Four Lectures

Originally published in the 1980s and out of print until now, Rodefer's four long poems are milestones in American avant-garde poetry.

Stephen Rodefer was an innovative, singular American writer—a student of Charles Olson’s often associated with the Language poets but whose eclectic, energetic verse defies categorization and embraces a worldly lyricism all Rodefer’s own. Four Lectures—first published in 1982 by Geoffrey Young’s legendary press The Figures and long out of print—is widely considered to be his masterpiece. It is a book of four long poems that explore the radical possibilities of language through a generous, intimate collage of sights and sounds, voices and images, drawn from the poet’s world. In city-block-like stanzas by turns philosophical and political, playful and playing for keeps, with freewheeling reference to everything from Shakespeare to Looney Tunes to Iceberg Slim and much else besides, Rodefer boldly reimagines the modern philosophical poem exemplified by T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for an inundating, fragmentary age in which there are “more photographs in the world than there are bricks.”

Stephen Rodefer (1940–2015) was an American poet and painter who lived in Paris and London. Born in Bellaire, Ohio, he knew many of the early Beat and Black Mountain poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. Rodefer, one of the original Language poets, taught at many universities, including Cambridge University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, San Francisco State, and the American University of Paris. Rodefer was the first American poet to be offered a Fellowship at Cambridge University. He was the author of One or Two Love Poems from the White World, The Bell Clerk's Tears Keep Flowing, Four Lectures, Oriflamme Day (with poet Benjamin Friedlander), Emergency Measures, Passing Duration, Leaving, Erasures, Left Under A Cloud, Call It Thought, and Mon Canard, among other titles. His graphic work, Language Pictures, has been exhibited in recent years in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, and Prague. He died in Paris.

Geoffrey Young is a poet and publisher. His press, The Figures, was the original publisher of Four Lectures.