Famous Headlines Poems by Famous Poets

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

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On

by Bob Kaufman
 On yardbird corners of embryonic hopes, drowned in a heroin tear.
On yardbird corners of parkerflights to sound filled pockets in space.
On neuro-corners of striped brains & desperate electro-surgeons.
On alcohol corners of pointless discussion & historical hangovers.
On television corners of cornflakes & rockwells impotent America.
On university corners of tailored intellect & greek letter openers.
On military corners of megathon deaths &...Read more of this...

The Ships that Wont Go Down

by Henry Lawson
 We hear a great commotion 
'Bout the ship that comes to grief, 
That founders in mid-ocean, 
Or is driven on a reef; 
Because it's cheap and brittle 
A score of sinners drown. 
But we hear but mighty little 
Of the ships that won't go down. 

Here's honour to the builders – 
The builders of the past; 
Here's honour to...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 02: 10: Sudden Death

by Conrad Aiken
 'Number four—the girl who died on the table—
The girl with golden hair—'
The purpling body lies on the polished marble.
We open the throat, and lay the thyroid bare . . .

One, who held the ether-cone, remembers
Her dark blue frightened eyes.
He heard the sharp breath quiver, and saw her breast
More hurriedly fall and rise.
Her hands made futile gestures, she turned her...Read more of this...

Leeds 2002

by Barry Tebb
 What ghosts haunt

These streets of perpetual night?

Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums

For nouveam riche merchant bankers

Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos

Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:

Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite 

Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.

I knew Len, the tubby taxi man

With his retirement dreams of visiting

The world’s great galleries:

‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,

I’ve lived all my life...Read more of this...

James Simmons R.i.p

by Barry Tebb
 You were the one I wanted most to know

So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,

The casual voice, the sharp invective,

The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant

Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms

Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt

For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry

Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.



You wrote from the heart,...Read more of this...

Letters To Friends

by Barry Tebb
 I


Eddie Linden

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page 

And at your age the wonder 

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under 

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...

Zone

by Guillaume Apollinaire
ZONE 


In the end you are tired of this ancient world 
Shepherd oh Eiffel Tower the herd of bridges is bleating this morning 

You've had enough of living in Greek and Roman antiquity 

Here even the cars look antique 
Only religion has stayed new religion 
Has stayed simple like the hangars at Port-Aviation 

You alone in Europe are not ancient...Read more of this...

The Thin People

by Sylvia Plath
 They are always with us, the thin people
Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen. They
Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only
In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace
Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest...Read more of this...

The Errand

by Anne Sexton
 I've been going right on, page by page,
since we last kissed, two long dolls in a cage,
two hunger-mongers throwing a myth in and out,
double-crossing out lives with doubt,
leaving us separate now, fogy with rage.

But then I've told my readers what I think
and scrubbed out the remainder with my shrink,
have placed my bones in a jar as if possessed,
have pasted...Read more of this...

Soup

by Carl Sandburg
 I SAW a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.

 When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon....Read more of this...

Put Off the Wedding Five Times and Nobody Comes to It

by Carl Sandburg
 (Handbook for Quarreling Lovers)I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms.
I might have said, “Dogs bark and the wind carries it away.”
I might have said, “He who would make a door of gold must knock a nail in every day.”
So easy, so easy it would have been to inaugurate a high impetuous moment for you to look on before the final...Read more of this...

That Day

by Anne Sexton
 This is the desk I sit at
and this is the desk where I love you too much
and this is the typewriter that sits before me
where yesterday only your body sat before me
with its shoulders gathered in like a Greek chorus,
with its tongue like a king making up rules as he goes,
with its tongue quite openly like a cat lapping...Read more of this...

Layover

by Charles Bukowski
 Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men- poor folks-
work.
That moment- to this. ....Read more of this...

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