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Famous Consonants Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Popa, Vasko
...Until her last breath she enlarges
Her Oxford house
Built in Slavonic
Vowels and consonants

She polishes the corner-stones
Until their Anglo-Saxon shine
Begins to sing

Her death is like a short breath-stop
Under the distant limetrees of her friends...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...minimum number of syllables.

Syntax condensed, sound is solid.

Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.

Consonants around vowels make sense.

Savor vowels, appreciate consonants.

Subject is known by what she sees.

Others can measure their vision by what we see.

Candor ends paranoia.


 Kral Majales
 June 25, 1986
 Boulder, Colorado...Read more of this...

by Stojanovic, Dejan
...Born from the natural attraction
Of vowels and consonants
Alliterating or merging into a fugue

Of sounds flowing 
From the fountain of language.
Meanings embodied 

In blasts of thunder, chirping, blowing; 
Sounds becoming meanings
In, for, and of themselves; 

A huge dictionary of sounds
Craving to be recognized and translated
Either into language or into understanding. ...Read more of this...

by Mueller, Lisel
...record;
all my friends are getting divorced.
Language, my old comrade, deserts me;
words are misused or forgotten,
consonants fight each other
between my upper and lower teeth.
I write "fiend" for "friend"
and "word" for "world",
remember comes out with an "m" missing.

I used to be able to find my way in the dark,
sure of the furniture,
but the town I lived in for years
has pulled up its streets in my absence,
disguised its buildings behind my back.
My neigh...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desolate it mocked destinations.

Who is that dark child on the parapets
of Europe, watching the evening river mint
its sovereigns stamped with power,...Read more of this...



by Rich, Adrienne
...etry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
talking of consonants, elision,
caught in the how, oblivious of why:
I look in your face, Jude,
neither frowning nor nodding,
opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:
a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking
What I cannot say, is me. For that I came....Read more of this...

by Brodsky, Joseph
...arrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels 
consonants and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces feces and barks and barks....Read more of this...

by Nemerov, Howard
....

So there he was, this forty-year-old teen-ager
Dreaming preposterous mergers and divisions
Of vowels like water, consonants like rock
(While everybody kept discussing values
And the need for values), for words that would
Enter the silence and be there as a light.
So much coffee and so many cigarettes
Gone down the drain, gone up in smoke,
Just for the sake of getting something right
Once in a while, something that could stand
On its own flat feet to keep out windy ...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...iritual friends & teachers,
 you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and 
 consonants to breath's end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breath
 out this blessing from your breast on our creation 
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains 
 in the Ten Directions pacify with exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder
 through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heart...Read more of this...

by Clampitt, Amy
...ulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird's call
means anything in
particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Th...Read more of this...

by Thomas, R S
...ped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for instance,
The soft consonants
Strange to the ear.
There are cries in the dark at night
As owls answer the moon,
And thick ambush of shadows,
Hushed at the fields' corners.
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics,
Wind-bitten towers and castles
With sham ghosts;
Mouldering quarries and mines;
And an impotent people,
Sick ...Read more of this...

by Bosquet, Alain
...ok.
I will give you this sonnet in return:
in that place live the birds
signed by the ocean;
and also these exalted consonants
from which can be seen
the brain tumors of stars.

Manufacturers of equators,
to what client, to what wanderer
who knows neither how to read nor love,
have you resold my poem,
that smiling predator who at each syllable
leapt for my throat?

My language is at half-mast
since my syllables
fled for safety, carrying with them,
as one carries weddi...Read more of this...

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