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Famous Concrete Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Concrete poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous concrete poems. These examples illustrate what a famous concrete poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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...Dutch and a dozen such
Of braggart bullies and brutes,
And each one bends 'neath the weight of friends
Who are wearing concrete suits.

Now the damned make way for the double-damned
Who emerge with shuffling pace
From the nightmare zone of persons unknown,
With neither name nor face.
And poor Dot King to one doth cling,
Joined in a ghastly jig,
While Elwell doth jape at a goblin shape
And tickle it with his wig.

See Rothstein pass like breath on a glass,
The ori...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden



...wanderer in a city without lights 
passion flees in the fog and words crumble at my touch 
and my throat feels like a concrete floor 
the power of tears has deserted me 

i walk through the streets of this forbidding town 
searching for faces i used to know 
and your memory is like a faded picture in the pocket 
here and there i hear your name like the distant crack of a whip 
and there is a dull pain where the scars remain 
i recall your stubbornness and the ring o...Read more of this...
by Oguibe, Olu
...nted to hang me
at forty-eight to give me the Peace Prize
 which they did
at thirty-six I covered four square meters of concrete in half a year
at fifty-nine I flew from Prague to Havana in eighteen hours
I never saw Lenin I stood watch at his coffin in '24
in '61 the tomb I visit is his books
they tried to tear me away from my party
 it didn't work
nor was I crushed under the falling idols
in '51 I sailed with a young friend into the teeth of death
in '52 I spent four months...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim
...ht,

While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed----

Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
Two lovers unstick themselves.

O white sea-crockery,
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat....

And the onlooker, trembling,
Drawn like a long material

Through a still virulence,
And a weed, hairy as privates.


(3)

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things----

...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia
...m time to time I long to turn 

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain 

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing 

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green....Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne



...banana shrub,
The owls’ tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump 
Thirty feet down the mountain’s granite foot. 

Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even drive a tractor,
Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned.
When, at the trial to garnishee his wages,
Fra...Read more of this...
by Bowers, Edgar
...a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
G...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...se with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of th...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...e that's lost, nor damaged handles, 
 nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken 
 ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete 
 floor, 
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final 
 warehouse. 

 II

Yet Spade reminded me of Angel, unloading a bus, 
dressed in blue overalls black face official Angel's work- 
 man cap, 
pushing with his belly a huge tin horse piled high with 
 black baggage, 
looking up as he passed the yellow light bulb of the loft 
and holding hig...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...ny corner of thought. 
Perhaps a clot of cinders 
that peppered the front yard 
clung to a spar of old weed 
or the concrete lip of the curb 
and worked its way back under 
the new growth spring brought 
and is a part of that yard 
still. Perhaps light falling 
on distant houses becomes 
those houses, hunching them 
down at dusk like sheep 
browsing on a far hillside, 
or at daybreak gilds 
the roofs until they groan 
under the new weight, or 
after rain lifts haloes ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
....
And inside the bed comes alive with bugs,
 the water jug no longer freezes,
and in the morning sun floods the concrete...
The sun--
every day till noon now
it comes and goes
from me, flashing off
 and on...
And as the day turns to afternoon, shadows climb the walls,
the glass of the barred window catches fire,
 and it's night outside,
 a cloudless spring night...
And inside this is spring's darkest hour.
In short, the demon ca...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim
...tumble down, because it's for sure
that behind it is the sea.
Not fear. Fear has a countenance;
It's external, concrete,
like a rifle, a shot bolt,
a suffering child,
like the darkness that's hidden
in every human mouth.
Not fear. Maybe only the brand
of the offspring of fear.

It's a narrow, interminable street
with all the windows darkened,
a thread spun out from a sticky hand,
friendly, yes, not a friend.
It's a nightmare
of polite ritual wearing a...Read more of this...
by Guillen, Rafael
...ory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This 
 breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your 
 form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress
 of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered
 cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ignot 
 cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmo-
 sphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums
 underground on soundless thrones and beds of
 lead
O density! ...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...mouth. 
I know that I have died before— 
once in November, once in June. 
How strange to choose June again, 
so concrete with its green breasts and bellies. 
Of course guitars will not play! 
The snakes will certainly not notice. 
New York City will not mind. 
At night the bats will beat on the trees, 
knowing it all, 
seeing what they sensed all day....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared. ...Read more of this...
by Shakur, Tupac
...eign 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 sleeping women.
Often I had to slow down for herds of goats
Or cattle milling on those narrow roads, & for
The narrower, lost, stone streets of villages
I passed through. Th...Read more of this...
by Levis, Larry
...say or abstract 
 well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to 
 say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them 
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad 
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind 
I didn't know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherr...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim
...hat this world is a prison
It's like a ghetto we can never leave
A broken rose giving bloom through the cracks of the concrete
So many things for us to see
Things to be
Our history so full of tragedy and misery
To all the homies who never made it home
The dead peers I shed tattooed tears for when I'm alone
Picture us inside a ghetto heaven
A place to rest finding peace through this land of stress
In my chest I feel pain come in sudden storms
A life full of rain in ...Read more of this...
by Shakur, Tupac
...on the German North Side. 
Forty feet of Corinthian candle 
celebrate Pullman embedded 
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. 
The Potter Palmers float 
in an island parthenon. 
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat 
are postmarked with angels and lambs. 

But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned 
in a triangle of trees swims dappled with leaf shadow, 
sketched light arch within arch 
delicate as fingernail moons. 

The green doors should not be locked.Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge
...There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
Beyond the ledges of concrete
restaurants fall into dreams
with candlelight couples
Lost Alexandria still burns
in a billion lightbulbs
Lives cross lives
idling at stoplights
Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'
A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
A yogi speaks at Ojai
'It's all taking pace in one mind'
On the lawn among the trees
lov...Read more of this...
by Ferlinghetti, Lawrence

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