The Best American Poetry 2002, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman, with poems chosen by guest editor Robert Creeley.
The first print run for the book was 30,000.[1]
Amy Bracken Sparks, reviewing the book in The Plain Dealer, wrote that Creeley's choices "are not poems accessible to all; they are innovative in both concept and structure, and therefore risk losing the reader. [...] Yes, it's a bit of work when not everything is explained. Pretension lurks about, but there's always Diane Di Prima keeping everything earthbound and Sharon Olds writing yet again about her father."[2]
Carmela Ciuraru, writing in The San Diego Union-Tribune, called Creeley's selection "bold and unconventional. Even his selections of more 'established' names prove to be those who have defied people's expectations — poets such as John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Alice Notley and John Yau." Ciuraru found Juliana Spahr's prose poem "frustratingly tedius" but called the poem by Donald Hall "beautiful".[3]
Contents |
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| Rae Armantrout | "Up to Speed" | Chicago Review |
| John Ashbery | "The Pearl Fishers" | Verse |
| Amiri Baraka | "The Golgotha Local" | Skanky Possum |
| Charles Bernstein | "12²" | Slope |
| Anselm Berrigan | from "Zero Star Hotel" | Bombay Gin |
| Frank Bidart | "Injunction" | Ploughshares |
| Jenny Boully | "The Body" | Seneca Review |
| T. Alan Broughton | "Ballad of the Comely Woman" | Beloit Poetry Journal |
| Michael Burkard | "What I Threw into the Grave" | jubilat |
| Anne Carson | "Opposed Glimpse of Alice James, Garth James, Henry James, Robertson James and William James" | The Threepenny Review |
| Elizabeth Biller Chapman | "On the Screened Porch" | Poetry |
| Tom Clark | "Lullaby for Cuckoo" | Skanky Possum |
| Peter Cooley | "Corpus Delicti" | Pleiades |
| Clark Coolidge | "Traced Red Dot" | New American Writing |
| Ruth Danon | "Long after (Mallarmé)" | 3rd Bed |
| Diane di Prima | "Midsummer" | Barrow Street |
| Theodore Enslin | "Moon Cornering" | Chicago Review |
| Elaine Equi | "O Patriarchy" | Skanky Possum |
| Clayton Eshleman | "Animals out of the Snow" | Skanky Possum |
| Norman Finkelstein | "Drones and Chants" | Hambone |
| Jeffrey Franklin | "To a Student Who Reads 'The Second Coming' as Sexual Autobiography" | New England Review |
| Benjamin Friedlander | "Independence Day" | Can We Have Our Ball Back? |
| Gene Frumkin | "Surreal Love Life" | Hambone |
| Forrest Gander | "Carried Across" | The Kenyon Review |
| Peter Gizzi | "Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil " | Boston Review |
| Louise Glück | "Reunion" | Slate |
| Albert Goldbarth | "The Gold Star" | The Antioch Review |
| Donald Hall | "Affirmation" | The New Yorker |
| Michael S. Harper | "TCAT serenade: 4 4 98 (New Haven)" | Harvard Review |
| Everett Hoagland | "you: should be shoo be" | Crux |
| Fanny Howe | "9/11/2001" | Can We Have Our Ball Back? |
| Ronald Johnson | "Poem" ("across dark stream") | Hambone |
| Maxine Kumin | "Flying" | Connecticut Review |
| Bill Kushner | "Great" | Boondoggle |
| Joseph Lease | "Broken World" (For James Assatly)" | Colorado Review |
| Timothy Liu | "Felix Culpa" | Ploughshares |
| Mộng-Lan | "Trail" | jubilat |
| Jackson Mac Low | "And Even You Elephants? (Stein 139/Titles 35)" | Deluxe Rubber Chicken |
| Nathaniel Mackey | "On Antiphon Island" | jubilat |
| Steve Malmude | "Perfect Front Door" | The Hat |
| Sarah Manguso | "Address to Winnie in Paris" | jubilat |
| Harry Mathews | "Butter & Eggs" | Boston Review |
| Duncan McNaughton | "The quarry (1-13)" | Hambone |
| W. S. Merwin | "To My Father's Houses" | The New York Review of Books |
| Philip Metres | "Ashberries: Letters" | New England Review |
| Jennifer Moxley | "Behind the Orbits" | Pressed Wafer |
| Eileen Myles | "Sympathy" | American Poetry Review |
| Maggie Nelson | "Sunday Night" | The Hat |
| Charles North | "Sonnet" | Boston Review |
| Alice Notley | "Haunt" | Pharos |
| D. Nurkse | "Snapshot from Niagara" | Barrow Street |
| Sharon Olds | "Frontis Nulla Fides" | Ploughshares |
| George Oppen | "Twenty-six Fragments" | Facture |
| Jena Osman | "Starred Together" | Hambone |
| Carl Phillips | "Fretwork" | The Threepenny Review |
| Pam Rehm | "'A roof is no guarantee...'" | Chicago Review |
| Adrienne Rich | "Ends of the Earth" | American Poetry Review |
| Corinne Robins | "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" | Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics |
| Elizabeth Robinson | "Tenets of Roots and Trouble" | Hambone |
| Ira Sadoff | "Self-Portrait with Critic" | AGNI |
| Hugh Seidman | "I Do Not Know Myself" | Poetry |
| Reginald Shepherd | "You Also, Nightingale" | New England Review |
| Ron Silliman | "For Larry Eigner, Silent" | Facture |
| Dale Smith | "Poem after Haniel Long" | Mungo vs. Ranger |
| Gustaf Sobin | "In Way of Introduction" | Hambone |
| Juliana Spahr | "Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours" | Chicago Review |
| John Taggart | "Call" | The Café Review |
| Sam Truitt | from "Raton Rex, Part I" | Boston Review |
| Jean Valentine | "Do flies remember us" | Colorado Review |
| Lewis Warsh | "Eye Contact" | The Hat |
| Claire Nicolas White | "Return to Saint Odilienberg, Easter 2000" | Witness |
| Nathan Whiting | "In Charge" | Hanging Loose |
| Dara Wier | "Illumined with the Light of Fitfully Burning Censers" | Volt |
| Charles Wright | "Nostalgia II" | Ploughshares |
| John Yau | "A Sheath of Pleasant Voices" | Verse |
|
|
|||||