| Administrative History | J. Patrick Byrne (later Padraig 0 Broin) was born in 1908 in Ireland at Clontarf, near Dublin. His family emigrated to Canada when Patrick was five and settled in Toronto where his father, an architect in Ireland, was employed by the T. Eaton Company. O Broin has stated that he first became seriously interested in poetry after hearing a poem by W.B. Yeats read at a meeting of the Scottish Society in Toronto in 1932. He began to read Yeats and other poets and to immerse himself in Irish literature, writing poetry himself and studying Gaelic. In 1933 he attended a meeting of the Canadian Literature Club and met its founder, Donald Graham French (1873-1945), an editor at McClelland and Stewart. He began to help French publish a mimeographed little magazine entitled the "Writer's Studio" and soon was having his own poems published in its pages. From 1940 to 1952 or later O Broin was a
member of a small "Poetry Group", founded by French, whom O Broin revered as his mentor. By 1939 O Broin had set up his own press, the Clontarf Press, and through the early 1940s issued broadsides and leaflets containing his poems. From 1952 to 1954 he edited and produced, with lain MacKay, a Gaelic magazine entitled "Irisleabhar Ceilteach". In 1955 he began publishing his own Gaelic literary magazine, "Teangadoir". In 1957 he visited Ireland and legally changed his name from J. Patrick Byrne to the Celtic form, Padraig O Broin. O Broin became increasingly interested in Canadian poetry in the early 1960's. He was a staunch supporter of the Bohemian Embassy literary evenings which began in June 1960 and also of the Contact Poetry Readings established the same year at the YM-YWHA Building. In 1961 he began to publish "Teangadoir" entirely in English, editing it jointly with Helen Yake. He continued the magazine until 1963, featuring young Canadian poets like Gwendolyn MacEwen. In 1962 0 Broin published a collection of his poems under the title "Than any Star". In this year he also published at his Clontarf Press booklets of poems by George Miller ("Ladders to High Places") and by Diane Spiecker ("Contact: Poemes"). |