Best Famous Chandler Poems
Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Chandler poems. This is a select list of the best famous Chandler poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Chandler poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of chandler poems.
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Written by
David Lehman |
Ithaca, October 1993: Jorie went on a lingerie
tear, wanting to look like a moll
in a Chandler novel. Dinner, consisting of three parts gin
and one part lime juice cordial, was a prelude to her hair.
There are, she said, poems that can be written
only when the poet is clad in black underwear.
But that's Jorie for you. Always cracking wise, always where
the action is, the lights, and the sexy lingerie.
Poems, she said, were meant to be written
on the run, like ladders on the stockings of a gun moll
at a bar. Jorie had to introduce the other poet with the fabulous hair
that night. She'd have preferred to work out at the gym.
She'd have preferred to work out with Jim.
She'd have preferred to be anywhere
but here, where young men gawked at her hair
and old men swooned at the thought of her lingerie.
"If you've seen one, you've seen the moll,"
Jorie said when asked about C. "Everything she's written
is an imitation of E." Some poems can be written
only when the poet has fortified herself with gin.
Others come easily to one as feckless as Moll
Flanders. Jorie beamed. "It happened here,"
she said. She had worn her best lingerie,
and D. made the expected pass at her. "My hair
was big that night, not that I make a fetish of hair,
but some poems must not be written
by bald sopranos." That night she lectured on lingerie
to an enthusiastic audience of female gymnasts and gin-
drinking males. "Utopia," she said, "is nowhere."
This prompted one critic to declare that, of them all,
all the poets with hair, Jorie was the fairest moll.
The New York Times voted her "best hair."
Iowa City was said to be the place where
all aspiring poets went, their poems written
on water, with blanks instead of words, a tonic
of silence in the heart of noise, and a vision of lingerie
in the bright morning -- the lingerie to be worn by a moll
holding a tumbler of gin, with her hair
wet from the shower and her best poems waiting to be written.
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Written by
Henry Lawson |
Light on the towns and cities, and peace for evermore!
The Big Five met in the world's light as many had met before,
And the future of man is settled and there shall be no more war.
The lamb shall lie down with the lion, and trust with treachery;
The brave man go with the coward, and the chained mind shackle the free,
And the truthful sit with the liar ever by land and sea.
And there shall be no more passion and no more love nor hate;
No more contempt for the paltry, no more respect for the great;
And the people shall breed like rabbits and mate as animals mate.
For lo! the Big Five have said it, each with a fearsome frown;
Each for his chosen country, State, and city and town;
Each for his lawn and table and the bed where he lies him down.
Cobbler and crank and chandler, magpie and ape disguised;
Each bound to his grocery corner – these are the Five we prized;
Bleating the teaching of others whom they ever despised.
But three shall meet in a cellar, companions of mildew and rats;
And three shall meet in a garret, pungent with stench of the cats,
And three in a cave in the forest where the torchlight maddens the bats –
Bats as blind as the people, streaming into the glare –
And the Nine shall turn the nations back to the plain things there;
Tracing in chalk and charcoal treaties that none can tear:
Truth that goes higher than airships and deeper than submarines,
And a message swifter than wireless – and none shall know what it means –
Till an army is rushed together and ready behind the scenes.
The Big Five sit together in the light of the World and day,
Each tied to his grocery corner though he travel the world for aye,
Each bleating the dreams of dreamers whom he has despised alway.
And intellect shall be tortured, and art destroyed for a span –
The brute shall defile the pictures as he did when the age began;
He shall hawk and spit in the palace to prove that he is a man.
Cobbler and crank and chandler, magpie and ape disguised;
Each bound to his grocery corner – these are the Five we prized;
Bleating the teaching of others whom they ever despised.
Let the nations scatter their armies and level their arsenals well,
Let them blow their airships to Heaven and sink their warships to Hell,
Let them maim the feet of the runner and silence the drum and the bell;
But shapes shall glide from the cellar who never had dared to "strike",
And shapes shall drop from the garret (ghastly and so alike)
To drag from the cave in the forest powder and cannon and pike.
As of old, we are sending a message to Garcia still –
Smoke from the peak by sunlight, beacon by night from the hill;
And the drum shall throb in the distance – the drum that never was still.
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