About David Lee

Since the publication of his first book of poems, the Porcine Legacy (1974), David Lee has written a poetry book unlike any in American letters. His poems are informed by a background that is unique to the world of poetry: he has studied in the seminary for the ministry, was a boxer, is a decorated Army veteran, played semiprofessional baseball as the only white player to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars and was a knuckleball pitcher for the South Plains Texas League Hubbers; he has raised hogs, worked as a laborer in a cotton mill, earned a Ph.D. with a specialty in the poetry of John Milton, and recently retired as the Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at Southern Utah University.

David Lee was named Utah's first Poet Laureate, and has been honored with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has received both the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award in Poetry and the Western States Book Award in Poetry. The recipient of the Utah Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, he has also been honored as one of Utah's top twelve writers of all time by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities.

Books by David Lee

A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)
News from Down to the Cafe: New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)
David Lee: A Listener's Guide (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)
Twentyone Gun Salute (Grey Spider Press, 1999)
The Fish (Wood Works Press, 1997)
Wayburne Pig (Brooding Heron Press, 1997)
Covenants (with William Kloefkorn) (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1996)
Paragonah Canyon (Brooding Heron Press, 1990)
Day's Work (Copper Canyon Press, 1990)
The Porcine Canticles (Copper Canyon Press, 1984)
Shadow Weaver (Brooding Heron Press, 1984)
Driving and Drinking (Copper Canyon Press, 1979)
Porcine Legacy (Copper Canyon Press, 1974)

In Praise of David Lee's Poetry:

"Lee joins the ranks of Frost and Hayden Carruth as poets whose treatment of rural life in lines cast in genuine vernacular goes far beyond what we often mean by 'regional poetry'." -The Year in Poetry 1999"Reading Lee's poetry is like sitting on a wide porch in the summer with a favorite uncle you don't see often and listening to him ramble along with tales of local townfolk. Lee captures the grit and authenticity of 'country' speech."-Library Journal"

Lee's splendid ear for idiomatic, vernacular speech imbues his work with a
kind of red-dirt, hog-wallow lyricism, with the direct and uncompromising
impact of common talk, and it isn't surprising that his readings tend to be
standing-room-only affairs." -Bloomsbury Review

"Lee writes the kind of poems that might find poetry readers in the most
unlikely places." -Rain Taxi

"One can only wish for more poets like David Lee. Not poets who write the same way he does.but more poets willing to make their own music.He doesn't have time for small talk, he's to busy with real and vital things to say: he entertains us, enlightens us, makes us laugh and feel good laughing, makes us taste the sadness of our world." -The Chowder Review

"Lee's calculatedly simple narratives are wonderfully wrought."
-Booklist

"Lee's evocative use of dialect preserves both the tragic and the humorous." -Publishers Weekly

"For Lee, humor is the secret of sanity."
-The Beloit Poetry Journal

"He shapes the characters of the rural American west, and their memories,
their versions of things, into tales of recognition and redemption."
-Neon

"Lee...makes a universe out of the world around him."
-Desert News

David Lee: In His Own Words

For me, poetry is the most serious thing in the world - it's my own form of
religion - but I just don't believe in a God who frowns.

I want to get back to the original traditions of what poetry and art are -storytelling.

Art does not imitate life. Life imitates art. Art sets the model, and if we accept the model, then we change our lives to fit that. What I'm trying to do is create a blueprint for a pattern of dignity.

We try to create beauty out of the raw material of our lives. But I think somewhere behind all of that, there has to be a sense of vision. There has to be an ultimate meaning that we want our work to aim toward.

In Utah, people don't have children, they have young Republicans, and they don't have college funds, they have mission funds. Everybody's expected to go out and spread their own version of their gospel. I see this as my mission. Poetry, in a sense, is my form of religion.

The poet's first preoccupation is with language. Language is divinity;
language was the inventor of man. This is the sacred trust.The poet's job is to somehow find a way to capture the eternal from the transitory, form the effervescent.

The poet must locate that bull's eye where we find self. We map the moment of epiphany where self is found and then we speculate on it. And we're supposed to bring that moment to a sense of common understanding.

Poetry is not a spectator sport. It cannot work unless we have active
engagement between the poet, the poem, and the reader. All three are equally responsible for what is going to happen inside the poem.

I hear poets all the time say, " I just write for myself" That's absolute
garbage. I rarely just write a poem. All right, I do. But nobody sees those.
I put them in a drawer. I often burn them.

Art is a conservative tool, a stabilizing tool. It shows what our society is at the moment. But while art itself is conservative, the approach to art must be radical. The opposite of conservative is not liberal. It's radical.
The artist must retain that radical approach. Difference rather than
sameness. Sameness is easy. It allows us the opportunity to define.

Good poetry comes from within. The poet's job is to write from the inside
out, not the outside in. The author has an obligation to make him- or
herself not the star, only the point of view.

Silence is a major part of both the composition and the delivery of poetry.
Poetry is compressed language, and the reason it is compressed is so we cancontain silence in it.

Poetry is a spiral to the heart of the reader from the heart of the poet. It flows not just from the poet to the reader, but from poet to poem, poem to poet, and line to line. Then from the poem to the reader, beyond the poet.
Poetry lets us seize the moment out of the flow of time. That's what we
achieve. The eternal.