Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry In Traditional Form [Paperback]

Philip Dacey (Author), David Jauss (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 415 pages
• Publisher: Longman; 1 edition (January 17, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060414715
• ISBN-13: 978-0060414719
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #473,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Minnesota in 1951 and educated at Southwest Minnesota State College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa. I am the author of two collections of short stories, Black Maps and Crimes of Passion; two books of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers; and a collection of essays on the craft of fiction, Alone With All That Could Happen. I have also edited three anthologies, Words Overflown by Stars, an anthology of essays on the craft of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from past and present faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts, The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction, and, with Philip Dacey, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms.

My fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including Arts & Letters, The California Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and The Writer's Chronicle. My work has also been translated into Indonesian, Farsi, and Braille and read over Voice of America radio.

My fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; and The Pushcart Book of Stories: Best Stories from the First 25 Years of the Pushcart Prize.

My poetry has appeared in 30 anthologies, including Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry and The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine.

From 1981-1991 I served as fiction editor of Crazyhorse, and I am currently on the Editorial Board of Hunger Mountain: The Vermont College of Fine Arts Journal of Arts & Letters.

In addition to the O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Short Stories selection mentioned above, my awards and honors include the AWP Award for Short Fiction, the Fleur-de-Lis Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council.

I teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I also serve as Faculty Chair and have twice received the Louise Crowley & Roger Weingarten Award for Teaching Excellence. I live in Little Rock with my wife Judy and our dogs Toby, Phoebe, and Pip. We are proud parents of two grown children, Alison and Steve, both of whom live nearby, Alison with her own trio of pooches and Steve with his wife Kewen and our darling grandson Galen.

For more information, please go to www.davidjauss.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I constantly refer to this book., August 29, 2000

By 

Melissa Bach (Rockport, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry In Traditional Form (Paperback)

I belong to a private online poetry group, and I turn again and again to these poems to share them with my friends. Nothing can substitute for having the collected or selected poems of a single author, but this anthology is unlike any other I've ever seen. Philip Dacey and David Jauss have selected, within the strictures of their chosen subject, an incredible emotional range, from the outright camp of Miller William's Rubaiyat for Sue Ella Tucker (Sue Ella Tucker was barely in her teens./ She often minded her mother. She didn't know beans/ About what boys can do. She laughed like air./ Already the world was crawling up her jeans...) to the hair-raising Rapist's Villanelle by Thomas M. Disch.

I would think this book would be extremely useful to a student of traditional poetry for exploring different forms; the appendices offer very clear explanations of each form and include a mini-index of the poems in the book that use a particular form. There are, for example, seven poems that qualify as hymnal stanzas, five pantoums, and all kinds of quatrains of various sorts: envelope quatrains, Sicilian quatrains, etc.

I see that Amazon charges $48 for this book. Sometimes it's hard to pass over a chunk of change that large for a book, but you've got to believe me, this one is worth it.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Power in Confinment, May 4, 2000

By 

David Smith (Marshfield, VT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry In Traditional Form (Paperback)

Being aware of the craft of writing heightens the appreciation of it. Poetry is a powerful, condensed form of writing, and traditional forms of poetry create a framework that this power presses against. Strong Measures is a fine anthology of modern American poets who work within these forms. Beginning with an accessable introduction to the history of poetic form, followed by examples by over 150 contemporary poets, and ending with an appendix explaining meter, scansion, form definition, and a classification of the poems by form, this is a wonderful reference book for anyone who wants to know where that resonance in what they just read came from.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still the best forms anthology, September 7, 2007

By 

Forbidden Planet "forbiddenplanet" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry In Traditional Form (Paperback)

Strong Measures is still by far the best anthology of forms, far surpassing Strand and Boland's (which actually claims blank verse is seldom used in the 20th century) and Finch's (too few examples, too much blather). I'd love to see a new edition. I wish Longman would put a reasonable price tag on this book, as most students will never be able to afford the whopping $100.20 now being charged for it.