Elemental Natures

Selected Lyrics, Sequences, and Artwork with New Poems and the Essay “The American Voice”

Pub. 2020

Lee (Homecomings) unites a selection of work from “old favorites” and poems he feels he has “neglected” in this cohesive and lyrical collection. Classic themes—such as love, pain and suffering, and religion—unfold amid vivid word imagery and profound symbolism, enveloping readers in a mix of “self and other, just as the present mixes with the past and any number of hoped-for futures.” Lee provides glimpses of a writer at work through the filter of time in this massive tome, packing a multitude of meaning into dramatic inflection and phrasing while challenging readers to open the wounds caused by being human.

Homecomings

Pub. 2015, US; 2015, UK

Lance Lee's poetry is splendidly averse to fashions. His poems cascade down the page; there is a combination of emotions, anguish, disappointment, sometimes also ecstasy and the discovery of the self through the other, the shared experience. These poems read easily, but they are also dense in meaning, so the reader returns to them. With its brooding quality and lyric descriptions of mountains, sea, and forest, Lee's work is poetry en plain air. It stays with you, because it also asks difficult, existential questions, the ones that are of our time but are also universal.

Transformations

Pub. 2012, US; 2012, UK

Lee’s writing, passionate and with a strong sense of the physical, is outstanding for its investigation of the human and natural world and the connections he often makes between the two. Particularly moving in this book is his imaginative and thoughtful search into the human predicament. Work by different artists complements the selection which is very appropriate as the visual is important to this poet and many of the poems take inspiration from paintings or other art forms.

Seasons of Defiance

Pub. 2009, US; 2010, UK

Unashamedly post-Keatsian in tone, transatlantic in bias, Lee’s strongest strain of originality lies in his marrying of lyric celebration with precise imagistic clarity; there’s the Hughsian fascination with animal forms, both real and metaphorical; there’s the packed line, the lush diction, the muted experimentation and the force of a restlessness that sustains the tempo.

Human Nature

Pub. 2006

The breadth and depth of Lance Lee's poetry is evidenced here by its sharp-etched imagery and far-reaching perspectives: stunning poems about his psychological connections to artists and historical figures such as Rembrandt and Hannibal, and others which draw upon mythological stalwarts such as Orpheus and Eurydice.

Becoming Human

Pub. 2001

This poetry is addressed elementally to its title theme — becoming (and remaining) human. It is poetry unabashed by sensuality and feeling, by declaring authorship of them, by setting ‘beauty’ as the prima materia of the work of poetry, by insisting on the profound and writing it large and with intensity.

Wrestling with the Angel

Pub. 1990

In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with an angel, defeats it, and forces it to bless his life. In Lance Lee’s Wrestling With The Angel, a man wrestles with life itself, trying to make it give him “some living moment” that will transform him so he no longer hears in the heart of everything — daily routine, work, even passion — the hollow sound of silence.

The Tale of Brian and the House Painter Mervyn

Pub. April 15 2022

In Lee’s novella-length fable, set in a fantastical California village known as Sandstone-by-the-Sea, ailing young Brian becomes depressed when he’s confined to a sickbed in a boring white room. Eager to brighten his days, his family seeks out the town's only non-abstract painter, the reclusive Mervyn, to paint the scenery and landscapes the boy adores, and Mervyn’s paintings prove so “real as real” that, soon, the entire town is enraptured at “how much fresher Mervyn’s world was compared to the original.”

Orpheus Rising

Pub. 2021

Orpheus Rising is a sparkling adventure of great beauty, danger, and the unexpected, with a climax that will move anyone to a sense of joy. A daring retelling of the Orpheus legend in modern guise, Sam and his father, John, set off to rescue Sam's lost mother, Madelyn, from "The Far Land of Fear" and "Dread City," a startling, imaginative view of the afterlife. A fantasy set in terms of Sam's 10 going on 11 imagination, they are joined by Lepanto, a very wise Elephant dressed in Edwardian elegance who likes to dance.

Second Chances

Pub. 2001

Second Chances is an adult romance between Anne and Ted, who have both suffered great losses. They have ended up on Cape Cod, whose nooks and crannies of wildness are their refuge. They are drawn together as Anne searches for someone to care for an injured fox...Maggie, Ted's daughter, gives the story a mythic dimension with her hunger for a mother and her love for the fox.

Network Jungle

Pub. 2000

Steve Lane, President of FBC-TV is being crucified by a headline-hunting senator—and his business associates are supplying the hammer and nails! Past successes count for nothing, friendships are forgotten, scruples are ignored, as his fellow executives cover their tracks and offer up Steve as a sacrifice to appease the government investigators. At the same time, his marriage is failing, but there is a young and nubile actress standing by hoping to replace his wife. Steve must decide whether to risk his career and buck the system, or play the game and keep his plush office.

Potomac Jungle

Pub. 2000

Against the backdrop of an invisible escalating war for nuclear submarine superiority, one man holds the fate of the country in his hands. President H. Stephen Thompson has nearly completed one term in office, aided by his son Harry and by Vice President Clifford Hawley, but the medical report from the Bethesda Naval Hospital has confirmed that the President's health is deteriorating. He suffers ominous memory losses that cause him to forget the names of important senators...and important matters of state.

Gods of Foxcroft

Pub. 2000

Earth has been reduced to a vast laboratory, it's people survivors of carbon-saturated air that increased surface temperature, melted giant glaciers, turned land into swamp and forced population into drastically reduced habitable areas. Observing these survivors from space are human beings whose evolution has been as startling as it was predictable centuries before from known biology, medicine and psychology.

Executive Jungle

Pub. 1998

Veteran Hollywood entertainment mogul David Levy, creator and/or originator of such shows as "The Addams Family", "Name That Tune", "Bonanza", and "The Bob Newhart Show", knows the world of big business better than anyone, and has seen the struggle for power that breaks and makes careers in the blink of an eye. A former presidential speech writer, producer for CBS, and programmer for NBC, Levy deftly pulls back the curtain on seedy, cut-throat corporate America in "Executive Jungle", an autobiographical novel of interrelated stories about a Madison Avenue advertising agency

Time's Up and Other Plays

Pub. 2001

Lance Lee's plays explore the moral dilemmas we face creating lives of coherence and value today with a poetic intensity that transforms theatrical practice.

In Time's Up a man and a woman treat the audience as their marriage counselors as they face the world nakedly.

The last fox turns the tables on a sex queen huntress and her slavish hound to survive as an individual in Fox, Hound, & Huntress. A thinker commits suicide in Gambits, while a veteran fire fighter confronts the same millennial emptiness saving anything that comes his way, including the man's young wife from a murder charge.

Rasputin is a Socratic demi-urge whose drive for self realization destroys Russia and opens the door to its greatest modern disaster.

Some of these started at the Eugene Neill Memorial Theatre National Playwrights Conference or through support from the Rockefeller Foundation through the Office for Advanced Drama Research: both Fox, Hound, & Huntress and Time's Up are included here from earlier publications.

Time's Up

Pub. 1976

A tour de force interweaving two syncopated monologues through seven scenes in the adjoining offices of two marriage counselors at a crisis center. They are interwoven so cleverly that you can see the similarities of the two characters' problems, yet you are listening to two separate stories. Lee's insight into marriage ... is brilliant.

Playwrights for Tomorrow, Vol. 10

Pub. 1973

Fox, Hound, & Huntress - Odyssey Theater Staging ‘Triad’ by Lawrence Christon, Los Angeles Herald Examiner

A monologue by the last fox on earth begins “Fox, Hound, & Huntress” by Lance Lee, the first of three one-act plays being present Sunday nights by the Odyssey Theatre ensemble under the title “triad.”

Family Matters

Pub. 2022

FAMILY MATTERS is a generations long reckoning with family myth, loss and transformation from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s, showing how family suffering metamorphosized into comedy on an abiding public, cultural scale in the original The Addams Family television series of 1964-1966 created by the author's father, David Levy, from the original Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons. It is also the story of how the author's parents though drawn from widely divergent backgrounds strove to realize the American Dream. Levy's ancestors derived from Jewish Eastern Europe, Lucille Wilds' from Germany and Anglo-Welsh aristocracy. The breakdown of that effort both as a slow ebbing and with an abrupt jolt provides the narrative drive and climax of FAMILY MATTERS.

The Death & Life of Drama

Pub. 2005

This is an intelligent, practical, and interesting study of the screenwriting art and craft. Lee's explorations into underlying philosophy and the psychological intricacies of character behavior and story consequences are so well developed they could easily be taken as case histories of real people and real events.

The American Voice

An Essay - 2005

“We have been on the wrong path in America for a long time in appreciating the real nature of the American Voice, a misunderstanding abetted by the unfortunate connection of American poets and poetry with the American university where one false vision after another sweeps over the country with each critical craze. But we can sweep away this nonsense if we look at three iconic poets in their own time, Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers, and Robert Lowell.”

A Poetics for Screenwriters

Pub. 2001

This is a brilliant, all-encompassing work. I cannot recall a book on screenwriting which delves so deeply into the art and antecedents of screenwriting. Aristotle himself would, no doubt, congratulate Lance Lee. However, without waiting for the great Greek's response, put me down as 'Bravo'!

On the Waterfront

(essays, includes essay On The Waterfront, Script Analysis Conventional and Unconventional)

Pub. 2003

Included are essays specially commissioned for this volume, analyzing the screenplay, Kazan as director, Schulberg as screenplay writer, the score by Leonard Bernstein, and the reception of the film in classrooms. Collectively they demonstrate how and why this film has been an enduring favorite among cineastes and movie buffs alike.

The Understructure of Writing for Film and Television

Pub. 1988

[This] book is written out of first hand experience; the words of an old pro. It sticks to practical reality without smothering the quest for creativity with arbitrary rules; the authors respect the artist as well as the craftsman. I recommend it without reservation