The Best American Poetry 2001, a volume in The Best American Poetry series, was edited by David Lehman and by guest editor Robert Hass.
In his introduction, Hass wrote, "There are roughly three traditions in American poetry at this point: a metrical tradition that can be very nervy and that is also basically classical in impulse; a strong central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, split between the impulses of an inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two; and an experimental tradition that is usually more passionate about form than content, perception than emotion, restless with the conventions of the art, skeptical about the political underpinnings of current practice, and intent on inventing a new one, or at least undermining what seems repressive in the current formed style. [...] At the moment there are poets doing good, bad, and indifferent work in all these ranges."
Speaking of the selection process for his editorship, Hass observed that he received "boxes...[of] xeroxes and notations of the indefatigable David Lehman....I had marked for rereading a couple of hundred poems [myself] and I had David's sometimes overlapping lists..." http://bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/volumes/?id=2001.
Maureen McLane, in a book review in The Chicago Tribune, said of Hass' description that "it's hard to imagine a more judicious account of major tendencies."[1]
"While many charming, witty poems have made it into this anthology, there are plenty of others that would seem to evade not only the perils of being charming but indeed the strictures of being a poem, conventionally understood," McLane wrote. She found the selections by Joshua Clover Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cal Bedient, Robert Bly, Michael Burkard and Claudia Rankine confusing (but not necessarily bad poems for that reason), and praised the work by Brenda Hillman, Louise Glück, Alan Feldman, Bernard Welt, Joshua Clover, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer, Lydia Davis, Rachel Rose, David Kirby, Jewelle Gomez, Noelle Kocot and Grace Paley.[1]
Hass also included newly published work by the late Elizabeth Bishop and James Schuyler.[1] Schuyler's poem was discovered by David Lehman in May 1994 in John Ashbery's archive at Harvard's Houghton Library and appeared six years later in "The New Yorker".[2] One of the poems Hass chose for the volume was by his wife,[3] Brenda Hillman.
| Poet | Poem | Where poem previously appeared |
| "Notes for a Sermon on the Mount" | Another Chicago Magazine | |
| "The Plan" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Crossroads in the Past" | The New York Review of Books | |
| "Jazz" | The Nebraska Review | |
| "Crossed-Over, Fiend-Snitched, X-ed Out" | New American Writing | |
| "When the Gods Put on Meter" | Colorado Review | |
| "Vague Poem" | The New Yorker | |
| "The French Generals" | The Paris Review | |
| "Sonnet Around Stephanie" | Verse | |
| "Notes About My Face" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Heartland" | The Nation | |
| "Blouse of Felt" | Faucheuse | |
| "Longing, a documentary" | The Threepenny Review | |
| "Ceriserie" | American Poetry Review | |
| "Snow Day" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "En Famille" | Boston Book Review | |
| "A Mown Lawn" | McSweeney's | |
| "Ma Ramon" | Callaloo | |
| "The Cloud of Unknowing" | Boston Review | |
| "T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M." | AGNI | |
| "The Art of the Snake Story" | Quarter After Eight | |
| "Contemporary American Poetry" | Poetry | |
| "Little Dantesque" | Fence | |
| "Time" | The New Yorker | |
| "My Chakabuku Mama: a comic tale" | Callaloo | |
| "Gulls" | Conjunctions | |
| "Waterborne" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "The Singers Change, The Music Goes On" | AGNI | |
| "Enough rain for Agnes Walquist" | The Southern Review | |
| "Her Garden" | The Times Literary Supplement | |
| "Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven" | The New Yorker | |
| "Nights" | Conjunctions | |
| "The Formation of Soils" | The Journal | |
| "In Praise of Coldness" | Tin House | |
| "What the Lovers in the Old Songs Thought" | The New Republic | |
| "After 65" | The Antioch Review | |
| "Doubt" | Seneca Review | |
| "Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled" | The Paris Review | |
| "The Emperor of China" | American Poetry Review | |
| "The Quick and the Dead" | The New Yorker | |
| "Dear Derrida" | The Kenyon Review | |
| "The Ashes" | The Texas Review | |
| "To World War Two" | Harper's | |
| "Consolations Before an Affair, Upper West Side" | Another Chicago Magazine | |
| "Songs of the Valley" | Southwest Review | |
| "Seven Deadly Sins" | Poetry | |
| "Wedding Day" | Northwest Review | |
| "The Rider" | American Letters & Commentary | |
| "Tattoos" | The Paris Review | |
| "Mae West Chats It Up with Bessie Smith" | Crab Orchard Review | |
| "My One" | jubilat | |
| "Music for Homemade Instruments" | Facture | |
| "Our Kitty" | Evansville Review | |
| "Where Leftover Misery Goes" | Chain | |
| "His Costume" | The New Yorker | |
| "The Nature of Things" | Barrow Street | |
| "Here" | The Massachusetts Review | |
| "Untitled (February 2000)" | Conjunctions | |
| "A Metal Denser Than, and Liquid" | AGNI | |
| "The Ghost Shirt" | Pequod | |
| "The Clearing" | Callaloo | |
| "Jersey Rain" | The Atlantic Monthly | |
| "A short narrative of breasts and womb in service of Plot entitled" | Verse | |
| "Architect" | The Paris Review | |
| "Vectors: Forty-five Aphorisms and Ten-second Essays" | Ploughshares | |
| "What We Heard About the Japanese" and "What the Japanese Perhaps Heard"" | Verse | |
| "Furtherness" | American Letters & Commentary | |
| "Along Overgrown Paths" | The New Yorker | |
| "Night Picnic" | Boston Review | |
| "Apple" | TriQuarterly | |
| "Meteor" | The Journal | |
| "The Diagnosis" | LIT | |
| "I stopped writing poetry..." | The Antioch Review | |
| "Sources of the Delaware" | Volt | |
| "In Your Version of Heaven I Am Younger" | American Poetry Review | |