Judson Jerome's career is a series of paradoxes. While he is clearly liberal, if not radical, in his political and social theories, his poetics have been traditional from the time his work began regularly appearing in print in the 1950s. He is known to many primarily as an innovative educator, yet he has not held a full-time teaching position for over two decades. His name is probably one of the most widely known of any serious poet, but largely for reasons other than his poetry. He has also been consistently ignored by the critical and poetic establishment for the past two decades, despite the quality of his work.

Jerome was born on 8 February 1927 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Ralph and Gwen Stewart Jerome. His father was an oil-royalty broker whose heavy drinking led to a divorce when Jerome was nine. Of all his family--and many of his poems deal...