Peter Quartermain fonds

Peter Quartermain’s fonds consists of 196 cassette tapes (initially 180, with an accrual of 16 additional tapes in winter of 2022). These recordings were donated to the SoundBox Collection by Peter and Meredith Quartermain. Peter Quartermain recorded many of his lectures as a professor of English at UBC Vancouver, as a means of making lecture/seminar content accessible to students long before this became a mainstream practice through online learning management systems. The tapes in this fonds were recorded over a span of more than 40 years, from 1961 to 2003, and many relate to Quartermain’s research on poet Basil Bunting, including radio broadcasts, interviews, events, and a graduate course on Bunting. Quartermain’s collection includes far more than just lectures, however. There are also home recordings of Peter Quartermain reading fiction, recordings of sound poetry performances, book launches, radio performances, and poetry readings. There are also several lectures given by other poets and professors who are Quartermain’s contemporaries, some specifically kept for class use, as well as many tapes of the New Poetics Colloquium of the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) featuring lectures and readings by various poets. His focus on accessibility both in the classroom and in poetry as an art form through his work on queer poetics and marginal poetry can be found in the hundreds of hours of recordings here.

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