Preface and Acknowledgements

The essays in Canadian Architexts and the editions of Canadian poems of architectural interest that accompany them on this portion of the Canadian Poetry website have their origins in my recognition some years ago that, while landscape has been the subject of a good deal of Canadian literary scholarship, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between Canadian literature and architecture. That recognition led first to the creation of a graduate course, “Civitas Canadensis: from Shanty to Megacity” (English 585) that was offered in 2001-02 at the University of Western Ontario, and then, partly as a result of the potential recognized in the process of designing the course, an application in the Fall of 2001 for a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant under the title “Canada’s ‘Archives Architectural’ and Canadian Literature” (the allusion is to A.M. Klein’s “Montreal”). The very existence of the “Canadian Architexts” portion of the Canadian Poetry website is the result of the success of that application and the support and generosity that it represents, as well as the support and generosity of the Department of English, the Faculty of Arts, and the Academic Development Fund of the University of Western Ontario.

The existence of “Canadian Artchitexts” is also the result of expertise, dedication, and hard work of a number of colleagues, students, and now ex-students at the University of Western Ontario who have thrown their talents and energies into its design, substance, and maintenance, and into the research upon which it is based. To Natalie Senst I owe thanks for helping to bring “Canadian Architexts” into electronic being, an achievement largely due to the extraordinarily talented and dedicated Jane Powell, Julia Obert, and Melissa Harris, to whom I owe enormous debts of gratitude, not just for their computing talents, but also for their inspirational camaraderie, their uncompromising perfectionism, and their unfailingly and unflinchingly good humour. I also owe large debts of gratitude to Danika Barker, Jen Esmail, Jodie Elliot, Andre Narbonne, Henna Singh and, especially, Stephen Artelle for their painstaking and imaginative work in identifying and assembling material of literary/architectural interest, and to Gord Nickerson, R.J. Shroyer, Merran Neville, and Rick Harley for their expert, generous, and patient attention to the Canadian Poetry Project’s all-too-high maintenance computers, scanners, servers, and printer. Finally, my thanks are due to Beth McIntosh, Lynne Larmour, and Yvonne Hill for their efficient and sensitive handling of the Project’s myriad and, it seems, increasingly complex financial relationships with students and the University.

Every effort has been made to contact copy-right holders of materials included in “Canadian Architexts.” Any copy-right holder whom we have been unable to contact or to whom inaccurate or inadequate acknowledgement has been made is invited to notify us. Links to and from other websites have generally been made by mutual agreement. Webmasters who wish to provide users of their site with links to Canadian Poetry or who wish us to provide links to their site are also invited to notify us.

Until this sentence is removed, the editions and essays in “Canadian Architexts” are works-in-progress, which is to say that their contents may be modified and material added to them in the light of new information and on-going research.

D.M.R. Bentley