The concessional structure is a two-part structure that turns from making concessions (that is, admitting the problems or difficulties in the argument one wants to make) to then, in fact, making the argument. Mary Szybist discusses the concessional structure more fully in Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. Below are supplemental poems and discussion.
“Sunshine. We know about that. Light keeps,” by Joshua Corey (Under “Excerpts”)
“Yet Do I Marvel,” by Countee Cullen
“Song for Baby-O, Unborn,” by Diane Di Prima
“Uncredited,” by Boris Dralyuk
“Time I’m Not Here,” by Graham Foust
“Well Water,” by Randall Jarrell
“Try To Change the Mutilated World,” by Mike Theune
“The Ivy Crown,” by William Carlos Williams
Generally, the concessions in the following poems are the repeated claims that it seems so much of what is good is gone, or about to go away. Creating and employing this sense of being at the end of things, these poets then represent–sometimes encouraging, sometimes just relaying–a new encounter with what is or might be present, or possible. The motto for this kind of concessional poem might be the first two and the final line of Wallace Stevens’s “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends….It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”
“The Eternal City,” by A.R. Ammons
“Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold
“The New Experience,” by Suzanne Buffam
Idea LXI (“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.”), by Michael Drayton
“Only This Morning,” by Dan Gerber
“A Brief for the Defense,” by Jack Gilbert
“Some Joy for Morning,” by Peter Gizzi (in Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), p. 50).
“Disaster Movie,” by Tony Hoagland (in Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2010), pp. 66-7).
“The Blizzard,” by Phillis Levin
“The Conditional,” by Ada Limón
“in the valley of its making,” by Nate Marshall
“The Plumbing,” by W. S. Merwin (in The Carrier of Ladders, collected in The Second Four Books of Poems, pp. 186-7).
“Small Comfort,” by Katha Pollitt
“And the days are not full enough…,” by Ezra Pound
Sonnet 65 (“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea…”), by William Shakespeare
“Building, Dwelling,” by Michael Theune (in American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets 32 (2007): 14). This ending is also a bit ironic.
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Here’s an interesting poem that feels like it’s going to have a concessional turn, but instead of turning from critique to something positive, it just gets darker and more despairing:
“Ordinance on Arrival,” by Naomi Lazard
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This poem largely is a list of concessional maneuvers.
Structure & Surprise 
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