We asked contributors to name five indispensable poems. The results of our survey are listed below, in alphabetical order by poet. No poem was named more than once. Editor picks are included (David Trinidad did not pick his own poem).
Ai, “The Kid”
Anna Akhmatova, “My imagination, obediently”
Maya Angelou, “And Still I Rise”
John Ashbery, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape”
John Ashbery, “The System”
Chase Berggrun, “Radicle”
Frank Bidart, “Coat”
Kayleb Rae Candrilli, “One Geography of Belonging”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
Lucille Clifton, “Cruelty”
Wanda Coleman, “Aptitude Test”
Elise Cowen, “Each Deformation”
Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”
Emily Dickinson, “God made a little Gentian -”
Emily Dickinson, “I Watched the Moon around the House”
Emily Dickinson, “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -”
Emily Dickinson, “One Anguish - in a Crowd -”
Emily Dickinson, “Success is counted sweetest”
Emily Dickinson, “The shut me up in Prose -”
Tim Dlugos, “G-9”
Cornelius Eady, “Gratitude”
Eve L. Ewing, “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife”
Forough Farrokhzad, “I Feel Sorry for the Garden”
Vievee Francis, “Taking It”
Ross Gay, “A Small Needful Fact”
Hafizah Geter, “The Pledge”
Kahlil Gibran, “The Grave-Digger”
Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”
Jessica Greenbaum, “No Ideas but in Things”
Thom Gunn, “Lament”
Essex Hemphill, “American Wedding”
David Hernandez, “All-American”
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”
Tyehimba Jess, Olio
Parneshia Jones, “What Would Gwendolyn Brooks Do?”
Bob Kaufman, “Blues Note”
Dorothea Lasky, “Ever Read a Book Called AWE?”
Dorianne Laux, “Facts About the Moon”
Federico García Lorca, “Death”
Audre Lorde, “A Woman Speaks”
Nabila Lovelace, “For the Days that are Today”
Vladimir Mayakovsky, “To Brooklyn Bridge”
Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day
Claude McKay, “America”
Marianne Moore, “Those Various Scalpels”
Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T
Harryette Mullen, “We Are Not Responsible”
Angel Nafis, “Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot”
Sharon Olds, “The Race”
George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”
Sylvia Plath, “Medallion”
Muriel Rukeyser, “Book of the Dead”
Chika Sagawa, “Flower” (trans. Sawako Nakayasu)
Tomaž Šalamun, “Gaza”
Sappho, “He seems to me like a god”
Aram Saroyan, “Lighght”
Steve Scafidi, “To Whoever Set My Truck on Fire”
James Schuyler, “February”
James Schuyler, “The Morning of the Poem”
Vijay Seshadri, “Personal Essay”
Anne Sexton, “Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West”
Patricia Smith, “Incendiary Art”
Wallace Stevens, “Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers”
David Trinidad, “Anne Sexton Visits Court Green”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (any version)
John Wieners, “Poem for Trapped Things”
William Carlos Williams, “Pastoral” (with the ending “no one will believe this of vast import to the nation”)
William Carlos Williams, Paterson
William Carlos Williams, “The Pink Locust”
Elizabeth Willis, “Plot”
Jane Wong, “No Need for the Moon to Shine in It”
William Wordsworth, “Old Man Traveling”