Poets and Poems Included
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| A. R. Ammons | "Anxiety's Prosody" | Poetry |
| John Ashbery | "Meanwhile..." | Mudfish |
| Beth Bentley | "Norther Idylls" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Elizabeth Bishop | "It is marvellous..." | American Poetry Review |
| Robert Bly | "My Father at 85" | Common Ground |
| Catherine Bowman | "Twins of Gazelle Which Feed Among the Lilies |
The Paris Review |
| George Bradley | "Of the Knowledge of God and Evil" | The New Yorker |
| David Budbill | "What I Heard at the Discount Department Store" |
Longhouse |
| Michael Burkhard | "Hotel Tropicana" | Epoch |
| Amy Clampitt | "A Minor Tremor" | Boulevard |
| Tom Clark | "For Robert Duncan" | Exquisite Corpse (magazine) |
| Clark Coolidge | "Paris..." | o•blék |
| Douglas Crase | "True Solar Holiday" | The Yale Review |
| Robert Creeley | "Age" | New American Writing |
| Peter Davison | "Letter from the Poetry Editor" | The New Criterion |
| David Dooley | "The Reading" | The Volcano Inside |
| Rita Dove | "The Late Notebooks of Albrecht Durer" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Stephen Dunn | "Letting the Puma Go" | Poetry |
| Russell Edson | "The Rabbit Story" | Willow Springs |
| Daniel Mark Epstein | "The Rivals" | The Paris Review |
| Elaine Equi | "A Date with Robbe-Grillet" | New American Writing |
| Aaron Fogel | "BW" | Western Humanities Review |
| Alice Fulton | "Powers of Congress" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Suzanne Gardinier | "Voyage" | Grand Street |
| Deborah Greger | "In Violet" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Linda Gregg | "A Dark Thing Inside the Day" | American Poetry Review |
| Thom Gunn | "Cafeteria in Boston" | The Times Literary Supplement |
| Donald Hall | "History" | The New Yorker |
| John Hollander | "Kinneret" | Harp Lake |
| Paul Hoover | "Twenty-five (from The Novel)" | New American Writing |
| Marie Howe | "The Good Reason for Our Forgetting" | Partisan Review |
| Andrew Hudgins | "Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought" | The Georgia Review |
| Rodney Jones | "Every Day There Are New Memos" | The Georgia Review |
| Lawrence Joseph | "An Awful Lot Was Happening" | Poetry |
| Donald Justice | "Dance Lessons of the Thirties" | The New Criterion |
| Vickie Karp | "Getting Dressed in the Dark" | The New York Review of Books |
| Jane Kenyon | "Three Songs at the End of Summer" | Poetry |
| Kenneth Koch | "Six Hamlets" | One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays |
| Phillis Levin | "The Ransom" | Grand Street |
| Philip Levine | "Dog Poem" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Anne MacNaughton | "Teste Moanial" | Exquisite Corpse |
| Harry Mathews | "Condo Auction" | The Paris Review |
| Robert Mazzacco | "Kidnapped" | The New Yorker |
| James McCorkle | "Showing Us the Fields" | Boulevard |
| Robert McDowell | "The Fifties" | The Hudson Review |
| Wesley McNair | "The Abandonment" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| James Merrill | "A Room at the Heart of Things" | The Inner Room |
| Thylias Moss | "The Warmth of Hot Chocolate" | Epoch |
| Sharon Olds | "The Wellspring" | American Poetry Review |
| Mary Oliver | "Some Questions You Might Ask" | Harvard Magazine |
| Steve Orlen | "The Bridge of Sighs" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Michael Palmer | "Sun" | Sun |
| Bob Perelman | "Movie" | Captive Audience |
| Robert Pinsky | "At Pleasure Bay" | Raritan |
| Anna Rabinowitz | "Sappho Comments on an Exhibition of Expressionist Landscapes" |
Sulfur |
| Mark Rudman | "The Shoebox" | The Paris Review |
| Yvonne Sapia | "Valetino's Hair" | The Reaper |
| Lynda Schraufnagel | "Trappings" | Shenandoah |
| David Shapiro | "The Lost Golf Ball" | House (Blown Apart) |
| Karl Shapiro | "Tennyson" | The New Yorker |
| Charles Simic | "The White Room" | Western Humanities Review |
| Louis Simpson | "The People Next Door" | Poetry |
| W. D. Snodgrass | "The Memory of Cock Robin Dwarfs W. D." | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Gary Snyder | "Building" | Witness |
| Elizabeth Spires | "Sunday Afternoon at Fulham Palace" | Iowa Review |
| David St. John | "Broken Gauges" | Green Mountains Review |
| William Stafford | "Last Day" | The Ohio Review |
| George Starbuck | "Reading the Facts about Frost in The Norton Anthology" |
Poetry |
| Patricia Storace | "Movie" | The New York Review of Books |
| Mark Strand | "Reading in Place" | Grand Street |
| Eleanor Ross Taylor | "Harvest, 1925" | Seneca Review |
| Jean Valentine | "Trust Me" | Boulevard |
| Richard Wilbur | "Lying" | New and Collected Poems |
| Alan Williamson | "The Muse of Distance" | The Muse of Distance |
| Jay Wright | "Madrid" | The Yale Review |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Poetry 1989
Famous quotes containing the words poets and, poets, poems and/or included:
“Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent “the past” and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)