Famous Harrison Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Harrison poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous harrison poems. These examples illustrate what a famous harrison poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...e hairs on the back of my neck prickle
An unflinching bitter rhetoric straight out
Hence the neglect. Your poem about Harrison.
“He has to feel the Odeons sell
Tickets to damned souls, that Dante’s Hell
Is in that red-plush darkness.”
Echoed in Roy Fisher's letter, “Once Harrison and I
Were best mates until fame went to his head.”
James, your ‘Love Leads Me into Danger’
Set off my own despair but restored me
Just as quickly with your sense of beauty’s muted danc...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...I
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.
You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…
The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pai...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...it was
Only Auntie Nellie I would trust to tie it with
Cotton to a door knob, shut it fast and pull.
13
Tony Harrison, you write hard
While I write soft about
Our common Leeds; we share
A hatred of all grammar schools.
You see Luddite blood while
I dream of Margaret’s first
Menstruation; you see the Aire
As slime, to me it was the
Halcyon’s nesting ground.
14
The Kardomah Caf?
Breathed a smell of coffee
You caught a street away
A roaster in the w...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...r what angered me
About Geoffrey Hill, quite funny
In a nervous, melancholic way,
A mask you wouldn’t get behind.
Harrison and I were close for years
But it sort of faded when he wrote
He wanted to hear no more
Of my personal life.
I went to his reading in Galway
Where he walked in his cosy regalia
Crossed the length of the bar
To embrace me, manic about the necessity
Of doing big shows in the Balkans.
I taught him all he knows, says aging poet!
And he’s forgo...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...I heard a woman's lips
Speaking to a companion
Say these words:
"A woman what hustles
Never keeps nothin'
For all her hustlin'.
Somebody always gets
What she goes on the street for.
If it ain't a pimp
It's a bull what gets it.
I been hustlin' now
Till I ain't much good any more.
I got nothin' to show for it.
Some man got it all,
Every night's hustlin' I e...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb....Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...gies
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 o...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...house of Cuthbert rejoice with Phyllandrian a good herb growing in marshes -- Lord have mercy on the soul of Cornelius Harrison.
Let Chillingworth, house of Chillingworth rejoice with Polygonoides an herb with leaves like laurel long and thick good against serpents.
Let Conworth, house of Conworth rejoice with Nenuphar a kind of Water Lily.
Let Ransom, house of Ransom rejoice with Isidos Plocamos a sea shrub of the Coral kind, or rather like Coral.
Let Ponder, house ...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...Your bed's got two wrong sides. You life's all grouse.
I let your phone-call take its dismal course:
Ah can't stand it no more, this empty house!
Carrots choke us wi'out your mam's white sauce!
Them sweets you brought me, you can have 'em back.
Ah'm diabetic now. Got all the facts.
(The diabetes comes hard on the track
of two coronaries and cataracts.)
...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He coul...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
'not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.'
I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
but only literally, which mak...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...Bottomless pits. There's on in Castleton,
and stout upholders of our law and order
one day thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain's dangling a scholar,
sa...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...wondered, apart from his CV?
“Well I am organising a reading but only for the big people, you understand,
Hardman, Harrison, Doughty, Duhig, Basher O’Brien, you know the kind,
The ones that count, the ones I owe my job to.”
We nattered on and on until by way of adieu I read the final couplet
Of my Goodbye poem, the lines about ‘One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s.
Duhigs once and for all/Write them into the ground and still have a hundred
Lyrics in his quiver....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...Up attic, Lucas Harrison, God rest
his frugal bones, once kept a tidy account
by knifecut of some long-gone harvest.
The wood was new. The pitch ran down to blunt
the year: 1811, the score: 10, he carved
into the center rafter to represent
his loves, beatings, losses, hours, or maybe
the butternuts that taxed his back and starved
the red squirrels higher up each scabbed tr...Read more of this...
by
Kumin, Maxine
...bushmen love hard riding where the wild bush horses are,
And the stock-horse snuffs the battle with delight.
There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the cup,
The old man with his hair as white as snow;
But few could ride beside him when his blood was fairly up—
He would go wherever horse and man could go.
And Clancy of the Overflow came down to lend a hand;
No better horseman ever held the reins;
For never horse could throw him while the saddle girths would sta...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)
All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...ash out KRUPP.
Arms are hoisted for the British ruling class
and clandestine, genteel aggro keeps them up.
And there's HARRISON on some Leeds building sites
I've taken in fun as blazoning my name,
which I've also seen on books, in Broadway lights,
so why can't skins with spraycans do the same?
But why inscribe these graves with **** and ****?
Why choose neglected tombstones to disfigure?
This pitman's of last century daubed PAKI GIT,
this grocer Broadbent's aerosolled with ...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
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