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Dennis Lee, OC, MA (born 31 August 1939) is a Canadian poet and thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a children's writer.

After attending high school at the University of Toronto Schools, Lee received bachelor's and master's degrees in English from the University of Toronto. He is best known for his children's writings; 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, 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.

Career

During the late 1960s, Lee was involved with the Rochdale College experiment in cooperative education in Toronto. His activism in the realm of education was also evident in articles published in the alternative journal This Magazine is about Schools (now This Magazine).

In 1967 Lee was among those who founded House of Anansi Press and was its first editor, a position he held for five years. He helped to build Anansi into the acclaimed publisher of poetry and literature that it is today.

Some of his most serious early poetic work is gathered in Civil Elegies and Other Poems (1972), which Canadian poet Eli Mandel called "one of the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country." The first part contains wry, self-critical poems meditating on domestic life and locations in Toronto. The title poem, however, is a much deeper semi-Beat meditation, in some ways reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg's Howl -- using the focal point of Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square—on the nature of Canadian national existence; and its strained self-betrayal by Canadian politicians and Canadian national colonial character (in Lee's apparent view) in the era of the Vietnam War. Civil Elegies here shows the seminal influences, among others, of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the American Beat Generation, and the Canadian philosopher and thinker George Grant.

Lee's 1977 Savage Fields is a prose philosophic work that examines the related problems of technology, modernism and alienation, and their violent, brutal degradation of the natural world. Its sources seem to be George Grant,'s Jacques Ellul's and Martin Heidegger's related concerns about post-war Western civilization.

Awards and honours

• Lee's Civil Elegies and Other Poems won the 1972 Governor General's Award for poetry.
• In 1986 he won the Vicky Metcalf Award.
• In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
• In 2001 Lee became Toronto's first Poet Laureate.

An example of Lee's verse for children

William Lyon Mackenzie King
Sat in the middle and played with string,
And he loved his mother like anything--
William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Selected bibliography

• Kingdom of Absence - 1967
• Wiggle to the Laundromat - 1970
• Civil Elegies and Other Poems - 1972 (winner of 1972 Governor General's Award for Poetry)
• Alligator Pie - 1974
• Nicholas Knock and Other People - 1974
• Garbage Delight - 1977
• Savage Fields - 1977
• The Ordinary Bath - 1979
• The Gods - 1979
• Jelly Belly - 1983
• Lizzy's Lion - 1984
• The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets - 1987
• The Ice Cream Store - 1991
• Riffs - 1993
• Body Music - 1998
• Bubblegum Delicious - 2000
• The Cat and the Wizard - 2001
• UN - 2003
• So Cool - 2004
• Yes No - 2007-8

Other significant writings

Lee, Dennis, and Howard Adelman, eds. (1968) The university game. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

External links

• Dennis Lee on University of Toronto's Canadian Poetry website
• Toronto's First Poet Laureate: Dennis Lee
• Order of Canada Citation
• Dennis Lee's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Dennis Lee Fan Site