The Best American Poetry 2000 (), a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Rita Dove.
In her introduction, Dove defended the idea that poets should be politically committed: "[W]e poets cannot afford to shit ourselves away in our convalescent homes, boning our specialized fools, while the barbarians — no matter if they are religious fanatics, materialistic profitmongers, crazy silver-tongued niggas sleeping in libraries, or merely more talented MFA drop-outs who actually care about 'art' — continue to sharpen their broadswords. Stepping into the fray of life does not mean dissipation of one's creative powers [...] The reward is a connection on a visceral level with the world [...]."
Speaking of her selection process, Dove indicated that once potential selections had been identified, either via her own reading or as submitted to her by the series editor, David Lehman, "[m]y method was simple: Read the poems without looking at the author's name, if possible, and put aside for further consideration only those pieces which made me catch my breath (then, look back at the names and decide from there). The final criterion was Emily Dickinson's famed description--if I felt the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in. And in the lofty words of Billy Collins, 'This music is loud yet so confidential./ I cannot help feeling even more/ like the center of the universe'." Dove, Rita, Introduction "The Best American Poetry 2000", 2000
Michael Shannon Friedman, reviewing the book in The Charleston Gazette, noted that Dove had admitted the "subjectivity" of her selections, and observed that, in his own view, the year's best selections were poems by Barbara Hamby, Thomas Lux, Stanly Plumly, Susan Wood and Mary Oliver.[ ]Friedman, Michael Shannon, "Editor of 'best' admits subjectivity", book review, The Charleston Gazette, Charleston, West Virginia, November 19, 2000, page P3F, as accessed from Newsbank.com Web site, October 13, 2007
Poets and poems included Poet Poem Where poem previously appeared Kim Addonizio "Virgin Spring" Barrow Street Pamela Alexander "Semiotics" Boston Book Review A. R. Ammons "Shot Glass" The New Yorker Julianna Baggott "Mary Todd on Her Deathbed" Quarterly West Erin Belieu "Choose Your Garden" TriQuarterly Richard Blanco "Mango, Number 61" TriQuarterly Janet Bowdan "The Year" Denver Quarterly Grace Butcher "Crow Is Walking" Poetry Lucille Clifton "Signs" Callaloo Billy Collins "Man Listening to Disc" The Atlantic Monthly Jim Daniels "Between Periods" Crab Orchard Review Linh Dinh "The Most Beautiful Word" Xconnect Gregory Djanikian "Immigrant Picnic" Poetry Denise Duhamel "Incest Taboo" Barrow Street Christopher Edgar "Birthday" The Germ Karl Elder "Alpha Images" Beloit Poetry Journal Lynn Emanuel "Walt. I Salute You!" Boulevard B. H. Fairchild "Mrs. Hill" The Southern ReviewCharles Fort "We Did Not Fear the Father" The Georgia Review Frank X. Gaspar "Seven Roses" The Georgia Review Elton Glaser "And in the Afternoons I Botanized" Parnassus (1973 magazine) Ray Gonzalez "For the Other World" Crab Orchard Review Jennifer Grotz "The Last Living Castrato" New England Review Thom Gunn "The Dump" The Threepenny Review Mark Halliday "Before" Xconnect Barbara Hamby "Ode to the Lost Luggage Warehouse at the Rome Airport" Five Points Forrest Hamer "Goldsboro Narratives" Callaloo Brenda Hillman "Air for Mercury" Boston Review Marsha Janson "Considering the Demise of Everything" Harvard Review Mark Jarman "Epistle" Meridian Patricia Spears Jones "Ghosts" Crab Orchard Review Rodney Jones "Plea for Forgiveness" The Atlantic Monthly Donald Justice "Ralph: A Love Story" The New Criterion Olena Kalytiak Davis "Six Apologies, Lord" The Antioch Review David Kirby "At the Grave of Harold Goldstein" Parnassus (1973 magazine) Carolyn Kizer "The Oration" The Threepenny Review Lynne Knight "The Muse of the Actual" The Southern Review Yusef Komunyakaa "The Goddess of Quotas Laments" TriQuarterly Thomas Lux "Henry Clay's Mouth" The Atlantic Monthly Lynne McMahon "We Take Our Children to Ireland" The Southern Review W. S. Merwin "The Hours of Darkness" Poetry Susan Mitchell "Lost Parrot" The Atlantic Monthly Jean Nordhaus "Aunt Lily and Frederick the Great" The Gettysburg Review Mary Oliver "Work" The Southern Review Michael Palmer "I Do Not" American Poetry Review Paul Perry "Paris" Callaloo Carl Phillips "'All art...'" Boulevard Robert Pinsky "Samurai Song" The New Yorker Donald Platt "History & Bikinis" Shenandoah Stanley Plumly "Kunitz Tending Roses" Poetry Lawrence Raab "Permanence" The Virginia Quarterly Review Thomas Rabbitt "The Beach at Falmouth Heights, Summer, 1952" Black Warrior Review Mary Jo Salter "Au Pair" Poetry Rebecca Seiferle "Welcome to Ithaca" Partisan Review Brenda Shaughnessy "Postfeminism" Chelsea Laurie Sheck from "Black Series" Seneca Review Reginald Shepherd "Semantics at Four P.M." American Letters & Commentary (magazine) Richard Siken "The Dislocated Room" Indiana Review Cathy Song "Mother of Us All" Shenandoah Gary Soto "Chit-Chat with the Junior League Women" Poetry Gabriel Spera "In a Field Outside the Town" Poetry A. E. Stallings "Asphodel" Beloit Poetry Journal Susan Stewart "Wings" American Poetry Review Adrienne Su "The English Canon" New Letters Pamela Sutton "There Is a Lake of Ice on the Moon" American Poetry Review Dorothea Tanning "No Palms" The Yale Review Natasha Trethewey "Limen" New England Review Quincy Troupe "Song" Tin House Reetika Vazirani "Rahim Multani" Meridian Paul Violi "As I Was Telling David and Alexandra Kelley" The World Derek Walcott "Pissarro at Dusk" The New Republic Richard Wilbur "Fabrications" The Yale Review Susan Wood "Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair" Ploughshares John Yau "Borrowed Love Poems" Boston Review Dean Young "The Infirmament" New American Writing
Best American poems of the twentieth century For this book in the series, Lehman, the general editor "invited his 14 past and present guest editors to list their choices for 15 best poems of the century. Most did, but Adrienne Rich refused flat out, and Louise Glück wrote a thoughtful letter, also declining. It said, in part: 'There can't be, I think, the best of the great ... What remains is preference.'" Gutin, JoAnn, "Freedom from choice", Salon, December 6, 2000, accessed January 21, 2007
From the responses Lehman got, he drew up a composite list of 32 poets whose work was nominated by at least two guest editors. In alphabetical order:
A. R. Ammons W. H. Auden John Ashbery John Berryman Elizabeth Bishop Gwendolyn Brooks Hart Crane Robert Creeley
T. S. Eliot Robert Frost Robert Hayden Langston Hughes Randall Jarrell Kenneth Koch Robert Lowell James Merrill
Marianne Moore Frank O'Hara Sylvia Plath Ezra Pound Kenneth Rexroth Edwin Arlington Robinson Theodore Roethke James Schuyler
Delmore Schwartz William Stafford Gertrude Stein Wallace Stevens Robert Penn Warren Richard Wilbur William Carlos Williams James Wright
See also 2000 in poetry
Notes
External links Web page for contents of the book, with links to each publication where the poems originally appeared