I Just See Myself as an Old-Fashioned Storyteller: A Conversation with Drew Hayden Taylor
I Want Edge: An Interview with Timothy Findley
I Would Try to Make Lists: The Catalogue in Lives of Girls and Women
I. V. Crawford’s Prose Fiction
If the Dress Fits: Female Stereotyping in Rosanna Leprohon’s “Alice Sydenham’s First Ball”
If You Say So: Articulating Cultural Symbols of Tradition in the Japanese Canadian Community
Illusion and an Atonement: E. J. Pratt and Christianity
Image and Mood: Recent Poems by Michael Bullock
Imagining a North American Garden: Some Parallels & Differences in Canadian & American Culture
Imperial Commerce and the Canadian Muse: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Poetic Advertising Campaign of 1966-1972
This essay explores the relationship between commercial publicity and poetic production in a series of advertisements devised by the head of publicity for The Hudson’s Bay Company, Mrs. Barbara Kilvert, between 1966 and 1972. Featured poets included Al Purdy, John Newlove, Alden Nowlan, Phyllis Gotlieb, A.J.M. Smith, Miriam Waddington, Joan Finnegan, James Reaney, Louis Dudek, Gwendolyn MacEwen, DG Jones, Raymond Souster, Ralph Gustafson, Gustave Lamarche, Fernand Ouellette and Jean-Guy Pilon. The advertisements were to appear in such respected periodicals as Quarry, The Tamarack Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Canadian Literature, The Malahat Review, Cité Libre, and Liberté. We examine how this campaign fitted into the history of HBC’s cultivation of its company image, and particularly its desire to identify itself with the nation it served. Did the initiative extend those accustomed patterns, or did it represent a radical new departure? And—equally important—how might such a use of poetry for promotional purposes mediate readers’ responses to the poems thus used?