The Best American Poetry 1994, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor A. R. Ammons.
Poets and poems included Poet Poem Where poem previously appeared Dick Allen "A Short History of the Vietnam War Years" The Gettysburg Review Tom Andrews "Cinema Vérité" Field John Ashbery "Myrtle" The New Yorker Burlin Barr "Tremendous Mood Swings" Grand Street Cynthia Bond "What You Want Means What You Can Afford" Ascent Catherine Bowman "Demographics" TriQuarterly George Bradley "The Fire Fetched Down" The Paris ReviewCharles Bukowski "me against the world" Urbanus Rebecca Byrkit "The Only Dance There Is" New England Review Amy Clampitt "A Catalpa Tree on West Twelfth Street" The New York Times Michelle T. Clinton "Tantrum Girl Responds to Death" The Kenyon Review James Air (GCA) "Sestina" The Paris Review Ramola Dharmaraj "full of rain, the word" Green Mountains Review Thomas M. Disch "The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play in One Act" The Hudson Review Mark Doty "Difference" Boulevard Denise Duhamel "Bulimia" Poet Lore Tony Esolen "Northwestern Mathematics" Fine Madness Richard Fischer "Life Drawing" Poetry Alice Fulton "The Priming Is a Negligee" Southwest Review Allison Funk "After Dark" Poetry Jorie Graham "In the Hotel" The New Yorker Debora Greger "The Frog in the Swimming Pool" The New Republic Donald Hall "Another Elegy" Iowa Review Forrest Hamer "Getting Happy" ZYZZYVA Lyn Hejinian "The Polar Circle" Grand Street Roald Hoffmann "Deceptively Like a Solid" Glass Technology John Hollander "Variations on a Fragment by Trumball Stickney" The Paris Review Janet Holmes "The Love of the Flesh" Tar River Poetry Paul Hoover "Baseball" Another Chicago Magazine Richard Howard "A Lost Art" Poetry Phyllis Janowitz "The Necessary Angel" River Styx Mark Jarman "Unholy Sonnets" The New Criterion Alice Jones "The Foot" ZYZZYVA Rodney Jones "Contempt" Michigan Quarterly Review Brigit Pegeen Kelly "Courting the Famous Figures at the Grotto of Improbable Thought" Northwest Review Caroline Knox "A Rune" Fine Madness Kenneth Koch "One Train May Hide Another" The New York Review of Books Dionisio D. Martínez "Avant-Dernieres Pensees" Seneca Review J. D. McClatchy "Found Parable" The New Yorker Jeffrey McDaniel "Following Her to Sleep" Ploughshares James McManus "Spike Logic" Salmagundi James Merrill "Family Week at Oracle Ranch" The New Yorker W. S. Merwin "One of the Lives" The New York Review of Books Stephen Paul Miller "I Was on a Golf Course the Day John Cage Died of a Stroke" Poetry New York Jenny Mueller "Allegory" Colorado Review Harryette Mullen "From Muse & Drudge" AGNI Brighde Mullins "At the Lakehouse" Colorado Review Fred Muratori "Sensible Qualities" No Roses Review Sharon Olds "The Knowing" American Poetry Review Maureen Owen "Them" Poetry New York Kathleen Peirce "Divided Touch, Divided Color" Colorado Review Carl Phillips "A Mathematics of Breathing" AGNI Lloyd Schwartz "Pornography" The Paris Review Frederick Seidel "Pol Pot" American Poetry Review Alan Shapiro "The Letter" The Threepenny Review Angela Shaw "Courtesan" Chelsea Charles Simic "Read Your Fate" The New Yorker W. D. Snodgrass "Snow Songs" The Kenyon Review Elizabeth Spires "The Robed Heart" Iowa Review A. E. Stallings "Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses" Beloit Poetry Journal Mark Strand "The Mysterious Maps" The New Yorker Sharan Strange "Offering" Callaloo May Swenson "Sleeping with Boa" The Yale Review Janet Sylvester "Modern Times" Boulevard James Tate "Like a Scarf" Colorado Review Patricia Traxler "Death of a Distant In-Law" AGNI William Wadsworth "The Snake in the Garden Considers Daphne" The Paris Review Kevin Walker "My Talk with an Elegant Man" The Bridge Rosanne Wasserman "Putting in a Word" Boulevard Bruce Weigl "The One" American Poetry Review Joshua Weiner "Who They Were" The Threepenny Review Henry Weinfield "Song for the In-Itselfand For-Itself" Poetry New York Michael White "Camille Monet sur son lit de mort" The New Republic Richard Wilbur "A Digression" The New Yorker Dean Young "Upon Hearing of My Friend's Marriage Breaking Up" The Threepenny Review
See also 1994 in poetry
Notes
External links Web page for contents of the book, with links to each publication where the poems originally appeared