Famous Stacked Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Stacked poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous stacked poems. These examples illustrate what a famous stacked poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Ingeborg Bachmann
Now the journey is ending,
the wind is losing heart.
Into your hands it's falling,
a rickety house of cards.
The cards are backed with pictures
displaying all the world.
You've stacked up all the images
and shuffled them with words.
And how profound the playing
that once again begins!
Stay, the card you're drawing
is the only world you'll win....Read more of this...
by
Frank Bidart
The only thing I miss about Los Angeles
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
--pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars
--descending through the city
fast as the law would allow
through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to...Read more of this...
by
Helen Hunt Jackson
O golden month! How high thy gold is heaped!
The yellow birch-leaves shine like bright coins strung
On wands; the chestnut's yellow pennons tongue
To every wind its harvest challenge. Steeped
In yellow, still lie fields where wheat was reaped;
And yellow still the corn sheaves, stacked among
The yellow gourds, which from the earth have wrung
Her utmost...Read more of this...
by
Stanley Kunitz
Since that first morning when I crawled
into the world, a naked grubby thing,
and found the world unkind,
my dearest faith has been that this
is but a trial: I shall be changed.
In my imaginings I have already spent
my brooding winter underground,
unfolded silky powdered wings, and climbed
into the air, free as a puff of cloud
to sail over the steaming fields,
alighting anywhere I...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Lux
Shelves and stacks and shelves of skulls, a Dewey
Decimal number inked on each unfurrowed forehead.
Here's a skull
who, before he lost his fleshy parts
and lower bones, once
walked beside a river (we're in the poetry section
now) his head full of love
and loneliness; and this smaller skull,
in the sociology stacks, smiling (they're all
smiling)—it's been empty
a hundred years. That slot
across the temple? An...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Lone amid the cafe's cheer,
Sad of heart am I to-night;
Dolefully I drink my beer,
But no single line I write.
There's the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,
It is later than you think!
Hello! there's a pregnant phrase.
Bravo! let me write it down;
Hold it with a hopeful gaze,
Gauge it with a fretful frown;
Tune...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Through my bedroom window
The coal carts jolted over the cobbles
A slow heavy rhythm full,
Light and fast returning empty.
The coal office manager was a dwarf
With sixty year old skin
On a ten year old’s body and
Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.
The enormous shire horses neighed
In warning if you went near,
Their polished brasses gleaming,
Their worn blinkers waxed;
When they brought in lorries
A two...Read more of this...
by
James Tate
The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing,
more likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I...Read more of this...
by
Jorge Luis Borges
Of all the streets that blur in to the sunset,
There must be one (which, I am not sure)
That I by now have walked for the last time
Without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws,
Sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams, and forms
Woven into the texture of this life.
If there is...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
Oh would I could subdue the flesh
Which sadly troubles me!
And then perhaps could view the flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.
To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis-playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.
At sundown on my tricycle
I tour the Borough’s edge,
And icy as an...Read more of this...
by
Cornelius Eady
Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,
Some type of supernatural creature.
My mother would tell you, if she could,
About her life with my father,
A strange and sometimes cruel gentleman.
She would tell you about the choices
A young black woman faces.
Is falling in love with some man
A deal with the devil
In blue terms, the tongue we use
When we don't...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
So gradual in those summers was the going
of the age it seemed that the long days setting out
when the stars faded over the mountains were not
leaving us even as the birds woke in full song and the dew
glittered in the webs it appeared then that the clear morning
opening into the sky was something of ours
to have...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Ah, well! but the case seems hopeless, and the pen might write in vain;
The people gabble of old things over and over again.
For the sake of the sleek importer we slave with the pick and the shears,
While hundreds of boys in Australia long to be engineers.
A new generation has risen under Australian skies,
Boys with...Read more of this...
by
Gary Snyder
Hay for the Horses
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
My Daddy used to wallop me for every small offense:
"Its takes a hair-brush back," said he, "to teach kids common-sense."
And still to-day I scarce can look a hair-brush in the face.
Without I want in sympathy to pat a tender place.
For Dad declared with unction: "Spare the brush and spoil the brat."
The dear old man! What e'er his faults he...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
"The aristocratic ne'er-do-well in Canada frequently finds his way
into the ranks of the Royal North-West Mounted Police." -- Extract.
Hark to the ewe that bore him:
"What has muddied the strain?
Never his brothers before him
Showed the hint of a stain."
Hark to the tups and wethers;
Hark to the old gray ram:
"We're all of us white,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
'Twas in the bleary middle of the hard-boiled Arctic night,
I was lonesome as a loon, so if you can,
Imagine my emotions of amazement and delight
When I bumped into that Missionary Man.
He was lying lost and dying in the moon's unholy leer,
And frozen from his toes to finger-tips'
The famished wolf-pack ringed him; but he didn't seem to fear,
As he pressed...Read more of this...
by
Jonas Mekas
Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.
Riding the rigs packed with fruit and crated live fowl,
or on foot, with cattle hitched to tailgates slowing the pace,
or sitting up high, on raised seats
(the women all wore...Read more of this...
by
Mark Hillringhouse
for Greg Fallon
A kid yells "*************" out the school bus window.
I don't think anyone notices the afternoon clouds turning pink along the horizon,
sunlight dripping down the stone facades,
the ancient names of old stores fading like the last century
above the street, above the Spandex women who adjust their prize buttocks,
sweating in the sun as I wonder how this city...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to...Read more of this...
by
Chris Jones
I caught rumours of some internal hearing
then you appeared with tears squeezing your eyes,
hands scrunched up like a child's, rice paper skin.
That work mates complained was a big surprise
as you were office sunshine, shafted no-one,
and turned your quick mind to the broadest cause.
But there you were, a whisper finished…gone,
scooping reams of data from cabinet drawers,
your kiddie snaps stacked face-down...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
We had a new house
And split the decorating.
You took the piled rolls of paper,
While I stacked the cans of gloss,
One to each corner-white-what else?
And when we began our slow labour
We did not even sigh except in some relief
In being there at last.
There were no spaces for our children’s visits
Nor for the children they would never bring.
All rooms sat square...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
It was the steamer Alice May that sailed the Yukon foam.
And touched in every river camp from Dawson down to Nome.
It was her builder, owner, pilot, Captain Silas Geer,
Who took her through the angry ice, the last boat of the year;
Who patched her cracks with gunny sacks and wound her pipes with wire,
And cut the spruce upon the banks...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul...Read more of this...
by
Edward Taylor
The directions to the lunatic asylum were confusing,
more likely they were the random associations
and confused ramblings of a lunatic.
We arrived three hours late for lunch
and the lunatics were stacked up on their shelves,
quite neatly, I might add, giving credit where credit is due.
The orderlies were clearly very orderly, and they
should receive all the credit that is their due.
When I...Read more of this...
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