Deborama’s Books — A Great Frustration

I can’t believe this. I found, purely by accident, a not-bad poem from the early or mid-1970s by a pretty obscure poet. When I tell you the name of the poem, and a little about its fate, you are going to understand immediately why I am going to have to include the entire text of this poem in this blog post.

Here’s the thing. I usually just quote a few lines from a published poem and then, having found it on the internet, I provide a link. But this poem does not exist on the internet.

I mean, that’s not impossible. Not every published poem is on the internet, obviously. The book depicted here, Time, Poems by Al Lee, is Lee’s only book of poetry. It’s published by Ecco Press, a known, legitimate publishing house, but not exactly mainstream.

It still exists, but now, since 1999, as a publishing imprint of Harper Collins. And several of Lee’s poems are anthologized in the 1975 collection The American Poetry Anthology, edited by Daniel Halpern, who is himself a poet, and who is also the founder of Ecco Press. I have that anthology and that’s where I discovered the poem.

I also cannot find a photograph or an obituary for Al Lee. I should explain, I am amazing at finding photos of people and obituaries online. But for Al Lee, nada. He’s not in Wikipedia. He’s not in the Poetry Foundation or any of the other…