Poets and Poems Included
| Poet | Poem | Publication(s) where poem previously appeared |
| Kim Addonizio | "Verities" | Poetry |
| Dick Allen | "See the Pyramids Along the Nile" | Boulevard |
| Craig Arnold | from "Couple from Hell" | Barrow Street |
| John Ashbery | "A Worldly Country" | The New Yorker |
| Jesse Ball | "Speech in a Chamber" | The Paris Review |
| Krista Benjamin | "Letter from My Ancestors" | Margie |
| Ilya Bernstein | "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" | Fulcrum |
| Gaylord Brewer | "Apologia to the Blue Tit" | River Styx |
| Tom Christopher | "Rhetorical Figures" | Hayden's Ferry Review |
| Laura Cronk | "Sestina for the Newly Married" | LIT |
| Carl Dennis | "Our Generation" | The Kenyon Review |
| Stephen Dobyns | "Toward Some Bright Moment" | American Poetry Review |
| Denise Duhamel | "Please Don't Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen" | Columbia Poetry Review |
| Stephen Dunn | "The Land of Is" | The Georgia Review |
| Beth Ann Fennelly | "Souvenir" | Shenandoah |
| Megan Gannon | "List of First Lines" | Third Coast |
| Amy Gerstler | "For My Niece Sidney, Age Six" | American Poetry Review |
| Sarah Gorham | "Bust of a Young Boy in the Snow" | Five Points |
| George Green | "The Death of Winckelmann" | The New Criterion |
| Debora Greger | "My First Mermaid" | The Kenyon Review |
| Eamon Grennan | "The Curve" | Five Points |
| Daniel Gutstein | "Monsieur Pierre est mort" | Rhino |
| R. S. Gwynn | from "Sects from A to Z" | Poetry |
| Rachel Hadas | "Bird, Weasel, Fountain" | The Cincinnati Review |
| Mark Halliday | "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Jim Harrison | "On the Way to the Doctor's" | New Letters |
| Robert Hass | "The Problem of Describing Color" | The New Yorker |
| Christian Hawkey | "Hour" | CROWD |
| Terrance Hayes | "Talk" | Gulf Coast |
| Bob Hicok | "My career as a director" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Katia Kapovich | "The Ferry" | Harvard Review |
| Laura Kasischke | "At Gettysburg" | New England Review |
| Joy Katz | "Just a second ago" | The Cincinnati Review |
| David Kirby | "Seventeen Ways from Tuesday" | Subtropics |
| Jennifer L. Knox | "The Laws of Probability in Levittown" | The Hat |
| Ron Koertge | "Found" | Iodine Poetry Journal |
| John Koethe | "Sally's Hair" | The Kenyon Review |
| Mark Kraushaar | "Tonight" | The Gettysburg Review |
| Julie Larios | "Double Abecedarian: Please Give Me" | The Georgia Review |
| Dorianne Laux | "Demographic" | The Alaska Quarterly Review |
| Reb Livingston | "That's Not Butter" | MiPoesias |
| Thomas Lux | "Eyes Scooped Out and Replaced by Hot Coals" | Five Points |
| Paul Muldoon | "Blenheim" | Five Points |
| Marilyn Nelson | "Albert Hinckley" | The Cincinnati Review |
| Richard Newman | "Briefcase of Sorrow" | Crab Orchard Review |
| Mary Oliver | "The Poet with His Face in His Hands" | The New Yorker |
| Danielle Pafunda | "Small Town Rocker" | The Canary |
| Mark Pawlak | "The Sharper the Berry" | New American Writing |
| Bao Phi | "Race" | Michigan Quarterly Review |
| Donald Platt | "Two Poets Meet" | Iowa Review |
| Lawrence Raab | "The Great Poem" | Nightsun |
| Betsy Retallack | "Roadside Special" | Endicott Review |
| Liz Rosenberg | "The Other Woman's Point of View" | The Kenyon Review |
| J. Allyn Rosser | "Discounting Lynn" | failbetter.com |
| Kay Ryan | "Thin" | Poetry |
| Mary Jo Salter | "A Phone Call to the Future" | The Georgia Review |
| Vejay Sheshadri | "Memoir" | The New Yorker |
| Alan Shapiro | "Misjudged Fly Ball" | The Cincinnati Review |
| Charles Simic | "House of Cards" | The Virginia Quarterly Review |
| Gerald Stern | "Homesick" | Ecotone |
| James Tate | "The Loser" | Crazyhorse |
| Sue Ellen Thompson | "Body English" | Connecticut Review |
| Tony Towle | "Misprision" | LIT |
| Alison Townsend | "What I Never Told You About the Abortion" | Margie |
| Paul Violi | "Counterman" | Shiny International |
| Ellen Bryant Voigt | "Harvesting the Cows" | The Kenyon Review |
| David Wagoner | "The Driver" | Margie |
| Charles Harper Webb | "Prayer to Tear the Sperm-Dam Down" | The Atlanta Review |
| C. K. Williams | "Ponies" | The Atlantic Monthly |
| Terence Winch | "Sex Elegy" | Verse |
| Susan Wood | "Gratification" | Five Points |
| Franz Wright | "A Happy Thought" | FIELD |
| Robert Wrigley | "Religion" | The Gettysburg Review |
| David Yezzi | "The Call" | New England Review |
| Dean Young | "Clam Ode" | POOL |
Read more about this topic: The Best American Poetry 2006
Famous quotes containing the words poets, poems and/or included:
“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)
“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.
“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)