“Poet and Audience Actually Exist”: The Contact Poetry Reading Series and the Rise of Literary Readings in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay documents and assesses the history of the Contact Poetry Reading Series (Toronto, 1957-62), arguing that the Contact readings mark the emergence of a vital form of modern literary expression in Canada. The essay has two primary goals. The first is to contextualize the Contact Poetry Reading Series as a fundamental component of Raymond Souster’s editorial work in order to enrich dominant critical perspective of Souster’s accomplishments as an editor and publisher. The Contact readings express the same drive on Souster’s part to “make contact” (between generations, between international communities, between poet and reader) that is identifiable in his work with Contact and Contact Press, only in this case under material conditions unique to the public performance of poetry. The second goal is to situate the Contact Poetry Reading Series within current book history and performance studies scholarship. In doing so, this essay positions the literary reading as an essential but understudied component of processes of publication, distribution, and reception of poetry in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.051 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".