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A Chat With Dennis Lee - Page 4

© Paula E. Kirman

Dennis: One of the great things about words is that you can define some things very closely and other things can be just kind of a blind cheque. The original poem read actually: (this is the beginning of Part Two):

In Casa Loma
Lives a cat
With a jet-back coat
And a tall, silk hat

This kind of seemed to pop onto the page that way, so I saw this rather jazzy cat with it's silk topper. When Gillian started illustrating it I didn't really know what the cat would look like, and in a sense it didn't matter because within the poem the cat has its own life; whether or not each person would be free to visualize it, but once you do illustrations the artist has to make some decisions. She started putting a tall silk hat on the cat and by far the best illustration she was doing of the cat - she did a lot of sample things at first to experiment-she kept coming back with the cat having this preposterous flower thing that turned her more into an Auntie Mame kind of figure, this older broad who's been around a bit. So the tall silk hat was never anything but an awkward prop whereas this other thing just seemed to be perfect, with the gloves that go above the elbow and this slightly tatty elegant. So I was very happy and at a certain point I said, "look, this cat doesn't have a tall silk hat anymore," and then I had to find the word that would go with this thing, so it became a spiffy hat. So that was a case where the poem caught up with the illustrations.

Paula: You've always used a lot of whimsical rhyme in your poems. How do you think of these new words and unique rhymes?

Dennis: It has to be pretty intuitive. I actually do a huge amount of revising. My first drafts are often very laboured and look like they've been worked on for dozens and dozens of drafts, and as I proceed through revising, if it goes well, they start to look more spontaneous and natural and seem as if they just came out of nowhere and popped onto the page. Frequently, the process goes the opposite of what you'd expect: it goes from the more laboured to the more spontaneous with the more spontaneous appearing through successive drafts. When you ask where they come from, I think most writers would tell you that that is the most important question in a certain sense and it's the one question that writers can't answer. Where does it come from? All that it matters to me is that it does come, but it's an intuitive process. Like, if we meet someone and we know right away, I can tell you if we spend any time together we are going to be worst enemies or I trust this person implicitly - and sometimes those intuitions are wrong but often they are absolutely right. How do we know those things? Explaining it doesn't matter as much as finding our way into that kind of knowing.

cat

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