David Lee Collection Finds Home at SUU

Utah’s “Pig Poet,” David Lee, has borne—and shared—a love of poetry his entire lifetime and has cemented both that commitment and his affection for Southern Utah University by donating his collection of more than 1,000 poetry books to the Gerald R. Sherratt Library.

Included in that collection are his own 22 published collections of poetry largely dealing with the more bucolic facets of our world and its people and passions. It is that subject matter that earned him the nickname of the “Pig Poet.”

He was Utah’s first poet laureate amid his 32-year career on the faculty of SUU, where he served as chair of the Department of Language, Literature, and Humanities for a quarter-century and was accorded every teaching award given by the institution, including three separate honors as Professor of the Year, before his 2003 retirement. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University to add to a wide array of plaudits from many quarters over the course of his career.

Lee said he will also continue to augment the donation, which is housed in the Sherratt Library’s Special Collections and Archives area and available to the public. It is a welcome addition to the campus, said Library Dean Richard Saunders.

“The Lee collection provides SUU students and other readers with a good cross-section of recent American poetry,” Saunders said. “It is somewhat unusual to find poetry collections this large, so acquiring David's collection creates a solid study opportunity for the writing program and for others who might want to look at the state of American poetry, especially in the final third of the 20th century and opening decade of the 21st.”

Lee, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, refers to poetry as the queen of art forms, and wholly divorced from capitalism. “Poetry has the smallest reading audience as well as the best reading audience,” he said of the medium to which he has devoted his life. “Poetry truly makes the world a better place,” Lee said.

He and his wife of 44 years, Jan, winter in Mesquite, Nev., and summer in Seaside, Ore. Dave, by his own account, scribbles, wanders available trails and byways, and continues his “intensive training regimen to become a World Class Piddler and Starer.”  He regularly performs readings of his works across the country and is currently polishing his 23^rd collection of poems.