# The Best American Poetry 2002

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.
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."
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".

## Poets and poems included

| 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 |