JUMP DIRECTLY TO THE OCTOPUS POEMS (updated July 2025)
Why, once we’re adults, do we stop asking each other, “What’s your favorite animal?” It’s a shame, really. It’s fun to consider and to share.
It’s no secret that my favorite animal is the octopus. To say I’m enamored is an understatement. I have octopus figurines, octopus plushies and an octopus tattoo.
I even painted an octopus mural on my garage (in the style of a “barn quilt”).
I see them everywhere. Both literally — as with the Bricktown OKCtopus in Oklahoma City…
… and figuratively.
I can’t remember when it began, but reading Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness years ago escalated the passion. Considerably.
Montgomery writes, “Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.”
Brilliant. Mysterious. Otherworldly.
And yet, as Craig Foster shows in My Octopus Teacher, she’s an earthling, same as us. “What she taught me was to feel,” he says of the octopus he befriended, “that you’re part of this place, not a visitor. That’s a huge difference.”
We’re all in this together. Connected.
“That is the essence of why we write poetry: wanting to share one’s own experience of the world and hoping that there’s something within one’s own experience that might break through to another psyche and have some kind of effect,” says Brenda Shaughnessy in an interview in Michigan Quarterly Review.
In her poetry collection The Octopus Museum, Shaughnessy “envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans,” says Penguin Random House. “These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.”
I love where the octopus takes Shaugnessy. It makes total sense. Octopuses 1000% give “things-could-be-so-very-different” and “anything-is-possible” vibes.
As part of my obsession, I’ve been collecting links to poems that mention* the octopus. I’ve only written two or three octopus poems myself; one, published in Crab Creek Review, is linked below.** I have been maintaining the list, as I encountered the poems, as a source of inspiration to write more octopus poems, and now I’m sharing it on the blog in hopes it inspires you, too.
Octopus Poems List
- Prairie Octopus, Awake by Nicky Beer
- Hold On by Carolee Bennett
- Arts & Sciences by Traci Brimhall
- The Octopus Prophet by Paula Closson Buck
- Octopus Self by Rachel Carney
- Ode to Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches, Judy Jetson, and the Sixties Version of the Future by Dorothy Chan (2nd poem on the page)
- Consider the Womb by Mónica Gomery
- An Octopus Picks Litter at the End of the World by Bex Hainsworth (page 35)
- Fabio and the Animals by John Hazard (2nd poem on the page)
- I Know I Have Loved Patricia by Trish Hopkinson (page 25 of the PDF)
- Day Precipice by Jill McCabe Johnson
- Ruptures by Stefanie Kirby
- Octopus Empire by Marilyn Nelson
- Under Water, Behind Glass by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They’re Doomed by January Gill O’Neil
- Cephalopod by Barbara Parchim
- The animals by Stella Reed
- Octopoda Is the Scientific Name of the Octopus by Greg Santos
- In This Economy by Brenda Shaughnessy
- Poetry by Richard Siken
- An Octopus Has Three Whole Hearts by Joy Sullivan
- Messiah in the Water by Kristen Tetzlaff
- Octopus on a Sea Dock by Kathryn Winograd
ADDITIONAL octopus poems can be found in a new book — Three Hearts: An Anthology of Cephalopod Poetry (edited by Sierra Nelson; compiled by Lana Hechtman Ayers; published by Pegasus Books). Thank you to best pal and blog reader Jill for the tip!
I’m happy to continue adding to this collection of octopus poems. Know one that I’ve missed? Let me know!
Also, be sure to check out other popular lists published at this blog:
- The One With 60+ Poems for the End of the World
- List Poems for Writing Inspiration
- Where to Find Barbie in the Poetry World
*Some of the poems on the list simply mention the octopus; others rely on the octopus significantly.
**I don’t typically include my own poems on the poetry lists and resources I publish here. Made an exception this time.
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