Half Hank Williams, Half Charles Baudelaire

My old poetry teacher wasn't much interested in money. What he was interested in was the pure, clear word.

Kevin Joe Eldridge, poet and teacher (1961-2011).

By Michael Judge

When I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the early 1990s, my father, a business major back in the day, bought me a T-shirt that read "The Iowa Waiters' Workshop." Sadly, it wasn't too far from the truth. Only a poet would go into journalism for the money, I later joked.

Yes, some poets do fabulously well, publish shelves full of books and receive relatively lucrative teaching positions and fellowships. But even they make little if anything off their poems. (I once happily received a check for $12 and change for a poem I published in The Southern Review.) Still, I have friends who've devoted their lives to the writing of poetry, and who will do just about anything to make ends meet.

My undergraduate poetry teacher, Kevin Joe Eldridge, was one of them. Kevin died in November 2011 of cancer at the age of 50. But I still have his Spring 1988 syllabus—tattered and torn, held together by a massive paper clip—on a s…