Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Constraints Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Constraints poems. This is a select list of the best famous Constraints poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Constraints poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of constraints poems.

Search and read the best famous Constraints poems, articles about Constraints poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Constraints poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Mark Doty | Create an image from this poem

To Bessie Drennan

 Because she could find no one else to paint a picture of the old family place where she and her sisters lived. . .she attended an adult education class in Montpelier. In one evening Bessie Drennan learned everything she would need to accomplish her goals. . .
The Vermont Folklife Center Newsletter


Bessie, you've made space dizzy
with your perfected technique for snow:
white spatters and a dry brush
feathering everything in the world

seem to make the firmament fly.
Four roads converge on the heart of town,
this knot of white and yellow houses
angling off kilter, their astigmatic windows

almost all in rows. Lucky the skater
threading the yellow tavern's quilt-sized pond,
the yellow dogs who punctuate the village
where our occupations are chasing

and being chaste, sleighing and sledding
and snowshoeing from house to house
in our conical, flamelike hats.
Even the barns are sliding in snow,

though the birches are all golden
and one maple blazes without being consumed.
Is it from a hill nearby we're watching,
or somewhere in the sky? Could we be flying

on slick runners down into the village?
Is that mare with the elegant legs
truly the size of a house,
and is this the store where everyone bought

those pointed hats, the snowshoes that angle
in contradictory directions?
Isn't that Rin Tin Tin, bigtongued
and bounding and in two places at once?

Down there in the world's corner two children
steal away onto the frozen pond,
carrying their toboggan. Even the weathervanes
--bounding fish, a sailing stag--look happy.

The houses are swaying, Bessie,
and nothing is grounded in shadow,
set loose by weather and art
from gravity's constraints.

And though I think this man is falling,
is it anything but joyous,
the arc his red scarf
transcribes in the air?


Written by Rg Gregory | Create an image from this poem

(filtered)

 a nearby field provides the plants
sometimes with a wild profusion
(organisation seems a long way off)

it takes an eye used to ink or paint
to confront such a rich confusion
and draw it inwards to a proof

that pattern too within constraints
has room for a wild fling - passion's
best rendered when the heart's aloof

images creep up through the vents
seeding voids with light explosions
chaos must come before the truth

art is nature (filtered) sucking sense
from unimaginable delusions
nowhere-to-go-to finds its path

out of thin air a formal dance
of paint or ink has reached conclusion
and in a nutshell cosmos coughs

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry