Good Measure ― Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry

Robert Morgan, a native of the North Carolina mountains and a widely published poet, has been writing essays about his craft for more than twenty years. This book brings together some of his most thought-provoking pieces, reflections upon poetry from the dual perspective of poet and critic.
Morgan begins by examining in succinct and challenging essays the elements of poetry and poetry writing in general, emphasizing the poet's responsibility to provide, as the title suggests, "good measure." Good measure, Morgan cautions, means neither facile spontaneity nor the sort of politicization that most often, he says, forces poets into poses of stylized enlightenment and response.
Morgan goes on to discuss specific poets with a craftsman's calm authority. His reflections upon the American tradition in poetry include a tribute to William Cullen Bryant, an illuminating piece on Robinson Jeffers, and studies of the contemporary poets A. R. Ammons, Russell Edson, and Fred Chappell. His look at individual poets also includes dazzling close readings of pieces by the French poet Jean Follain.
In "The Transfigured Body" and "Mica," Morgan presents excerpts from his own notebooks, meditations jotted down during the process of composing poems. These notes made in passing provide intriguing insights into the work of poetry.
Finally, there are interviews with Morgan by other poets: lively discussions of southern writing, the experience of being a poet in America today, and the influence of Morgan's Appalachian background on his own vocation and career as a poet.
Good Measure sparkles with honesty, keen intelligence, and most of all Morgan's conviction that a passionate striving for an unattainable perfection is its own reward. The indifference of the public, the success of the third-rate, the scorn of critical theorists for whom literary quality is irrelevant - none of these is an excuse "for not saying the truth with wit, and for not making poems that will shine long after we have ceased our worry and hope."
Poets, scholars, and casual readers alike will find Good Measure a rich source of inspiration and wisdom.

Robert Morgan grew up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in an old farmhouse outside Ithaca, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poems, including Topsoil Road, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Campbell-Brockman Poetry Award, the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Greensboro Review Amon Liner Poetry prize, and Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. He has also published eight novels, among them Gap Creek, which was a New York Times Notable Book, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. For more information visit Robert Morgan'sOfficial Author Website.