1 Anders Carlson-Wee: Brilliant, empathic poem, “How-To,” published in The Nation—then a mob ends his career.
2 Stephanie Burt: Harvard professor and Nation poetry editor publishes Carlson-Wee—caves to the mob.
3 Carmen Giminez-Smith: Nation co-editor, with Burt, apologizes for “disparaging and ableist language” giving “offense,” “harm,” and “pain” to “several communities.”
4 Grace Schulman: Former Nation poetry editor: “never once did we apologize for publishing a poem.”
5 Patricia Smith: Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, a slam poet champion, leads Twitter outrage which greets Carlson-Wee’s Nation poem.
6 Ben Mazer: Selected Poems out, discovering unpublished Delmore Schwartz material for Library of America.
7 Rupi Kaur: Milk and Honey, her debut self-published book of viral Instagram ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ verse, has put a young woman from Toronto on top of the poetry popularity heap.
8 Tyler Knott Gregson: NY Times pointed out this Instagram poet’s first collection of poetry was a national bestseller.
9 Christopher Poindexter: This Instagram poet has been compared to Shakespeare by Huffpost. (He’s nothing like Shakespeare.)
10 Nikita Gill: Probably the best of the feminist Instagram poets.
11 Yrsa Daley-Ward: Her Instapoetry memoir, The Terrible, was praised by Katy Waldman in the New Yorker.
12 Marilyn Chin: Her New and Selected (Norton) this October contains her famous poem, “How I Got That Name.”
13 Frank Bidart: Awarded 2018 Pulitzer for his Collected Poems.
14 William Logan: New prose book: Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods. New book of poems, Rift of Light, proves again his formal verse is perhaps the best poetry published today.
15 Kevin Young: New New Yorker poetry editor.
16 Evie Shockley: Was on short list for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
17 David Lehman: Series editor for Best American Poetry since 1988—30 years.
18 Linda Ashok: Poet (Whorelight), songwriter (“Beautiful Scar”) and champion of Indian poetry in English.
19 Derrick Michael Hudson: Who still remembers this “Chinese” BAP poet?
20. Dana Gioia: Guest editor of Lehman’s Best American Poetry 2018.
21 Akhil Katyal: “Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?”
22 Urvashi Bahuguna: “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/It was Boy.”
23 Jeet Thayil: “you don’t want to hear her say,/Why, why did you not look after me?”
24 Sridala Swami: Jorge Louis Borges of English Indian poetry.
25 Adil Jussawalla: Born in Mumbai in 1940, another Anglo-Indian poet ignored in the U.S.
26 Rochelle D’Silva: Indian slam poet who writes in English.
27 Billy Collins: Pajama and Slippers school of poetry. And nothing wrong with that at all.
28 W.S. Merwin: One of the few living major poets born in the 20s (goodbye Ashbery, Hall).
29 Valerie Macon: Quickly relieved of her NC poet laureate duties because of her lack of creds.
30 Mary Angela Douglas: a magical bygone spirit who sweetly found her way onto the Internet.
31 Stephen Cole: Who is this wonderful, prolific lyric poet? The daily Facebook fix.
32 Sophia Naz: “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”
33 Rochelle Potkar: “But can I run away from the one cell that is the whole Self?”
34 Helen Vendler: No one finally cares what non-poets say about poetry.
35 Huzaifa Pandit: “Bear the drought of good poems a little longer”
36 N Ravi Shankar: “a toy train in a full moon night”
37 Sharon Olds: Like Edna Millay, a somewhat famous outsider, better than the men.
38 Nabina Das: “the familiar ant crawling up”
39 Kaveh Akbar: “the same paradise/where dead lab rats go.”
40 Terrance Hayes: “I love poems more than/money and pussy.”
41 Dan Sociu: Plain-spoken, rapturous voice of Romania
42 Glyn Maxwell: Editor of Derek Walcott’s poems— The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
43 Arjun Rajendran: Indian poet in English who writes sassy, seductive poems.
44 A.E. Stallings: With Logan, and a few others, the Formalist torch.
45 Patricia Lockwood: Subsiding from viral into respectability.
46 Marjorie Perloff: An old-fashioned, shaming of NYU professor Avital Ronell in the Nimrod Reitman case.
47 Daipayan Nair: Great love and sex poet of India
48 Shohreh Laici: Proud young voice of restless, poetic Iran
49 Smita Sahay: “You flowed down the blue bus/into a brown puddle/below the yellow lamp post/and hung there”
50 Mary Oliver: An early fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she assisted Edna’s sister, Norma, in assembling the great poet’s work.
51 Natasha Trethewey: Former U.S. laureate, her New and Selected favored to win National Book Award this year.
52 Anand Thakore: “a single tusk/White as a quarter-moon in mid-July,/Before the coming of a cloud.”
53 Carl Dennis: Author of the poem, “The God Who Loves You.”
54 Tony Hoagland: Today’s Robert Bly.
55 Meera Nair: “I live in a house/Someone else has loved in”
56 Fanny Howe: “Eons of lily-building/emerged in the one flower.”
57 Rita Dove: Won Pulitzer in 1987. Her The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) was panned by Vendler and Perloff.
58 Diana Khoi Nguyen: Poet and multimedia artist studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
59 Matthew Zapruder: Poetry editor of the New York Times magazine since 2016.
60 Jenny Xie: “I pull apart the evening with a fork.”
61 Mary Jo Bang: Chair of the National Book Award judges.
62 Jim Behrle: Hates David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series and “rhyme schemes.”
63 Semeen Ali: “diverting your attention/for a minute/contains my life/my undisclosed life”
64 George Bilgere: Ohio’s slightly more sophisticated Billy Collins.
65 Aishwarya Iyer: “When rain goes where will you find/The breath lost to the coming of love?”
66 Sukrita Kumar: “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
67 Sushmita Gupta: “So detached, so solid, so just, so pure. A glory unbeholden, never seen or met before.”
68 Merryn Juliette: “before your body knows the earth”
69 John Cooper Clarke: “The fucking clocks are fucking wrong/The fucking days are fucking long”
70 Justin Phillip Reed: His book (2018) is Indecency.
71 Cathy Park Hong: Her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” rules our era. The avant-garde is no longer automatically cool.
72 Carolyn Forche: “No one finds/ you no one every finds you.”
73 Zachary Bos: “The sun like a boat drowns.”
74 Bob Dylan: “You could have done better but I don’t mind”
75 Kanye West: The musical guest when SNL open its 44th season September 29th
76 Raquel Salas Rivera: “i shall invoke the shell petrified by shadows”
77 Jennifer Reeser: Indigenous, her new collection, will be available soon.
78 Forrest Gander: Be With from New Directions is his latest book.
79 Arun Sagar: “through glass and rain./Each way out/is worthy, each way leads/to clarity and mist,/and music.”
80 Joanna Valente: “Master said I am too anti-social.”
81 Richard Howard: Like Merwin, an American treasure, born in the 1920s.
82 J.Michael Martinez: Museum of the Americas on 2018 National Book Award longlist.
83 Amber Tamblyn: The actress/poet’s dad does the amazing flips in the movie West Side Story.
84 Paul Rowe: Stunning translation of Cesario Verde’s “O Sentimento dum Ocidental.”
85 Jill Bialosky: Norton editor caught plagiarizing by William Logan
86 Robert Pinsky: Editor of the 25 year anniversary edition of Best American Poetry in 2013.
87 Philip Nikolayev: Poet, linguist, philosopher: One Great Line theory of poetry is recent.
88 Ada Limón: The poet lives in New York, California, and Kentucky.
89 Rae Armantrout: Her poems examine, in her words, “a lot of largely unexamined baggage.”
90 Alex Dimitrov: “I want even the bad things to do over.”
91 Sam Sax: “Prayer for the Mutilated World” in September Poetry.
92 Danielle Georges: “You should be called beacon. You should be called flame.”
93 Stephen Sturgeon: “These errors are correct.”
94 Hieu Minh Nguyen: “Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.”
95 Richard Blanco: presidents, presidents, presidents.
96 Kent Johnson: His magazine Dispatches from the Poetry Wars continues the fight against poetry as commodity/career choice.
97 Parish Tiwari: “between falling rain/and loneliness…/the song/that once was ours”
98 Eliana Vanessa: Rrrrr. Lyric internet poet of the Tooth, Death, Love, Sex and Claw school.
99 Rachel Custer: Best known poem is “How I Am Like Donald Trump”
100 Jos Charles: “wen abeyance/accidentlie”