The Varsity’s John Sinopoli talks to Toronto’s first Poet Laureate, Dennis Lee, about the golden days at U of T, working with Jim Henson and the giants of CanLit.
It was 1957, and Dennis Lee had just begun studying English Language and Literature at Victoria College. Margaret Atwood was a classmate, Northrop Frye one of his professors, and E.J. Pratt had recently retired from his post at the college.
In ’57 Canada’s literary scene—like the other arts—was nothing to talk about, even if one could manage to get around our domineering neighbour to the south, or the larger, long-established countries with libraries full of books from their own literary canons. Who knew that the decade to follow would see that all change? That pre-adolescent CanLit would finally begin to make significant strides in discovering what it is, and that Dennis Lee would have a significant role in that change? One of Lee’s first brushes with the literary legacy he would inherit occurred just after E.J. Pratt died.
“While I was at U of T Pratt died, and a professor who was a close friend of the Pratts gave me his tuxedo. He saw it as a passing on of something or other. And I have to admit that I was not a particular fan of Pratt’s poetry, even though he obviously had a heroic career at a time when poetry was a very barren thing in Canada,” says Lee.
“Victoria College was a seabed for a whole lot of poets in particular, novelists as well. At the time it was very straight and middle class…it looked like all the action was down at University College, although now, looking back, people tend to say that Vic was the heart of the action.”
After obtaining his B.A. in 1962 and his M.A. in 1965, he was a junior lecturer for four years at Vic. Realizing that his heart was more into poetry than academia, he resigned.
Lee, along with Dave Godfrey, who was teaching at Trinity when Lee was teaching at Vic, went on to found one of the most important publishing companies in the country, House of Anansi Press, in 1967. Their roster included many of CanLit’s young writers who would go on to become global literary titans—Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Northrop Frye, Matt Cohen, Roch Carrier, Graeme Gibson and Austin Clarke.
“It was a funny time because I had a sense of people coming up from basements and down from attics with manuscripts in their hands, sort of blinking in the sun, wondering if anybody else was writing at all. Over a few years, we all discovered that there were a lot of people writing,” states Lee.
“[Before the 1960s] you would rarely see Canadian authors on paperback racks, and if you did they were published in the States. And if you were in a movie house the chances of you seeing a Canadian film was zero percent.”
In the early ’80s, Lee also worked with Jim Henson, writing song lyrics for the Muppet-esque Fraggle Rock. Says Lee, “Jim Henson didn’t like shooting in New York or Los Angeles…he wasn’t enchanted with the studio situation in the States, and he had done a couple of things in Toronto and liked working with the CBC.
“Henson would only come up to Toronto to do a couple of shows a year because he didn’t have a character that was a regular in the series. He was a very impressive man. By then he was heading a major corporation that was doing astonishing work in TV and film. He had spectacular energy…keeping up with him was exhausting, because he was demanding, because he wanted good work, but he was never mean.”
Last April, Lee was appointed Toronto’s first ever Poet Laureate, a post he will hold until December 2003. He was also recently chosen as Canada’s nominee for the 2002 Hans Christian Andersen Author Award, the highest international distinction given to an author of children’s books. The winner of the award, dubbed the “Little Nobel,” will be announced at the Bologna Book Fair in April 2002. Lee has gone on to write nearly thirty books. The most popular of these are his children’s books, which include Alligator Pie, Jelly Belly, Garbage Delight and Lizzy’s Lion. They have put Canada on the children’s literature map, and are all testaments to that old adage that good children’s novels can be reread throughout a person’s life—whether you’re six, 60 or 106.
