LEE, Dennis (Beynon) 1939-

PERSONAL: Born August 31, 1939, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; son of Walter (a high school teacher) and Louise (a high school teacher; maiden name, Garbutt) Lee; married Donna Youngblut, June 24, 1962 (divorced); married Susan Perly, October 7, 1985; children: (first marriage) Kevyn, Hilary, Julian. Education: University of Toronto, B.A., 1962, M.A., 1964.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o WCA, 94 Harbord St., Toronto Ontario M5S 1G6 Canada. Agent—Sterling Lord Associates, 10 St. Mary's St., Suite 510, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4Y 1P9.

CAREER: Writer. University of Toronto, Victoria College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, lecturer in English, 1964-67; Rochdale College, Toronto, self-described "research person," 1967-69; Artist-in-Residence, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, 1975; House of Anansi Press, Toronto, co-founder and editor, 1967-72. Editorial consultant, Macmillan of Canada, 1973-78; poetry editor, McClelland & Stewart, 1981-84. Lyricist for television series Fraggle Rock, 1982-86.

AWARDS, HONORS: Governor General's Award for Poetry, 1972, for Civil Elegies; Independent Order of Daughters of the Empire award, 1974; Canadian Association of Children's Librarians Best Book Medals, 1974 and 1977, and English Medal, 1975, all for Alligator Pie; named to Hans Christian Andersen Honour List and recipient of Canadian Library Association award, both 1976, both for Alligator Pie; Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award for Garbage Delight, 1978; Philips Information Systems Literary Award, 1984; Vicky Metcalf Award, Canadian Authors' Association, 1986, for body of work for children; Mr. Christie's Book Award, 1991; Officer of the Order of Canada, 1994; Toronto Arts Award for lifetime achievement, 1995; Trillium Award nomination, 2001, for Bubblegum Delicious; Book of the Year for Children Award nomination, Canadian Library Association, 2002, for Cat and the Wizard. Honorary doctorate, Trent University, 1995.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Kingdom of Absence, House of Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1967.

Civil Elegies, House of Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1968, revised edition published as Civil Elegies and Other Poems, 1972.

Not Abstract Harmonies But, Kanchenjunga Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1974.

The Death of Harold Ladoo, Kanchenjunga Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1976.

Miscellany, privately printed (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976.

Moving to the Clear, Trent University (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada), 1976.

The Gods, Kanchenjunga Press (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 1978.

The Gods (collection of revised versions of Not Abstract Harmonies But, The Death of Harold Ladoo, and The Gods), McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

Riffs, Brick (London, Ontario, Canada), 1993.

Nightwatch: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1996, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1996.

Body Music, Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

JUVENILE

(With illustrator Charles Pachter) Wiggle to the Laundromat, New Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1970.

(With illustrator Frank Newfield) Alligator Pie, Macmillan (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1974, reprinted, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1975.

(With illustrator Frank Newfield) Nicholas Knock andOther People, Macmillan (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1974, reprinted, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1975.

The Ordinary Bath, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977.

(With illustrator Frank Newfield) Garbage Delight, Macmillan (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977, reprinted, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1978, new edition published as Garbage Delight: Another Helping, illustrated by Maryann Kovalski, Key Porter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2002.

The Ordinary Bath, illustrated by Jon McKee, Magook (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

(With illustrator Juan Wijngaard) Jelly Belly, Macmillan (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983, reprinted, Blackie (London, England), 1983.

(With illustrator Marie-Louise Gay) Lizzy's Lion, Stoddart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1984.

(With illustrator Barb Klunder) The Dennis Lee BigBook (anthology), Gage (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets (some poems previously published in Nicholas Knock and Other People and The Gods), Macmillan (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1987.

(With illustrator David McPhail) The Ice Cream Store, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1991, reprinted, Scholastic (New York, NY), 1992.

Ping and Pong, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.

Dinosaur Dinner (With a Slice of Alligator Pie): Favorite Poems, compiled by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by Debbie Tilley, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.

Bubblegum Delicious: Poems, illustrated by David McPhail, Key Porter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2000, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

The Cat and the Wizard, illustrated by Gillian Johnson, Key Porter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

OTHER

(Editor, with R. A. Charlesworth) An Anthology ofVerse, Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1964.

(Editor, with R. A. Charlesworth) The Second CenturyAnthologies of Verse 2, Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1967.

(Editor, with Howard Adelman) The University Game (essays), House of Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1968.

(Editor) T. O. Now: The Young Toronto Poets (poetry anthology), House of Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1968.

Savage Fields: An Essay in Cosmology and Literature, House of Anansi (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977.

(Editor and author of introduction) New Canadian Poets, 1970-1985 (poetry anthology), McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

(Coauthor of story with Jim Henson) Labyrinth (screenplay adapted by Terry Jones), Henson Associates Inc./Lucasfilm Ltd., 1985.

(Editor, with R. A. Charlesworth) A New Anthology ofVerse, Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

Contributor to The Canadian Junior Green Guide, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990. Also contributor to periodicals such as Descant, Open Letter, Saturday Night, and Quarry. Contributor to anthologies, including The Maple Laugh Forever: An Anthology of Canadian Comic Poets, edited by Douglas Barbour and Stephen Scobie, Hurtig (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 1991, and The Canadian Junio Green Guide, prepared with Terri Degler, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990. Lee's works have been translated into French, Danish, and Braille editions. Lee's papers are housed in the permanent collection at the Fisher Rare Book Room, University of Toronto.

RECORDINGS

Selections, High Barnet (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.

Alligator Pie and Other Poems, Caedmon, 1978.

Savage Fields: An Essay on Cosmology and Literature, Ontario Audio Library Service (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

Luncheon Address (speech), Audio Archives of Canada (Markham, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Fraggle Rock, Muppet Music, 1984.

SIDELIGHTS: In a speech delivered at the 1975 Loughborough Conference in Toronto and reprinted in Canadian Children's Literature, Canadian author Dennis Lee examines the way his attitude toward children's verse evolved. As an adult and parent, he contemplates Mother Goose and discovers: "The nursery rhymes I love . . . are necessarily exotic....But they were in no way exotic to the people who first devised them and chanted them....Theairoffar-off charm and simpler pastoral life which now hangs over Mother Goose was in no way a part of those rhymes' initial existence....The people who told nursery rhymes for centuries would be totally boggled if they could suddenly experience them the way children do here and now, as a collection of references to things they never see or do, to places they have never heard of and may never visit, told in words they will sometimes meet only in those verses."

Out of concern that his own children were learning that "the imagination leads always and only to the holy city of elsewhere," Lee decided to build his imaginary "city" from the language of familiar objects—elements of contemporary life made extraordinary by their unique use and sound in verse. Maintaining that "you are poorer if you never find your own time and place speaking words of their own," he believes the "fire hydrants and hockey sticks" of today can be the stuff of nursery rhymes, much like the "curds and whey" of a previous time. Thus, he says, "to look for living nursery rhymes in the hockey-sticks and high-rises that [children know] first-hand [is not] to go on a chauvinistic trip, nor to wallow in a fad of trendy relevance. It [is] nothing but a rediscovery of what Mother Goose [has been] about for centuries."

While Lee's poetic narratives, tongue-twisters, and riddles have been called nonsense verse, he often emphasizes the here-and-now objects of daily life in his work—things children may or may not recognize. Canadian places, history, politics, and colloquial diction, as well as purely invented words, all play a part in his pieces. Many critics feel the readability and repeatability of the poems—rather than references to faraway places—are what fascinates young children, as represented by the poems in Alligator Pie which evoke the Canadian landscape, and attempt, as Sheila Egoff wrote in The Republic of Childhood, "to give Canadian children . . . a sense of their particular time and space." More recent works, however, like The Ice Cream Store, as Carolyn Phelan noted in Booklist, have expanded his focus so that "the scope is worldwide, with a consciously multicultural slant to the text and the art alike." Still, as Betsy English wrote in In Review: Canadian Books for Children, the strong rhythms, rhymes, and other sound devices produce "a sense of gaiety, an appeal that shouts for reading aloud," making Lee's work appealing to both adults and children alike. As a result, Lee, who has been compared by critics to Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, Edward Lear, and Shel Silverstein, has even been called "a Canadian Mother Goose."

In addition to his nearly one dozen children's books, and his nearly as many anthologies, Lee is also a successful writer of serious adult poetry. He has, as John Robert Colombo remarked in Contemporary Poets, "played a transitional role in the evolution of literary thinking in Canada, linking the humanistic concerns of the 1950's with the nationalistic and cultural aspirations of the 1960's and 1970's. His range of awareness is wide enough to encompass the academy, the marketplace, and the antiestablishment." Bruce Meyer, writing in Books in Canada, called Lee "grandiloquent," since "his profound sense of rhetoric gives his poetry a wonderful flavour," and "his aphorisms, often cryptic, are stabbing attempts at philosophical wit and axiom."

In Kingdom of Absence, Lee's first book, Douglas Barbour noted in Dictionary of Literary Biography that it identifies "a sense of alienation that separates the poet from others and from his own most deeply rooted self," which becomes the "central problem to which Lee returns again and again in his work."

Civil Elegies and Other Poems, expanded from an earlier 1968 version, is Lee's set of elegiac meditations on living in Canada in the late 1960s. Using a new free-form line which Colombo believed "contrasts throwaway allusions and tough talk" and which "verges on 'free prose,'" Lee finds a more flexible instrument for his voice. "Using Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto as his base," according to Barbour, "Lee sends his thoughts coursing out through space and time in an attempt to discover what it means to be a Canadian." Colombo calls Civil Elegies and Other Poems Lee's "most impressive and influential publication," since the poet defines himself in "sociopolitical terms as a liberal leftist or cultural and social activist." This theme in Lee's work is considered to be inspired by Canadian philosopher George Grant, who saw Canada as "a conservative country on a liberal continent trapped in the economic and electronic web of modern technology." In the "Coming Back" section of the book, Lee candidly explores his roles as husband, father, teacher, editor, lover, idealist, and writer. Civil Elegies and Other Poems, called by Barbour "a testament to Lee's hunger for authenticity," won him the Governor General's Award for poetry.

The Gods collected three previously published works (Not Abstract Harmonies But, The Death of Harold Ladoo, and The Gods) and was cited by Barbour for its "jangly creative sense of exploration, of engaging, continually changing process," and for "the continual shifts from one level of discourse to another that occur in any attempt to speak truly." Not Abstract Harmonies But displays an attitude of acceptance of living in the present, despite all the ideologies which pull at an individual on a regular basis. The Gods wrestles with the notion of a traditional god in an era of increasing technology. The Death of Harold Ladoo is an elegy dedicated to Lee's friend, the Trinidad novelist who was murdered when he returned to his native island in 1973, which Barbour called a "painfully honest exploration" that "resolutely affirms life."

Riffs, a meditation upon a love affair, shows that Lee has discovered a new voice. A sequence of eightyeight sections, the same as the number of keys on a piano, takes its title from the jazz term for a repeated phrase underlying an improvised solo. As Colombo noted, "improvisation is certainly a good word to describe the tone and style of the whole suite of poems....The author's verbal resources permit him to encompass monologue, dialogue, many levels of diction, meditation, contemplation, and even swear words" which effectively capture "the urban idiom of an educated literary person living in North America." Though the poems appear to be spontaneously written, Lee told John Bemrose in a Maclean's review that he spent over ten years composing "thousands of pages" to complete the book. The result, as Sandra Nicholls called it in Books in Canada, is "true jazz" which "resurrects the music of Dylan Thomas [and] the wordplay of e. e. cummings."

Nightwatch: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1996, which collects the best of Lee's work, was called by Bruce Meyer of Books in Canada "something of a landmark, or rather a benchmark, in Canadian literature," since it is the work of a poet "whose works have had an impact not only on a generation of poets but also on one of critics....[Itis]a record, a chronicle of a career and its various leitmotifs and themes."

Bubblegum Delicious is a collection of thirty-two verses for grade school children. The poems "offer lots of rhythm and rhyme," according to Laura Scott of School Library Journal. In keeping with the lighthearted imagery conjured by the bubblegum of the title, Lee and illustrator David McPhail, who previously collaborated on The Ice Cream Store, explore topics ranging from friendship to imagination to playing with bugs in verses that Scott called "a celebration of childhood, friendship, and life." Lee explains to readers that "Dogs can dance and bugs can talk," while the illustrations show them engaging in even more colorful activities, from playing the drums to watching old movies. A reviewer for Horn Book Magazine said that "Artful simplicity of language masks the deep inventiveness, wit, and poignancy of Lee's poetry." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly also complimented the book, saying that "the dexterity of Lee's language . . . guarantee[s] discoveries on every page."

As Bemrose stated, "There have always been at least two Dennis Lees; the children's poet and the more intellectual author of the adult poetry collections." Furthermore, Bemrose added, "moral questions . . . have always informed Lee's most serious work—questions about whether ecstasy and ethics can co-exist in daily life." As John Robert Sorfleet explained in St. JamesGuide to Children's Writers, Lee's poetry "dances off the page and involves the reader in its world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bennett, Donna, Russell Brown, and Karen Mulhallen, editors, Task of Passion: Dennis Lee at Mid-Career, Descant (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

Children's Literature Review, Volume 3, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1978.

Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Davey, Frank, From There to Here, Press Porcepic (Erin, Ontario, Canada), 1974.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 53: Canadian Writers since 1960, Second Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Egoff, Sheila, The Republic of Childhood: A CriticalGuide to Canadian Children's Literature in English, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1975.

Middlebro, T. G., Dennis Lee and His Works, ECW Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

St. James Guide to Children's Writers, 5th ed., St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 1985, p. 1334; November 15, 1992, p. 602; May 15, 2001, Ellen Mandel, review of Bubblegum Delicious, p. 1754.

Books, August, 1988, p. 11.

Books for Young Children, summer, 1988, p. 7.

Books for Young People, April, 1987, p. 1.

Books in Canada, February, 1980, p. 21; December, 1984, p. 12; October, 1985, p. 30; December, 1993, p. 37; summer, 1996, pp. 19-21.

Brick, winter, 1981, pp. 8-12.

Canadian Book Review Annual, 1998, review of BodyMusic, p. 270.

Canadian Children's Literature, number 4, 1976, pp. 25-58; number 33, 1984, p. 15; number 41, 1986, p. 74; number 42, 1986, p. 55, 56, 103; number 52, 1988, p. 56; number 63, 1991, p. 61-71; number 67, 1992, p. 102.

Canadian Forum, February, 1986, p. 38.

Canadian Literature, autumn, 1978, pp. 53-58; autumn, 1989, p. 228; spring, 1996, p. 143.

Canadian Materials, March, 1988, p. 58; May, 1988, p. 103; March, 1992, p. 86; March-April, 1994, p. 46.

Center for Children's Books—Bulletin, December, 1992, p. 116.

Childhood Education, summer, 1993, p. 244.

Children's Book News, fall, 1991, p. 35.

Children's Book Review Service, spring, 1985, p. 126; December, 1992, p. 40.

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, winter, 1990, p. 216.

Choice, May, 1995, p. 1506.

Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 1984, p. 88.

CV, autumn, 1980, pp. 14-17.

Descant, winter, 1982.

Emergency Librarian, November, 1984, p. 20; May, 1985, p. 12; January, 1989, p. 51; January, 1992, p. 50; March, 1992, p. 15, 50.

Essays on Canadian Writing, spring, 1988, p. 110-122; spring, 1994, p. 126-131.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), November 3, 2001, review of The Cat and the Wizard, p. D10.

Horn Book Guide, spring, 1993, p. 134. Horn Book Magazine, December, 1975; December, 1977, p. 675; May, 1986, 354; July, 2001, review of Bubblegum Delicious, p. 468.

In Review: Canadian Books for Children, spring, 1971, winter, 1975.

Instructor, November-December, 1992, p. 36.

Maclean's, December 10, 1984, p. 12; August 12, 1985, p. 55; October 25, 1993, John Bemrose, "Inventing a Language of Love," 61.

New Yorker, December 1, 1975, p. 184.

New York Times Book Review, November, 1977, p. 47.

Poetry, February, 1970, p. 353.

Publishers Weekly, September 5, 1977, p. 73; October 12, 1992, p. 76; May 28, 2001, a review of Bubblegum Delicious, p. 88.

Quill & Quire, November, 1983, p. 25; November, 1984, p. 11; August, 1985, p. 44; fall, 1991, p. 35; October, 1993, p. 28; October, 1998, a review of Body Music, p. 30; November, 2001, a review of The Cat and the Wizard, p. 36.

Reference and Research Book News, May, 1995, p. 6.

Saturday Night, January, 1978, p. 74; November, 1979, p. 61.

Saturday Review, November 29, 1975, p. 33.

School Library Journal, December, 1975, p. 47; December, 1985, p. 77; September, 1992, p. 221; September, 2001, Laura Scott, review of Bubblegum Delicious, p. 217.

Times Educational Supplement, May 13, 1988, p. B3.

Times Literary Supplement, December 13, 1985, p. 1435.

ONLINE

Dennis Lee Home page,http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/lee/ (January 22, 2003).

January Magazine,http://www.janmag.com/ (May 1, 2003), interview with Dennis Lee.*