Lost and Found Poet #10
Douglas LePan: Queer Poet, GG Winner and WWII Veteran
Rediscovered by John Barton, co-editor of the recently published Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets, which includes works by LePan
Douglas LePan was born in Toronto in 1914 and died in 1998. He studied at the University of Toronto and Oxford before serving with the Canadian Army in Italy, an experience that informs his second book, The Net and the Sword (1953). After the Second World War, he joined the foreign service, then left to teach at Queen’s University, Kingston becoming Principal of University College, University of Toronto. A man with a lifelong talent for hero worship, soon after his retirement, he published a memoir, Bright Glass of Memory, in 1979. It recounts his relationships with significant figures of his time, including Wyndham Lewis, General Andrew McNaughton, T. S. Eliot, and John Maynard Keynes. In 1990, at age 76, he published Far Voyages, a landmark book of poetry in Canadian queer studies that also broke personal ground in its frank exploration of his relationship with a man almost thirty-five years his junior. A writer who won Governor General’s Awards for both poetry (in 1953) and fiction (in 1964), who was singled out for praise by Northrop Frye, and published many iconic poems about the Canadian experience, LePan is unjustly forgotten by today’s readers and critics. The essay in Arc Poetry Magazine is the first ever published on his work and explores the telling ways in which he evokes ideas of the heroic in some of the most luminous poetry ever written by a Canadian.
About Essayist John Barton
John Barton, born and raised in Alberta, has published eight books of award-winning poetry and five chapbooks, including Designs from the Interior (Anansi, 1993), Sweet Ellipsis (ECW, 1998), Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001) and Asymmetries (Frog Hollow, 2004). A bilingual edition of West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a self-portrait was published by BuschekBooks in 2006. He is co-editor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, which was published earlier this spring by Arsenal Pulp. He has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, the Patricia Hackett Prize (University of Western Australia), an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and is a nominee in the poetry category of this year’s National Magazine Awards. He was educated at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Victoria, and Western Ontario, as well as Columbia University in New York, studying poetry with Gary Geddes, Eli Mandel, Robin Skelton, and Joseph Brodsky. His poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines across Canada and in the United States, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. He worked as a librarian and editor for five national museums in Ottawa from 1985 to 2003, where he also co-edited Arc for thirteen years. He currently lives in Victoria where he is the editor of the internationally celebrated quarterly, The Malahat Review.
Arc 58, Summer 2007
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