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Famous Movie Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Ginsberg, Allen
...t of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
 men are serious. Movie producers are serious. 
 Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again. 

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of 
 marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable...Read more of this...



by Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
...stupid!)
While this bird with two right wings
flies right on with its corporate flight crew
And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit
And next year its the great Bush pilot
And now its the Chameleon Kid
and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap
and now its a donkey and now an elephant
and now some kind of donkephant
And now we recognize two of the crew
who took out a contract on America
and one is a certain gringo wretch
who's busy monkeywrenching
cruci...Read more of this...

by Bidart, Frank
...n afternoon of talk...

He liked Bishop: somehow, it was to his taste, this
hard-drinking, loud, visited-by-movie-stars town.
"Better to be a big fish in a little pond."

And he was: when they came to shoot a film,
he entertained them; Miss A--, who wore
nothing at all under her mink coat; Mr. M--,
good horseman, good shot.

"But when your mother 
let me down" (for alcoholism and
infidelity, she divorced him)
"and Los Angeles wouldn't give us water...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...once again last night
by a margin of three billion dollars
or so, but every time I hear
a Yiddish word like bupkes
in a movie (L.A. Confidential)
or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie
calls a garment a shmatta, it's "good
for the Jews," as our parents used to say.
Meanwhile some things have
stayed the same; the drunken lout
in the street is still somebody's father.
Hey, kid, how does it feel to have a pop
that's a flop? And we had such good ideas
for ch...Read more of this...

by Estep, Maggie
...in and
**** ME.

Stop being logical
stop contemplating
the origins of evil
and the beauty of death
this is not a TV movie about Plato sex life,
this is **** ME
so **** ME

It's the pause that refreshes
just add water and
**** ME.

I wrote this
so I'd have a good excuse to say "**** ME"
over and over
and over
so I could get a lot of attention
and look, it worked!
So thank you
thank you
and **** ME....Read more of this...



by Levine, Philip
...ritualized
even as they took into themselves
these spirits, but I thought then
I was at last sharing the world
with the movie stars, that before
long I would be shaving because
I needed to, that hair would
sprout across the flat prairie
of my chest and plunge even
to my groin, that first girls
and then women would be drawn
to my qualities. Amazingly, later
some of this took place, but
first the bottle had to be
emptied, and then the three boys
had to empty themselves of a...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...sert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, ...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...male
freinds,

I changed jobs and
cities,I hated holidays,
babies,history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color 
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.

peace an happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
an
addled
mind.

but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passag...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...and still
Is only corners, crossroads in a wood).
And I remember one whose name appeared
Between the pictures on a movie screen
Election night once in Franconia,
When everything had gone Republican
And Democrats were sore in need of comfort:
Easton goes Democratic, Wilson 4
Hughes 2. And everybody to the saddest
Laughed the loud laugh the big laugh at the little.
New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,
Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs
At Little...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...s eyes, he's so intense
he looks cross-eyed) and we're still alive
and I'm still fourteen years old
and the kids in the movie about summer camp
are beatniks and this is the 1960s
the early 1960s of Maury Wills
on the basepaths and Ray Charles
on the radio and chemistry biology
geometry locker-room cruelty and daily masturbation
what a relief to return to 1999
in time for Benitez to strike out
the Braves' last batter...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...a shack right beside a huge fire-

place where there had once been a great mansion during the

1920s, built by a famous movie actor. The mansion was built

before there was even a road down at Big Sur. The mansion

had been brought over the mountains on the backs of mules,

strung out like ants, bringing visions of the good life to the

poison oak, the ticks, and the salmon.

 The mansion was on a promontory, high over the Pacific.

Money could see farther in ...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...ere

the rats were, and he started shooting them. It didn't bother

the rats at all. They acted as if it were a movie and started

eating their dead companions for popcorn.

 The man walked over to a rat that was busy eating a friend

and placed the pistol against the rat's head. The rat did not

move and continued eating away. When the hammer clicked

back, the rat paused between bites and looked out of the corner

of its eye. First at the pistol and ...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...same as it was before.

Those good old days are over because Trout Fishing in Am-

erica Shorty is famous. The movies have discovered him.

 Last week "The New Wave" took him out of his wheel-

chair and laid him out in a cobblestone alley. Then they shot

some footage of him. He ranted and raved and they put it

down on film.

 Later on, probably, a different voice will be dubbed in.

It will be a noble and eloquent voice denouncing man's in-

hu...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...

ing in America about a winter I spent as a child in GreatFalls.

"It was during the war and I saw a Deanna Durbin movie seven

times, "I said.

 The baby put a blue rock in Trout Fishing in America's

shirt pocket and he said, "I've been to Great Falls many

times. I remember Indians and fur traders. I remember

Lewis and Clark, but I don't remember ever seeing a Deanna

Durbin movie in Great Falls."

 "I know what you mean, " I said. "The other peop...Read more of this...

by Hoagland, Tony
...teady and so straight

they implied the enormous concentration
of good men,
but now my eyes flicker

from the in-flight movie
to the stewardess's pantyline,
then back into my book,

where men throw harpoons at something
much bigger and probably
better than themselves,

wanting to kill it,
wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt
to prove that they exist.

Imagine being born and growing up,
rushing through the world for sixty years
at unimaginable speeds.

Imagine a ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...anuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.

The passengers
from Boston to Paris
watching the movie with dawn
coming up like statues of honey,
having partaken of champagne and steak
while the world turned like a toy globe,
those murderers of the nightgown
would understand.

The amnesiac
who tunes into a new neighborhood,
having misplaced the past,
having thrown out someone else's
credit cards and monogrammed watch,
would understand.

The drun...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...t

to walk the center of the road,
head up like a missionary moving certainly
into the country of his hopes.
In the movies in this small town
I stopped for popcorn while you went ahead
to claim seats. When I entered the cool dark

I saw straight couples everywhere,
no single silhouette who might be you.
I walked those two aisles too small
to lose anyone and thought of a book
I read in seventh grade, "Stranger Than Science,"
in which a man simply walked away,

at a...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie
 houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse
 sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happen...Read more of this...

by Duhamel, Denise
...ave said yes unenthusiastically enough
for you to realize I mean no.
You can imagine the confusion 
surrounding our movie dates, the laundry,
who will take out the garbage
and when. I remind him 
I'm an American, that all has yeses sound alike to me. 
I tell him here in America we have shrinks 
who can help him to be less of a people-pleaser. 
We have two-year-olds who love to scream "No!" 
when they don't get their way. I tell him, 
in America we have a p...Read more of this...

by Atwood, Margaret
...You take my hand and
I'm suddenly in a bad movie,
it goes on and on and 
why am I fascinated

We waltz in slow motion
through an air stale with aphrodisms
we meet behind the endless ptted palms
you climb through the wrong windows

Other people are leaving
but I always stay till the end
I paid my money, I
want to see what happens.

In chance bathtubs I have to 
peel you off me
in the form of smoke...Read more of this...

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