Stephen Rodefer's professional life has proven as eclectic and wide-ranging as the poetic voice emerging from his numerous books. As educator, he has taught undergraduate seminars at San Francisco State University, the University of California at San Diego, Jesus College at Cambridge University--and creative arts classes to fourth graders at the Malcolm X School; as prose writer, his work has been reprinted in publications as diverse as Wet, Downbeat, and Contrast II; and as poet, his narrative voice ranges from interpretive "translations" of the ancient Greek anthology, Lucretius, and Villon, to the consciously modern (if not post-modern) voice of Four Lectures or Passing Duration.

Born in 1940 in Bellaire, Ohio, Rodefer studied art history at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He received a master's degree in Language and Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he studied with Charles Olson and began a dissertation on the life and work of Robert Creeley, the notes for which are part of this collection. Also during this period, he attended the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, which he describes as a sort of induction into the world of the New American Poetry represented by attendees like Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). He received an M.F.A. degree from San Francisco State University in 1981.

He has served as assistant professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at the University of New Mexico, lecturer in English at San Francisco State University, curator of the Archive for New Poetry and visiting lecturer at the University of California at San Diego, and held a number of visiting lectureships at other schools and universities. As well as writing for magazines in both poetry and journalistic prose, Rodefer has been associated with their production: he edited Fervent Valley: A Magazine for the Arts (1972-1975); was contributing editor for Zyzzyva, and became involved with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, an important journal of so-called language poetry. Since 1972, he has been active in the Bay Area's Poets Theater as both performer and writer/producer; his plays "A & C: an Idyl in One Act" and "Tennyson" were staged in 1983.

Rodefer's translations include After Lucretius, Villon, Orpheus (from Rilke's work) and Safety, a selection from Sappho and the Greek anthology. He is the author of The Knife, One Or Two Love Poems from the White World, The Bell Clerk's Tears Keep Flowing, Plane Debris, Oriflamme Day, Emergency Measures, and Four Lectures, which in 1983 was awarded the Annual Book Award by the American Poetry Center in San Francisco.