhibition of his published work.
The couple moved from Toronto to Port Hope in August 2002. Barbara Howard died in December 2002. Richard Outram took his own life on January 21, 2005.
His Books
Eight Poems Tortoise Press, Toronto, 1959
Exsultate, Jubilate Macmillan Company of Canada, Toronto, 1966
Creatures The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1972
Seer Aliquando Press, Toronto, 1973
Thresholds The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1973
Locus The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1974
Turns and Other Poems Chatto & Windus, London, 1975 and Anson-Cartwright Editions, Toronto, 1976
Arbor The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1976
The Promise of Light Anson-Cartwright Editions, Toronto, 1979
Selected Poems, 1960-1980 Exile Editions, Toronto, 1984
Man in Love The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, 1985
Hiram and Jenny The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, 1989
Mogul Recollected The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, 1993
Around & About The Toronto Islands The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1993
Hiram and Jenny: Unpublished Poems Food For Thought Books, Ottawa, 1994
Peripatetics The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1994
Tradecraft The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1994
Eros Descending The Gauntlet Press, Toronto, 1995
Benedict Abroad St. Thomas Poetry Series, Toronto, 1998 (Awarded the City of Toronto Book Award in 1999)
Dove Legend The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, 2001
South of North The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, 2007
To learn more about Richard’s and Barbara’s work, as well as their Gauntlet Press, visit Memorial University’s website and digital archive.
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