Measures have to do with how we think about things. One of the ways we think about things is in poems. One of the ways we think about poems is in criticism. Contemporary literary criticism and contemporary poetry in America seem at cross purposes. In fact, the formal literary critics writing recently seldom address the poems of their contemporaries. While structuralists and other schools of critics seek terms, generalizations, and whole systems to account for and to understand poems, poets themselves repeatedly assert that each of their poems is its own poetic and no system applies to their writing. It is in the prose statements of poets--in essays, in interviews, and reviews--that a reader can find the most direct and simplest affirmations of an aesthetic that, while hard to define, is easy to see in practice. This paper attempts a criticism sympathetic with the contentions of those poets by avoiding a priori terminology, that is, by avoiding the appliances of criticism, and by self-consciously persisting in close reading of texts as the directing force of its of its argument, as, in fact, the sole component of its argument. Such categories as the paper constructs in its second part (poems about paintings, poems with typographical eccentricities, poems about the sea, and poems about politics) involve a common thread, the analogy of the pulsebeat asserted in part one, to support rather than subvert those contentions. In its last chapters the paper addresses first books of poems by Amy Clampitt and Denis Johnson in order to focus on the recurrence both of the pulsebeat analogy and those subject matters outlined in part two. Thus, the paper attempts to assert a continuity between the prose statements and the poetic practices of established contemporary poets and the work of new poets. By attempting to remain descriptive rather than prescriptive, the paper tries to evoke the essential element and quintessential spirit of all of the poems treated in it: The measure is always the poem.