Best Famous Penguin Poems

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

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• All Famous Penguin Poems

Written by Barry Tebb | A Hope For Poetry: Remembering The Sixties There was a hope for poetry in the sixties And for education and society, teachers free To do as they wanted: I could and did teach Poetry and art all day and little else - That was my way. I threw rainbows against the classroom walls, Gold and silver dragons in the corridors and Halls; the children’s eyes were full of stars; I taught the alphabet in Greek and spoke of Peace and war in Vietnam, of birth and sex and Death and immortality - the essences of lyric poetry; Richards and Ogden on ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, Schopenhauer on sadness, Nietzsche and Lawrence on Civilisation and Plato on the Theory of Forms; I read aloud ‘The Rainbow’ and the children drew The waterfall with Gudrun bathing, I showed Them Gauguin and Fra Angelico in gold and a film On painting from life, and the nude girls Bothered no-one. It was the Sixties - Art was life and life was art and in the Staff-room we talked of poetry and politics And passionately I argued with John. a clinical Psychologist, on Freud and Jung; Anne, at forty One, wanted to be sterilised and amazingly asked My advice but that was how it was then: Dianne Went off to join weekly rep at Brighton, Dave Clark had given up law to teach a ‘D’ stream in the Inner city. I was more lucky and had the brightest Children - Sheila Pritchard my genius child-poet with Her roguish eye and high bright voice, drawing skulls In Avernus and burning white chrysanthemums, teasing me With her long legs and gold salmon-flecked eyes. It was a surprise when I made it into Penguin Books; Michael Horovitz busy then as now and madly idealistic As me; getting ready for the Albert Hall jamboree, The rainbow bomb of peace and poetry.

Written by A R Ammons | **** List; Or Omnium-gatherum Of Diversity Into Unity You'll rejoice at how many kinds of **** there are: gosling **** (which J. Williams said something was as green as), fish **** (the generality), trout ****, rainbow trout **** (for the nice), mullet ****, sand dab ****, casual sloth ****, elephant **** (awesome as process or payload), wildebeest ****, horse **** (a favorite), caterpillar **** (so many dark kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros ****, splashy jaybird ****, mockingbird **** (dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin **** that oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts, chicken **** and chicken mite ****, pelican ****, gannet **** (wholesome guano), fly **** (periodic), cockatoo ****, dog **** (past catalog or assimilation), cricket ****, elk (high plains) ****, and tiny scribbled little shrew ****, whale **** (what a sight, deep assumption), mandril **** (blazing blast off), weasel **** (wiles' waste), gazelle ****, magpie **** (total protein), tiger **** (too acid to contemplate), moral eel and manta ray ****, eerie shark ****, earthworm **** (a soilure), crab ****, wolf **** upon the germicidal ice, snake ****, giraffe **** that accelerates, secretary bird ****, turtle **** suspension invites, remora **** slightly in advance of the shark ****, hornet **** (difficult to assess), camel **** that slaps the ghastly dry siliceous, frog ****, beetle ****, bat **** (the marmoreal), contemptible cat ****, penguin ****, hermit crab ****, prairie hen ****, cougar ****, eagle **** (high totem stuff), buffalo **** (hardly less lofty), otter ****, beaver **** (from the animal of alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down cloaca—macaw ****, alligator **** (that floats the Nile along), louse ****, macaque, koala, and coati ****, antelope ****, chuck-will's-widow ****, alpaca **** (very high stuff), gooney bird ****, chigger ****, bull **** (the classic), caribou ****, rasbora, python, and razorbill ****, scorpion ****, man ****, laswing fly larva ****, chipmunk ****, other-worldly wallaby ****, gopher **** (or broke), platypus ****, aardvark ****, spider ****, kangaroo and peccary ****, guanaco ****, dolphin ****, aphid ****, baboon **** (that leopards induce), albatross ****, red-headed woodpecker (nine inches long) ****, tern ****, hedgehog ****, panda ****, seahorse ****, and the **** of the wasteful gallinule.

Written by Barry Tebb | In Harm's Way I was never a film buff, give me Widmark and Wayne any day Saturday matin?es with Margaret Gardener still hold sway As my memory veers backwards this temperate Boxing Day- Westerns and war films and a blurred Maigret, Coupled with a worn-out sixties Penguin Mallarm?- How about that mix for a character trait? Try as I may I can’t get my head round the manifold virtues Of Geraldine Monk or either Riley Poetry has to have a meaning, not just patterns on a page, Vertical words and snips of scores just make me rage. Is Thom Gunn really the age-old sleaze-weasel Andrew Duncan says? Is Tim Allen right to give Geraldine Monk an eleven page review? At least they care for poetry to give their lives to it As we do, too. My syntax far from perfect, my writing illegible But somehow I’ll get through, Bloodaxe and Carcourt May jeer but an Indian printer’s busy with my ‘Collected’ And, Calcutta typesetters permitting, it will be out this year With the red gold script of sari cloth on the spine And **** those dusty grey contemporary voices Those verses will be mine. Haslam’s a whole lot better but touchy as a prima donna And couldn’t take it when I said he’d be a whole lot better If he’d unloose his affects and let them scatter I’m envious of his habitat, The Haworth Moors Living there should be the inspiration of my old age But being monophobic I can’t face the isolation Or persuade my passionate friend to join me. What urban experiences can improve Upon a cottage life with my own muse!

Written by Pablo Neruda | Magellanic Penguin Neither clown nor child nor black nor white but verticle and a questioning innocence dressed in night and snow: The mother smiles at the sailor, the fisherman at the astronaunt, but the child child does not smile when he looks at the bird child, and from the disorderly ocean the immaculate passenger emerges in snowy mourning. I was without doubt the child bird there in the cold archipelagoes when it looked at me with its eyes, with its ancient ocean eyes: it had neither arms nor wings but hard little oars on its sides: it was as old as the salt; the age of moving water, and it looked at me from its age: since then I know I do not exist; I am a worm in the sand. the reasons for my respect remained in the sand: the religious bird did not need to fly, did not need to sing, and through its form was visible its wild soul bled salt: as if a vein from the bitter sea had been broken. Penguin, static traveler, deliberate priest of the cold, I salute your vertical salt and envy your plumed pride.

Written by Barry Tebb | James Simmons R.i.p You were the one I wanted most to know So like yet unlike, like fire and snow, The casual voice, the sharp invective, The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant. You wrote from the heart, feelings on your sleeve, But feelings are all a master poet needs: You broke all the taboos, whores and fags and booze, While I sighed over books and began to snooze Until your voice broke through the haze Of a quarter century’s sleep. “Wake up you git And bloody write!” I did and never stopped And like you told the truth about how bad poetry Rots the soul and slapped a New Gen face or two And kicked some arses in painful places, And so like you, got omitted from the posh anthologies Where Penguin and Picador fill the pages With the boring poetasters you went for in your rages, Ex-friends like Harrison who missed you out. You never could see the envy in their enmity. Longley was the worst, a hypocrite to boot, All you said about him never did come out; I’ve tried myself to nail others of that ilk Hither and thither they slide and slither And crawl out of the muck white as brides’ Fat with OBE’s, sinecures and sighs And Collected Poems no one buys. Yet ‘Mainstrem’, your last but one collection, I had to wait months for, the last borrower Kept it for two years and likely I’ll do the same Your poetry’s like no other, no one could tame Your roaring fury or your searing pain. You bared your soul in a most unfashionable way But everything in me says your verse will stay, Your love for your fourth and final wife, The last chance marriage that went right The children you loved so much but knew You wouldn’t live to see grown up, so caught Their growing pains and joys with a painter’s eye And lyric skill as fine as Wordsworth’s best they drank her welcome to his heritage of grey, grey-green, wet earth and shapes of stone. Who weds a landscape will not die alone. Those you castigated never forgave. Omitted you as casually as passing an unmarked grave, Armitage, I name you, a blackguard and a knave, Who knows no more of poetry than McGonagall the brave, Yet tops the list of Faber’s ‘Best Poets of Our Age’. Longley gave you just ten lines in ‘Irish Poets Now’ Most missed you out entirely for the troubles you gave Accusing like Zola those poetic whores Who sold themselves to fashion when time after time Your passions brought you to your knees, lashing At those poetasters when their puffed-up slime Won the medals and the prizes time after time And got them all the limelight while your books Were quietly ignored, the better you wrote, The fewer got bought. Belatedly I found a poem of yours ‘Leeds 2’ In ‘Flashpoint’, a paint-stained worn out School anthology from 1962. Out of the blue I wrote to you but the letter came back ‘Gone away N.F.A.’ then I tried again and had a marvellous letter back Full of stories of the great and good and all their private sins, You knew where the bodies were buried. Who put the knife in, who slept with who For what reward. They never could shut you up Or put you in a pen or pay you off and then came Morley, Hulse and Kennedy’s ‘New Poetry’ Which did more damage to the course of poetry Than anything I’ve read - poets unembarrassed By the need to know more than what’s politically White as snow. Constantine and Jackie Kay And Hoffman with the right connections. Sweeney and O’Brien bleeding in all the politically Sensitive places, Peter Reading lifting Horror headlines from the Sun to make a splash. Sansom and Maxwell, Jamie and Greenlaw. Proving lack of talent is no barrier to fame If you lick the right arses and say how nice they taste. Crawling up the ladder, declaring **** is grace. A talented drunken public servant Has the world’s ear and hates me. He ought to be in prison for misuse Of public funds and bigotry; But there’s some sparkle in his poetry. You never flinched in the attack But gave the devils their due: The ‘Honest Ulsterman’ you founded Lost its honesty the day you withdrew But floundered on, publicly sighed and Ungraciously expired as soon as you died. You went with fallen women, smoked and sang and boozed, Loved your many children, wrote poetry As good as Yeats but the ignominy you had to bear Bred an immortality impossible to share. You showed us your own peccadilloes, Your early lust for fame, but you learned The cost of suffering, love and talent winning through, Your best books your last, just two, like the letters You wrote before your life was through. The meeting you wanted could never happen: I didn’t know about the stroke That stilled your tongue and pen But if you passed your mantle on to me I’ll try and take up where you left off, Give praise where praise is due And blast the living daylights from those writers who Betray the sacred art of making poetry true To suffering and love, to passion and remorse And try to steer a flimsy world upon a saner course.