Dennis Lee (author) - Writing

Writing

In 1967 House of Anansi published Lee's first book of poetry, Kingdom of Absence, "a sequence of 43 sonnet variations." Lee followed that up the next year with a long meditative poem, Civil Elegies. (Civil Elegies and Other Poems, a revised version of that work collected with some newer poetry, won Lee the Governor General's Award in 1972.)

Lee began writing for children as part of his goal of "Reclaiming language and liberating imagination;" he "tries to free Canadian children from a colonial mentality by creating poems rooted in the words and activities of their everyday lives, poems which encourage free imaginative play." His most famous work is the rhymed Alligator Pie (1974). He also wrote the lyrics to the theme song of the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock and, with Philip Balsam composing, many of the other songs for that show. Balsam and Lee also wrote the songs for the television special The Tale of the Bunny Picnic. Lee is co-writer of the story for the film Labyrinth.

"On the adult level," says The Canadian Encyclopedia, "roots and play (including lovemaking) are further explored in Part I of The Gods (1979). Part 2, The Death of Harold Ladoo (1976), is an elegy for Lee's friend, a writer murdered in 1973.... The poem also meditates on the roles of mystical epiphanies and of artistic creation in its attempts to come to term with the problems of the contemporary world."

Lee is also the co-editor of The University Game (1968, with H. Edelman), "in which he calls for freedom from inhibiting educational institutions" a la Rochdale; and the author of Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology (1977), which "explores the interrelationship between 'earth' and 'world' -- ie nature and civilization, or instinct and consciousness -- all with particular application to a critical analysis of works by Michael Ondaatje and Leonard Cohen."