Famous Camera Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Camera poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous camera poems. These examples illustrate what a famous camera poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Barry Tebb
Even the charity shops boast of the surveillance
Mr Average is caught on camera a hundred times a day
To provide unending footage for reality TV
But in a decade where will we all be?
Big Brother’s eye will see our every step,
The blink of every eye, the tears we cry....Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
Foolish Follies.
They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of
awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of...Read more of this...
by
Larry Levis
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Koch
You have helped hold me together.
I'd like you to be still.
Stop talking or doing anything else for a minute.
No. Please. For three minutes, maybe five minutes.
Tell me which walk to take over the hill.
Is there a bridge there? Will I want company?
Tell me about the old people who built the bridge.
What is "the Japanese economy"?
Where did you hide the...Read more of this...
by
Nick Flynn
I go back to the scene where the two men embrace
& grapple a handgun at stomach level between them.
They jerk around the apartment like that
holding on to each other, their cheeks
almost touching. One is shirtless, the other
wears a suit, the one in the suit came in through a window
to steal documents or diamonds, it doesn't matter anymore
which, what's...Read more of this...
by
R S Thomas
My father is dead.
I who am look at him
who is not, as once he
went looking for me
in the woman who was.
There are pictures
of the two of them, no
need of a third, hand
in hand, hearts willing
to be one but not three.
What does it mean
life? I am here I am
there. Look! Suddenly
the young tool in their hands
for hurting one another.
And...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
This he perched upon a tripod -
Crouched beneath its...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Oh, the new-chum went to the backblock run,
But he should have gone there last week.
He tramped ten miles with a loaded gun,
But of turkey of duck saw never a one,
For he should have been there last week,
They said,
There were flocks of 'em there last week.
He wended his way to a waterfall,
And...Read more of this...
by
Russell Edson
A man is bending his wife. He is bending her
around something that she has bent herself
around. She is around it, bent as he has bent
her.
He is convincing her. It is all so private.
He is bending her around the bedpost. No, he
is bending her around the tripod of his camera.
It is as...Read more of this...
by
Linda Pastan
It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn't believe. Our children were asleep
or playing,...Read more of this...
by
T Wignesan
When at five-thirty
In the rubbed-eye haziness
Of ferreting lonesome night walks
The camera-eye refugee
Asleep in the half awakefulness
Of the hour
Peers out of his high turbanned sockets:
Hyde Park's through road links
London's diurnally estranged couple -
The Arch and Gate.
When at five-thirty
The foot falls gently
Of the vision cut in dark recesses
And the man, finger gingerly on the fly
Gapes dolefully about
For a while
Exchanges a casual passing...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Give me life at its most garish
Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle
And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff
Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants
‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’
And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one
My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard
Making me stand out in the teeming...Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts...Read more of this...
by
Dejan Stojanovic
If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago
He would've thought they were birds
Or angels from another world
Or messengers from other planets.
Every new machine would have surprised him—
The car, TV, radio, phone, camera.
He would've thought he was a savage
Who didn't understand.
If he saw a computer,
Watching people talking on the internet,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I have no camera but imagination’s tinted glass
I cannot pass this crumbling dry stone wall
Without a break to catch the vistas of the chain of Pennine hills
That splash their shades of colour like mercury in the rising glass.
The June sun focuses upon the vivid grass,
The elder’s pale amber, the Victoria Tower’s finger
On the pulse of past shared walks, Emley’s...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
You, my photographer, you, most aware,
Who climbed to the bridge when the iceberg struck,
Climbed with your camera when the ship's hull broke,
And lighted your flashes and, standing passionate there,
Wound the camera in the sudden burst's flare,
Shot the screaming women, and turned and took
Pictures of the iceberg (as the ship's deck shook)
Dreaming like the moon in the night's black air!
You,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART
1
The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days
Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two
Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?
I am the mad poet first love
You never got over
You are my blue-eyed
Madonna virgin bride
I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’
On the bark of every
Wind-bent tree in
East End Park
2
The park itself will blossom
And...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
They brought me ambrotypes
Of the old pioneers to enlarge.
And sometimes one sat for me—
Some one who was in being
When giant hands from the womb of the world
Tore the republic.
What was it in their eyes?—
For I could never fathom
That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids,
And the serene sorrow of their eyes.
It was like a pool of water,
Amid oak trees at the...Read more of this...
by
R S Thomas
My father is dead.
I who am look at him
who is not, as once he
went looking for me
in the woman who was.
There are pictures
of the two of them, no
need of a third, hand
in hand, hearts willing
to be one but not three.
What does it mean
life? I am here I am
there. Look! Suddenly
the young tool in their hands
for hurting one another.
And...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I lost my patronage in Spoon River
From trying to put my mind in the camera
To catch the soul of the person.
The very best picture I ever took
Was of Judge Somers, attorney at law.
He sat upright and had me pause
Till he got his cross-eye straight.
Then when he was ready he said "all right."
And I yelled "overruled" and his eye turned...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.
There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Poems do not always satisfy the soul,
The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more
Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas
Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarm?.
I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea
With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped
Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
As he grew famous-”ah, but what is fame?-”
he lost his old obsession with his name,
things seemed to matter less,
including the fame-”a television team came
from another country to make a film of him
which did not him distress:
he enjoyed the hard work & he was good at that,
so they all said-”the charming Englishman
among the camera & the lights
mathematically wandered in...Read more of this...
by
Marriott Edgar
Would you hear a Wild tale of adventure
Of a hero who tackled the sea,
A super-man swimming the ocean,
Then hark to the tale of Joe Lee.
Our Channel, our own Straits of Dover
Had heen swum by an alien lot:
Our British-born swimmers had tried it,
But that was as far as they'd got.
So great was the outcry in England,
Darts Players...Read more of this...
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