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Famous Stanley Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Kunitz, Stanley
...Reading in Li Po
how "the peach blossom follows the water"
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao,
naturally with the sex 
transposed
and the figure slighter.
Loving you was a kind
of Chinese guerilla war.
Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage
so nibbled...Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...ly without an audience

Whose eyes stopped the magic from working.



7



Up Easy Road was Rocket’s Greengrocers - Stanley Rocket

Had a green van he took me and Colin in, delivering.

In Kirkgate Market Car Park the attendant shouted,

“On your way, sky-rocket, you’re too mean to pay!”

Stanley laughed and parked anyway but he told us

To hush when we drove to the house of a Big Doctor

At the Infirmary. A snooty housekeeper took the box

Of fruit and veg in, sn...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo bla...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whitter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.
Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,
After the secret master of my blood,
Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love
Kept ...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...At his incipient sun 
The ice of twenty winters broke, 
Crackling, in her eyes. 

Her mirroring, still mind, 
That held the world (made double) calm, 
Went fluid, and it ran. 

There was a stir of music, 
Mixed with flowers, in her blood; 
A swift impulsive balm 

From obscure roots; 
Gold bees of clinging light 
Swarmed in her brow. 

Her thro...Read more of this...



by Kunitz, Stanley
...Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk 
across the board and told us 
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course 
and smashed into the earth
there'd be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills 
with a wild look in his eyes 
stood in the public square 
at the pla...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...If the water were clear enough,
if the water were still,
but the water is not clear,
the water is not still,
you would see yourself,
slipped out of your skin,
nosing upstream,
slapping, thrashing,
tumbling
over the rocks
till you paint them
with your belly's blood:
Finned Ego,
yard of muscle that coils,
uncoils.
If the knowledge were given you,
but it ...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...body was preserved in a cask

holding one hundred-eighty gallons of spirits: 0, a long way

from Idaho, a long way from Stanley Basin, Little Redfish

Lake, the Big Lost River and from Lake Josephus and the

Big Wood River.










 THE MESSAGE





 Last night a blue thing, the smoke itself, from our campfire

drifted down the valley, entering into the sound of the bell-

 mare until the blue thing and the bell could not be separated,

no matter how hard you tried....Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...for the first time. It was cloud-

ing over and we thought it was going to rain.

 "Looks like it's raining in Stanley, " I said, though I had

never been in Stanley before. It is easy to say things about

Stanley when you have never been there. We saw the road to

Bull Trout Lake. The road looked good. When we reached

Stanley, the streets were white and dry like a collision at a

high rate of speed between a cemetery and a truck loaded

with sacks o...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...THE PUDDING MASTER OF



 STANLEY BASIN





Tree, snow and rock beginnings, the mountain in back of the

lake promised us eternity, but the lake itself was filled with

thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore

and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time.

 The minnows were an Idaho tourist attraction. They

should have been made into a National Monument.Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...a









 THE LAKE JOSEPHUS DAYS





We left Little Redfish for Lake Josephus, traveling along the

good names--from Stanley to Capehorn to Seafoam to the

Rapid River, up Float Creek, past the Greyhound Mine and

then to Lake Josephus, and a few days after that up the trail

to Hell-diver Lake with the baby on my shoulders and a good

limit of trout waiting in Hell-diver.

 Knowing the trout would wait there like airplane tickets

for us to come, we stopped at Mushroo...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...Nobody in the widow's household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke 
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren't for a census report
of a five-year-old White Male
...Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...ou say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he
says one set of glasses won't do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason and
Keats's "Endymion" with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello
to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put
on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your
reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can't find your seeing glasses again because
...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned ca...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name 
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand 
of a long-lipped stra...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...The word I spoke in anger 
weighs less than a parsley seed, 
but a road runs through it 
that leads to my grave,
that bought-and-paid-for lot 
on a salt-sprayed hill in Truro
where the scrub pines 
overlook the bay.
Half-way I'm dead enough,
strayed from my own nature 
and my fierce hold on life.
If I could cry, I'd cry, 
but I'm too old to be 
any...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
My careless sprawler,
And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,
That have become the land of your self-strangeness.
What long seduction of the bone has led you
Down the imploring roads I cannot take
Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,
Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field
To guard you where you lie ...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...1

On my way home from school
up tribal Providence Hill
past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
I scuffed in the drainage ditch
among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
rolled out of glacial time
into my pitcher’s hand;
then sprinted lickety-
split on my magic Keds
from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...e sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")

What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night, 
he thinks only of his figu...Read more of this...

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