with Archivist Peter Bowman
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THE FIRST "TOWER" |
The first issue of The Tower appears to have been produced on a typewriter, then mimeographed and stapled together. The cover design created by Naomi Jackson consists of two slender branches growing from the left and right side at the base of the original McMaster University Tower. The words, “The Tower An Anthology of Poems Nov. 1952,” are written by hand between the two branches hovering above the simple sketch of the tower. It too appears similarly reproduced. The book itself contains thirty-four pages with thirty poems by ten contributors. They are: Stewart Basterfield, Bernard Groom, I. Sutherland Groom, Adeline Haddow, G. C. Haddow, Marjorie Grant Henry, A. E. Johns, Gordon Johnson, Jean B. McCallion, and Rosemary Wood. There was also this foreword written by Dr. G. P. Gilmour, the then President and Vice Chancellor of McMaster University: |
“I am happy to commend this group of poems both for there own merits and because they represent something that is
important. Poets are too often solitary voices, and to gather into a group a number of people interested in the reading and
writing of poetry is to do something to draw writers out of their solitude and also to encourage greater numbers to study
a mode of expression that depends on a knowledge of craftsmanship as well as that elusive thing called inspiration.
There is a wholesome mixture of gravity and gaiety here, and a touch of unconventional and conventional form.
May the group flourish and its work bring to McMaster a more lively and persistent interest in the art of winged words.” |
Someone using the pseudonym Todos wrote the first poem of the first issue: THE TOWER Low cloud-flocks scudded o’er the sky: The Tower sold for 50 cents a copy and its contents of primarily religious poems and nature poems written by members of the McMaster University community was an immediate success on its then still Baptist-influenced campus. |
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