Cameron Anstee is a SSHRC-funded Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. His dissertation studies the work of booksellers in Canada after the Second World War in relation to the small press. He recently co-edited (with Robert David Stacey) a special issue of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews on Irving Layton, and is the editor of the forthcoming The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015). He runs Apt. 9 Press (Ottawa).
Authors | Cameron Anstee
Articles on Amodern by Cameron Anstee
SETTING WIDESPREAD PRECEDENT
The Canada Council for the Arts and the Funding of Poetry Readings in Canada (1957–1977)
This paper traces how the Canada Council for the Arts came to fund poetry readings beginning in 1959. It examines the tension between the experiment of funding readings and the centripetal impulses of the Council’s nationalist agenda. The specific material economic conditions that facilitated the widespread establishment of public readings as a common form of literary expression are documented, from the first grant of $845.00 in 1959 to the 136 grants totaling $190,430.00 issued in 1977. This provides historical grounding for a continued critical examination of the Canada Council and of conceptions of the “literary” in Canada that exist outside of traditional conceptions of the text.