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, poems and/or included:
“O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes,
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Suppertime I float toward you
from the stewpot
holding poems you shrug off
and you kiss me like a mosquito.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The Heavenly eye,
Much wider than the sky,
Wherein they all included were,
The glorious Soul, that was the King
Made to possess them, did appear
A small and little thing!”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)