Famous Notebook Poems by Famous Poets

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...washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
 out again
 I write from the bed
 as I did last
 year.
 will see the doctor,
 Monday.
 "yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head-
 aches and my back 
 hurts."
 "are you drinking?" he will ask.
 "are you getting your
exercise, your
 vitamins?"
 I think that I am just ill 
 with life, the same stale yet
 fluctuating
 factors.
 even at the track
 I watch ...Read more of this...

...aw
the bird, as train came to a stop,
‘I’ll make this image mine before
some Yorkshire upstart snaps it up.’

He drew a notebook from his mac’,
unclipped a biro from his tweed,
stared at the crow, the crow stared back
then recognising him indeed

began to stun the platform crowd,
began to flap, began to sing,
and the poet wrote about its loud
and flattering beak, applauding wings.

Reporters, fans all stood amazed.
It seemed as if all clocks had stopped.
Only Auden stood unfa...Read more of this...

...!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me. 



[Written in December 1926, this poem was the last
entry in Rilke's notebook, less than two weeks before his
death at age 51.]...Read more of this...

...
Here you might find
Alexander the Great's
 Longines watch complete with chronometer,

but 
not a single sheet of clean notebook paper
or a pencil worth a piaster.
Damn your Louvre, your Paris.
I'll write these entries
 on the back of my canvas.

And so
when I picked a pen from the pocket
of a nearsighted American
 sticking his red nose into my skirts
--his hair stinking of wine--

 I started my memoirs.

I'm writing on my back
 the sorrow of having a famous smile...


18 Mar...Read more of this...

...just remember.

The dogs are barking. In
the studio music plays
and Bob and Darragh paint.
I sit scribbling in a little
notebook at a garden table,
too hot in a heavy shirt
in the mid-October sun
into which the Korean mums
all face. There is a 
dull book with me,
an apple core, cigarettes,
an ashtray. Behind me
the rue I gave Bob
flourishes. Light on leaves,
so much to see, and
all I really see is that
owl, its bulk troubling
the twilight. I'll
soon forget it: what
is there I...Read more of this...

...Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
The are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty 
And my madness....Read more of this...

...with care" --
My Goodness! here's where they make the nuclear bomb
 triggers.


 August 17, 1978


VI -- Numbers in Red Notebook

2,000,000 killed in Vietnam
13,000,000 refugees in Indochina 1972
200,000,000 years for the Galaxy to revolve on its core
24,000 the Babylonian Great Year
24,000 half life of plutonium
2,000 the most I ever got for a poetry reading
80,000 dolphins killed in the dragnet
4,000,000,000 years earth been born

 Summer 1978...Read more of this...

...Poor Cinderella, whose stepmom was mean,
could never see films rated PG-13.
She hadn’t a cell phone and no DVD,
no notebook computer or pocket TV.
She wasn’t allowed to play video games.
The tags on her clothes had unfashionable names.
Her shoes were not trendy enough to be cool.
No limousine chauffeur would drive her to school.
Her house had no drawing room; only a den.
Her bedtime, poor darling, was quarter past ten!
Well one day Prince Charming declared that a ...Read more of this...

...iticians' speeches: 
two hours of unrelenting oratory 
and then a sudden golden silence 
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: 

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come 
to imagined places, not just stay at home? 
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right 
about just sitting quietly in one's room? 

Continent, city, country, society: 
the choice is never wide and never free. 
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, 
wherever that may be...Read more of this...

...listen to until it is dark,
a curious student in a V-neck sweater,
angled into the wooden chair of his life,
ready with notebook and a chewed-up pencil,
quiet as a goldfish in winter,
serious as a compass at sea,
eager to absorb whatever lesson
this damp, overcast Tuesday
has to teach me,
here in the spacious classroom of the world
with its long walls of glass,
its heavy, low-hung ceiling....Read more of this...

...Somewhere beneath that piano's superb sleek black
Must hide my mother's piano, little and brown with the back
That stood close to the wall, and the front's faded silk, both torn
And the keys with little hollows, that my mother's fingers had worn.
Softly, in the shadows, a woman is singing to me
Quietly, through the years I have crept back to see
A child si...Read more of this...

...k
with nothing for a view
to tempt me 
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day....Read more of this...

...ou still.

Come and sit right next to me,
With the happy eyes come look:
Here, my childhood poetry
Is in this blue notebook.

That I lived sorrowful and little
Was I glad of the sun, forgive.
And forgive, that in your stead I
Many others did receive.



x x x

Whether to look for you on earth --
I don't know if you're dead or you live --
Or about you in the evening
I should for you, departed, grieve.

All is for you: and the daily prayer
And the sleepl...Read more of this...

...pt, but to relations so rich 
it would not thus affect them. 

3. 

On leave in Vienna in August 1918 
he assembled his notebook entries 
into the Tractatus, Since it provided 
the definitive solution to all the problems 
of philosophy, he decided to broaden 
his interests. He became a schoolteacher, 
then a gardener's assistant at a monastery 
near Vienna. He dabbled in architecture. 

4. 

He returned to Cambridge in 1929, 
receiving his doctorate for the Tractatus, 
"a wor...Read more of this...

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