Poets and Poems Included
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| Margaret Atwood | "Bored" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Sally Ball | "Nocturnal" | Southwest Review |
| Catherine Bowman | "Mr. X" | Chelsea |
| Stephanie Brown | "Schadenfreude" | American Poetry Review |
| Lewis Buzbee | "Sunday, Tarzan in His Hammock" | ZYZZYVA |
| Cathleen Calbert | "The Woman Who Loved Things" | Harvard Review |
| Rafael Campo | "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" | Ploughshares |
| William Carpenter | "Girl Writing a Letter" | Iowa Review |
| Nicholas Christopher | "Terminus" | The Paris Review |
| Jane Cooper | "The Infusion Room" | American Poetry Review |
| James Cummins | "Sestina" | The Paris Review |
| Olena Kalytiak Davis | "Thirty Years Rising" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Lynn Emanuel | "Film Noir: Train Trip Out of Metropolis" | The Antioch Review |
| Elaine Equi | "Sometimes I Get Distracted" | New American Writing |
| Irving Feldman | "Terminal Laughs" | The Yale Review |
| Donald Finkel | "In the Clearing" | The Yale Review |
| Aaron Fogel | "The Printer's Error" | The Stud Duck |
| Richard Frost | "For a Brother" | North American Review |
| Allen Ginsberg | "Salutations to Fernando Pessoa" | The Threepenny Review |
| Peter Gizzi | "Another Day on the Pilgrimage" | apex of the M |
| Jody Gladding | "Asparagus" | The Yale Review |
| Elton Glaser | "Undead White European Male" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Albert Goldbarth | "A Still Life, Symbolic of Lines" | Southwest Review |
| Beckian Fritz Goldberg | "Being Pharaoh" | Field |
| Laurence Goldstein | "Permissive Entry: A Sermon on Fame" | The Tampa Review |
| Barbara Guest | "If So" | Princeton University Library Chronicle |
| Marilyn Hacker | "Days of 1992" | Colorado Review |
| Judith Hall | "St. Peregrinus' Cancer" | Western Humanities Review |
| Anthony Hecht | "Prospects" | The New Yorker |
| Edward Hirsch | "Unearthly Voices" | TriQuarterly |
| Janet Holmes | "Against the Literal" | The Georgia Review |
| Andrew Hudgins | "Seventeen" | The Southern Review |
| T. R. Hummer | "Apocatastasis Foretold in the Shape of a Canvas of Smoke" |
Sewanee Theological Review |
| Brigit Pegeen Kelly | "All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer" | The Massachusetts Review |
| Karl Kirchwey | "Sonogram" | The New Republic |
| Carolyn Kizer | "On a Line from Valery" | Princeton University Library Chronicle |
| Wayne Koestenbaum | "1975" | Boulevard |
| John Koethe | "Falling Water" | Western Humanities Review |
| Yusef Komunyakaa | "Troubling the Water" | Urbanus |
| Maxine Kumin | "Getting the Message" | Tikkun |
| Lisa Lewis | "Bridget" | American Poetry Review |
| Rachel Loden | "My Night with Philip Larldn" | B City |
| James Longenbach | "What You Find in the Woods" | The Yale Review |
| Robert Hill Long | "Refuge" | Manoa |
| Gail Mazur | "Fracture Santa Monica" | Colorado Review |
| J. D. McClatchy | "My Mammogram" | Poetry |
| Heather McHugh | "And What Do You Get" | Urbanus |
| Susan Musgrave | "Exchange of Fire" | Nimrod |
| Charles North | "Shooting for Line" | Hanging Loose |
| Geoffrey O'Brien | "The Interior Prisoner" | Hambone |
| Jacqueline Osherow | "Late Night Tete-a-Tete with a Moon in Transit" |
Western Humanities Review |
| Molly Peacock | "Have You Ever Faked an Orgasm?" | The Paris Review |
| Carl Phillips | "Toys" | Boston Phoenix |
| Marie Ponsot | "Old Mama Saturday" | Western Humanities Review |
| Bin Ramke | "How Light Is Spent" | Pequod |
| Katrina Roberts | "How Late Desire Looks" | Harvard Magazine |
| Michael J. Rosen | "The Night Before His Parents' First Trip to Europe His Mother Writes a Letter 'To Our Children'" |
Salmagundi |
| Kay Ryan | "Outsider Art" | Partisan Review |
| Mary Jo Salter | "The Age of Reason" | The Threepenny Review |
| Tony Sanders | "Transit Authority" | The Yale Review |
| Stephen Sandy | "Threads" | The Paris Review |
| Grace Schulman | "The Present Perfect" | Boulevard |
| Robyn Selman | "Avec Amour" | The American Voice |
| Alan Shapiro | "Manufacturing " | TriQuarterly |
| Reginald Shepherd | "Brotherhood" | Colorado Review |
| Angela Sorby | "Museum Piece" | Kansas Quarterly |
| Laurel Trivelpiece | "The Nursery" | Witness |
| Paul Violi | "Scatter" | Painted Bride Quarterly |
| Arthur Vogelsang | "The Nose, the Grand Canyon, and the Sixties" |
The Antioch Review |
| David Wagoner | "Walt Whitman Bathing" | The Yale Review |
| Charles H. Webb | "The Shape of History" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Ed Webster | "San Joaquin Valley Poems: 1969" | Western Humanities Review |
| David Wojahn | "Homage to Ryszard Kapuściński" | Poetry |
| Jay Wright | "The Cradle Logic of Autumn" | Callaloo |
| Stephen Yenser | "Blue Guide" | The Paris Review |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Poetry 1995
Famous quotes containing the words poets, poems and/or included:
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“After all, poets shouldn’t be their own interpreters and shouldn’t carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Under the one word “house” are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest shed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)