Poets and Poems Included
| Poet | Poem | Publication(s) where poem previously appeared |
| Jonathan Aaron | "The End of Out of the Past" | The London Review of Books |
| Beth Anderson | from "A Locked Room" | Poetry Project Newsletter |
| Nin Andrews | "Dedicated to the One I Love" | Gargoyle |
| Wendell Berry | "Some Further Words" | American Poetry Review |
| Frank Bidart | "Curse" | The Threepenny Review |
| Diann Blakely | "Rambling on My Mind" | Bomb |
| Bruce Bond | "Art Tatum" | The Paris Review |
| Catherine Bowman | from "1000 Lines" | TriQuarterly |
| Rosemary Catacalos | "Perfect Attendance: Short Subjects Made from the Staring Photos of Strangers" |
The Progressive |
| Joshua Clover | "Aeon Flux:June" | Ploughshares |
| Billy Collins | "Litany" | Poetry |
| Michael S. Collins | "Six Sketches: When a Soul Breaks" | Callaloo |
| Carl Dennis | "World History" | Poetry |
| Susan Dickman | "Skin" | Rhino |
| Rita Dove | "Fox Trot Fridays" | Callaloo |
| Stephen Dunn | "Open Door Blues" | Brilliant Corners |
| Stuart Dybek | "Journal" | Tin House |
| Charles Fort | "The Vagrant Hours" | Mississippi Review |
| James Galvin | "Ponderosa" | Boston Review |
| Amy Gerstler | "An Offer Received in This Morning's Mail:" | American Poetry Review |
| Louise Glück | "Landscape" | The Threepenny Review |
| Michael Goldman | "Report on Human Beings" | Ontario Review |
| Ray Gonzalez | "Max Jacob's Shoes" | New American Writing |
| Linda Gregg | "Beauty" | The New Yorker |
| Mark Halliday | "The Opaque" | Colorado Review |
| Michael S. Harper | "Rhythmic Arrangements (on prosody)" | LUNA |
| Matthea Harvey | "Sad Little Breathing Machine" | Verse |
| George V. Higgins | "Villanelle" | 88 |
| Edward Hirsch | "The Desire Manuscripts" | The Paris Review |
| Tony Hoagland | "Summer Night" | 88 |
| Richard Howard | "Success" | The New Yorker |
| Rodney Jones | "Ten Sighs from a Sabbatical" | Five Points |
| Joy Katz | "Some Rain" | Pleiades |
| Brigit Pegeen Kelly | "The Dragon" | New England Review |
| Galway Kinnell | "When the Towers Fell" | The New Yorker |
| Carolyn Kizer | "After Horace" | Poetry |
| Jennifer L. Knox | "Love Blooms at Chimsbury After the War" | FIELD |
| Kenneth Koch | "Proverb" | The New York Review of Books |
| John Koethe | "Y2K (1933)" | Poetry |
| Ted Kooser | "In the Hall of Bones" | Third Coast |
| Philip Levine | "The Music of Time" | Rattle |
| J. D. McClatchy | "Jihad" | Poetry |
| W. S. Merwin | "To Zbigniew Herbert's Bicycle" | The New Yorker |
| Stanley Moss | "A History of Color" | American Poetry Review |
| Heather Moss | "Dear Alter Ego" | Croonenbergh's Fly |
| Paul Muldoon | "The Loaf" | The New York Review of Books |
| Peggy Munson | "Four Deaths That Happened Daily" | Spoon River Poetry Review |
| Marilyn Nelson | "Asparagus" | Rattapallax |
| Daniel Nester | "Poem for the Novelist Whom I Forced to Write a Poem" |
Spinning Jenny |
| Naomi Shihab Nye | "What Happened to Everybody" | LUNA |
| Ishle Yi Park | "Queen Min Bi" | Barrow Street |
| Robert Pinsky | "Anniversary" | The Washington Post Magazine |
| Kevin Prufer | "What the Paymaster Said" | Witness |
| Ed Roberson | "Sequoia sempervirens" | Callaloo |
| Vijay Seshadri | "The Disappearances" | The New Yorker |
| Myra Shapiro | "For Nazim Hikmet in the Old Prison, Now a Four Seasons Hotel" |
Rattapallax |
| Alan Shapiro | "Sleet" | Third Coast |
| Bruce Smith | "Song with a Child's Pacifier in It" | Boston Review |
| Charlie Smith | "There's Trouble Everywhere" | Poetry |
| Maura Stanton | "Translating" | Mid-American Review |
| Ruth Stone | "Lines" | PMS |
| James Tate | "The Restaurant Business" | New American Writing |
| William Tremblay | "The Lost Boy" | LUNA |
| Natasha Trethewey | "After Your Death" | New England Review |
| David Wagoner | "On Being Asked to Discuss Poetic Theory" | 88 |
| Ronald Wallace | "In a Rut" | Poetry Northwest |
| Lewis Warsh | "Premonition" | The World |
| Susan Wheeler | "In Sky" | Boston Review |
| Richard Wilbur | "Man Running" | The New Yorker |
| C. K. Williams | "The World" | The New Yorker |
| Terence Winch | "My Work" | New American Writing |
| David Wojahn | "Scrabble with Matthews" | Poetry |
| Robert Wrigley | "Clemency" | The Kenyon Review |
| Anna Ziegler | "After the Opening, 1932" | The Threepenny Review |
| Ahmos Zu-Bolton II | "Reading the Bones: a Blackjack Moses nightmare" |
American Poetry Review |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Poetry 2003
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 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)
“There’s a wonderful family called Stein:
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein.
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Ep’s statues are junk,
And no-one can understand Ein.”
—Anonymous.
“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)