Famous Newspapers Poems by Famous Poets

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

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1954

...Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up—he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off. They found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being f...Read more of this...
by Olds, Sharon


A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General

..., trust me, as the noise grows stronger,
He'd wish to sleep a little longer.
And could he be indeed so old
As by the newspapers we're told?
Threescore, I think, is pretty high;
'Twas time in conscience he should die.
This world he cumbered long enough;
He burnt his candle to the snuff;
And that's the reason, some folks think,
He left behind so great a s---k.
Behold his funeral appears,
Nor widow's sighs, nor orphan's tears,
Wont at such times each heart to pierce,...Read more of this...
by Swift, Jonathan

America

...my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday 
 somebody goes on trial for murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid 
 I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses 
 in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My m...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

An Electric Sign Goes Dark

...e,” “Follow Me” were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

Avons Harvest

...nightmare and an aneurism; 
And so, or partly so, I’ll say it was. 
The last without the first will be enough 
For the newspapers and the undertaker; 
Yet if we doctors were not all immune
From death, disease, and curiosity, 
My diagnosis would be sorry for me. 
He died, you know, because he was afraid— 
And he had been afraid for a long time; 
And we who knew him well would all agree
To fancy there was rather more than fear. 
The door was locked inside—they broke it in 
To ...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington


CIA Dope Calypso

...ddled dope grand scale and how
Chief of border customs paid
By Central Intelligence's U.S. A.I.D.

The whole operation, Newspapers say
Supported by the CIA

He got so sloppy & peddled so loose
He busted himself & cooked his own goose
Took the reward for an opium load
Seizing his own haul which same he resold

Big time pusher for a decade turned grey
Working for the CIA

Touby Lyfong he worked for the French
A big fat man liked to dine & wench
Prince of the Meos he grew black ...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Let It Enfold You

...were something
to screw and rail
at,i had no 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 fig...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Love Lies Sleeping

...dlike clothes-line.
 Along the street below
 the water-wagon comes

throwing its hissing, snowy fan across
peelings and newspapers. The water dries
 light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern
 of the cool watermelon.

I hear the day-springs of the morning strike
from stony walls and halls and iron beds,
 scattered or grouped cascades, 
 alarms for the expected:

***** cupids of all persons getting up,
whose evening meal they will prepare all day,
 you will dine well
 on his heart, on h...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

Madmen

...
and this time they are absolutely right.

Take the night I mentioned to you
I wanted to write about the madmen,
as the newspapers so blithely call them,
who attack art, not in reviews,
but with breadknives and hammers
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam.

Actually, they are the real artists,
you said, spinning the ice in your glass.
The screwdriver is their brush.
The real vandals are the restorers,
you went on, slowly turning me upside-down,
the ones in the white d...Read more of this...
by Collins, Billy

Notes For a Speech

...African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land. A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world. Does
not feel
what I am.

Strength

in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own. Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they. People. To concern

m...Read more of this...
by Baraka, Imamu Amiri

Part 5 of Trout Fishing in America

...and then slowly the water bugs came

into being.

 I saw a black one with big teeth chasing a white one with

a bag of newspapers slung over its shoulder, two white ones

playing cards near the window, a fourth white one staring

back with a harmonica in its mouth.

 I was a scholar until the mud puddles went dry and then I

picked cherries for two-and-a-half cents a pound in an old

orchard that was beside a long, hot dusty road.

 The cherry boss was a middle-aged woman wh...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Part 8 of Trout Fishing in America

...the roof of her woodshed.

The woman gave me a dollar tip, and I said thank you, and

the next time it rained, all the newspapers she had been sav-

ing for seventeen years to start fires with got soaking wet.

From then on out, I received a sour look every time I

passed her house. I was lucky I wasn't lynched.

 I didn't work for the old lady in the winter. I'd finish the

year by the last of October, raking up leaves or somethin

or transporting the last muttering garters...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Part 9 of Trout Fishing in America

...family that fell in the autumn.

 After he split up with his wife, he went to Arizona and was

a reporter and editor of newspapers. He honky-tonked in

Naco, a Mexican border town, drank illescal Mescal Triunfo, played

cards and shot the roof of his house full of bullet holes.

 Pard tells a story about waking one morning in Naco, all

hungover, with the whips and jingles. A friend of his was sit-

ting at the table with a bottle of whisky beside him.

 Pard reached over and...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

The Channel Swimmer

...is,
For the honour and glory of England 
I'll swim from Dover to Gris-niz."

As soon as his words were made public
The newspapers gathered around
And offered to give him a pension 
If he lost both his legs and got drowned.

He borrowed a tug from the Navy 
To swim in the shelter alee,
The Wireless folk lent him a wavelength, 
And the Water Board lent him the sea.

His wife strapped a mascot around him, 
The tears to his eyes gently stole;
'Twere some guiness corks she had co...Read more of this...
by Edgar, Marriott

The Present

...back of a bin of potatoes. 

* 

The old man who sleeps among the cases 
of empty bottles in a little nest of rags 
and newspapers at the back of the plant 
is not an old man. He is twenty years 
younger than I am now putting this down 
in permanent ink on a yellow legal pad 
during a crisp morning in October. 
When he fell from a high pallet, his sleeve 
caught on a nail and spread his arms 
like a figure out of myth. His head 
tore open on a spear of wood, and he 
swore in ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

The School Of Metaphysics

...use he is grim and officious
And wears black.

The clock on the church tower
Had stopped at five to eleven.
The morning newspapers had no date.
The gray building on the corner
Could've been a state pen,

And then he showed up with his watch,
Whose Gothic numerals
And the absence of hands
He wanted me to understand
Right then and there....Read more of this...
by Simic, Charles

The Sins of Kalamazoo

...ople waiting in jail,
And a dog catcher and a superintendent of streets,
And telephones, water-works, trolley cars,
And newspapers with a splatter of telegrams from sister cities of Kalamazoo the round world over.

And the loafer lagging along said:
Kalamazoo, you ain’t in a class by yourself;
I seen you before in a lot of places.
If you are nuts America is nuts.
 And lagging along he said bitterly:
 Before I came to Kalamazoo I was silent.
 Now I am gabby, God help me, I am ...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

The White Cliffs

...upon the downs,
How beautiful in the village post-office,
On the pavements of towns—
How beautiful in the huge print of newspapers,
Beautiful while telegraph wires hum,
While telephone bells wildly jingle,
The news that peace has come—
That peace has come at last—that all wars cease.
How beautiful upon the mountains are the footsteps 
Of the messengers of peace!

XXXVIII 
In the depth of the night betwixt midnight and morning, 
In the darkness and silence forerunning the dawn...Read more of this...
by Miller, Alice Duer

Two Songs

...1.
Sex, as they harshly call it,
I fell into this morning
at ten o'clock, a drizzling hour
of traffic and wet newspapers.
I thought of him who yesterday
clearly didn't
turn me to a hot field
ready for plowing, 
and longing for that young man
pierced me to the roots
bathing every vein, etc.
All day he appears to me
touchingly desirable,
a prize one could wreck one's peace for.
I'd call it love if love
didn't take so many years
but lust too is a jewel
a sweet flower a...Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne

War Profit Litany

...ted, the names of the banks, combines,
 investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
 banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
 combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens em-
 ployed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
 1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
 coherent and definite,
and the first form of this litany begu...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

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