Famous Chicago Poems by Famous Poets

• Best Chicago Poems by Famous Poets
• Chicago Poems by Members
• Best Chicago Poems by Members
• Chicago Quotes

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by Ginsberg, Allen

 For 
 Carl Solomon 


 I 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
 madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn...Read More

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by Whitman, Walt

 1
AS I sat alone, by blue Ontario’s shore, 
As I mused of these mighty days, and of peace return’d, and the dead that return no
 more, 
A Phantom, gigantic,...Read More

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by Whitman, Walt

 SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me! 
Hour prophetic—hour resuming the past! 
Inflating my throat—you, divine average! 
You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing....Read More

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by Hughes, Langston

 When a man starts out with nothing,
 When a man starts out with his hands
 Empty, but clean,
 When a man starts to build a world,
He starts first with...Read More

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by Pinsky, Robert

 to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert


Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the...Read More

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by Ginsberg, Allen

 America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 
 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we...Read More

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by Moody, William Vaughn

 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment, the Fifty-fourth...Read More

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by Whitman, Walt

 1
STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born, 
Well-begotten, and rais’d by a perfect mother; 
After roaming many lands—lover of populous pavements; 
Dweller in Mannahatta, my city—or on southern...Read More

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by Piercy, Marge

 In flat America, in Chicago, 
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. 
Forty feet of Corinthian candle 
celebrate Pullman embedded 
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. 
The Potter...Read More

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by Brautigan, Richard

 WORSEWICK







Worsewick Hot Springs was nothing fancy. Somebody put some

boards across the creek. That was it.

 The boards dammed up the creek enough to form a huge

bathtub there, and the...Read More

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by Levine, Philip

 All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any...Read More

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by Knight, Etheridge

 (or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

I was born in Mississippi;
I walked barefooted thru the mud.
Born black in Mississippi,
Walked barefooted thru the mud.
But, when I reached the age of...Read More

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by Levine, Philip

 THE DREAM

This has nothing to do with war 
or the end of the world. She 
dreams there are gray starlings 
on the winter lawn and the buds 
of next...Read More

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by Sandburg, Carl

 THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither...Read More

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by Rumi, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad

Reason says, “I will beguile him with the tongue;”
Love says, “Be silent. I will beguile him with the soul.”
The soul says to the heart,...Read More

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