Poets and Poems Included
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| A. R. Ammons | "Garbage" | American Poetry Review |
| John Ashbery | "Baked Alaska" | The New Yorker |
| Michael Atkinson | "The Same Trouble with Beauty You've Always Had" |
Ontario Review |
| Stephen Berg | "Cold Cash" | The Kenyon Review |
| Sophie Cabot Black | "Interrogation" | AGNI |
| Stephanie Brown | "Chapter One" | American Poetry Review |
| Charles Bukowski | "Three Oranges" | OnTheBus |
| Hayden Carruth | "At His Last Gig" | The Ohio Review |
| Tom Clark | "Statue" | American Poetry Review |
| Killarney Clary | ""An Unlikely One Will Guide Me..."" | Ploughshares |
| Marc Cohen | "Sometimes in Winter" | Santa Monica Review |
| Billy Collins | "Tuesday, June 4th, 1991" | Poetry |
| Peter Cooley | "Macular Degeneration" | Iowa Review |
| Carolyn Creedon | "litany" | American Poetry Review |
| Barbara Cully | "Repressed Theme" | Free Lunch |
| Carl Dennis | "The Window in Spring" | Shenandoah |
| Tim Dlugos | "Healing the World from Battery Park" | Hanging Loose |
| Stephen Dobyns | "Favorite Iraqi Soldier" | The Paris Review |
| Denise Duhamel | "Feminism" | Hanging Loose |
| Stephen Dunn | "The Vanishings" | The Paris Review |
| Roger Fanning | "Shoelace" | Phoebe |
| Alice B. Fogel | "The Necessity" | Boston Review |
| Tess Gallagher | "One Kiss" | Fine Madness |
| Albert Goldbarth | "Life Is Happy," | Boulevard |
| Jorie Graham | "What the Instant Contains" | Epoch (magazine) |
| Allen Grossman | "Great Work Farm Elegy" | Colorado Review |
| Thom Gunn | "The Butcher's Son" | The New Yorker |
| Donald Hall | "Pluvia" | The Nation |
| Mark Halliday | "Vegetable Wisdom" | The Virginia Quarterly Review |
| Daniel Halpern | "Argument" | Western Humanities Review |
| Paul Hoover | "Theory" | Ploughshares |
| David Ignatow | "Absolutely" | Boulevard |
| Josephine Jacobsen | "Hourglass" | The New Yorker |
| Mark Jarman | "Questions for Ecclesiastes" | New England Review |
| Rodney Jones | "Grand Projection" | New England Review |
| Donald Justice | "Invitation to a Ghost" | Sewanee Theological Review |
| Brigit Pegeen Kelly | "The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery" |
The Gettysburg Review |
| Robert Kelly | "Mapping" | Grand Street |
| Jane Kenyon | "Having It Out with Melancholy" | Poetry |
| Pamela Kircher | "Looking at the Sea" | The Ohio Review |
| Kenneth Koch | "Talking to Patrizia" | Poetry |
| Phyllis Koestenbaum | "Harriet Feigenbaum Is a Sculptor" | Poetry New York |
| Stanley Kunitz | "Chariot" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Denise Levertov | "In California During the Gulf War" | American Poetry Review |
| Lisa Lewis | "The Urinating Man" | Poetry East |
| Thomas Lux | "Grim Town in a Steep Valley" | Field |
| Elizabeth Macklin | "The Nearsighted" | The New Yorker |
| Tom Mandel | "Open Rebuke (Concealed Love)" | Hambone |
| James McMichael | from "The Person She Is" | TriQuarterly |
| Sandra McPherson | "Waiting for Lesser Duckweed: On a Proposal of lssa's" |
Iowa Review |
| W.S. Merwin | "The Stranger" | Poetry |
| Susan Mitchell | "Rapture" | Provincetown Arts |
| A. F. Moritz | "April Fool's Day, Mount Pleasant Cemetery" |
The Spoon River Quarterly |
| Mary Oliver | "Poppies" | The Kenyon Review |
| Ron Padgett | "Advice to Young Writers" | The World |
| Michael Palmer | "Who Is to Say" | Epoch |
| Lucia Maria Perillo | "Skin" | Ontario Review |
| Wang Ping | "Of Flesh and Spirit" | The World |
| Lawrence Raab | "Magic Problems" | Shenandoah |
| Adrienne Rich | "Not Somewhere Else, But Here" | Southwest Review |
| Laura Riding | "Makeshift" | Chelsea |
| Gjertrud Schnackenberg | "Angels Grieving over the Dead Christ" | The Yale Review |
| Hugh Seidman | "Icon" | Pequod |
| Charles Simic | "This Morning" | The New Yorker |
| Louis Simpsom | "Suddenly" | The Hudson Review |
| Gary Snyder | "Ripples on the Surface" | Grand Street |
| Gerald Stern | "Coleman Valley Road" | Black Warrior Review |
| Ruth Stone | "That Winter" | American Poetry Review |
| Mark Strand | from "Dark Harbor" | The New Republic |
| James Tate | "In My Own Backyard" | American Poetry Review |
| John Updike | "To a Former Mistress, Now Dead" | Poetry |
| Ellen Bryant Voigt | "Song and Story" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Susan Wheeler | "A Filial Republic" | No Roses Review |
| C. K. Williams | "A Dream of Mind: The Gap" | The Threepenny Review |
| Dean Young | "The Business of Love Is Cruelty" | Poetry East |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Poetry 1993
Famous quotes containing the words poets and, poets, poems and/or included:
“The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have made a very rude translation of the Seven against Thebes, and Pindar too I have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. I believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. Perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself,—or is not that what the poets themselves do? However, I have not done with Pindar yet.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Some poems are for holidays only. They are polished and sweet, but it is the sweetness of sugar, and not such as toil gives to sour bread. The breath with which the poet utters his verse must be that by which he lives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“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)