As even he would admit, 2005 was a bad year for Bin Ramke. Up until then the poet was enjoying a firmly established career in American letters. He'd clocked decades of distinguished teaching as a faculty member of the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Denver. As editor of the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Series, a position he'd held since 1984, he'd made his mark putting out books by poets such as X. J. Kennedy, Timothy Liu, Terese Svoboda, and C. D. Wright. He'd also authored eight books, his last four published by the esteemed University of Iowa Press. But in 2005, Ramke's career hit some rough road.

That year the Contemporary Poetry Series was targeted by the "poetry watchdog" Web site Foetry.com. As has been reported in these pages and elsewhere, Alan Cordle, the man behind Foetry (which has since shut down), claimed that a winner of the Georgia competition was corruptly selected in 1999, when outside judge Jorie Graham chose a manuscript by Peter Sacks—her soon-to-be Harvard colleague and soon-to-be husband—for publication. Ramke defended Graham's choice and his decision to publish Sacks's book. Ensuing press coverage of the accusation led, ultimately, to Ramke's retiring as editor; the University of Georgia Press subsequently ended the series altogether.

The squabble also called into question Ramke's publishing relationship with the University of Iowa Press, for whom Graham had edited a series of poetry books. As a result, Ramke decided to take a break from publishing with Iowa, leaving his next manuscript homeless.

Undoubtedly, Ramke was caught in the crossfire of an ongoing debate in poetry: on one side, those who believe that poets who forge lives in the hermetic world of academia succeed more through connections than talent; on the other, those who believe such accusations are, in most cases, sour grapes.

As with many such tales, there was more to the story. While pressure from the controversy certainly influenced his decision to retire from the editorship, Ramke was contending with a range of family problems at the time: "My son became very ill and my wife had an eye problem—she was effectively blind—and I just said I couldn't continue." There were other concerns too—Ramke realized he would have had to do significant fund-raising to keep the series going, something the difficulties he'd encountered in his personal life would have made impossible. Ramke still regrets the way the series ended, but is proud of what he accomplished at the University of Georgia Press: "I will admit it was very painful, because I tend to take things personally. But, looking back, in all of that controversy, no one actually said that the books weren't good."

And now, two years later, the dust having settled, Ramke has emerged stronger than ever. His new book, Tendril, is out this month from Omnidawn, a small experimental poetry and fiction publisher based in Richmond, California, that has published the work of such important poets as Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop and Lyn Hejinian, among others. The book's arrival confirms not only Ramke's talent and tenacity, but his uncommon commitment to the development of his creativity. While many poets do their strangest and most groundbreaking work in their early books and then settle into predictable grooves, a look at Ramke's oeuvre shows he is a poet whose work has gotten progressively stranger and stronger. Ramke has emerged as one of the avant-garde's treasured half-secrets.

With his sharp features, Ramke looks severe, inscrutable, as if he might command a deep, ominous voice. In fact, he's very soft-spoken and utterly humble. Born in 1947 in Port Neches, Texas, to a Cajun mother and a father who'd grown up on the bayou, Ramke first discovered his passion for verse in the late '60s when he was introduced to modernist poetry—work by Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Wallace Stevens—in a freshman honors English class at Louisiana State University (LSU). There, he also took his first poetry workshop, with Stanley Plumly.

Under the spell of modernist poetry and living day-to-day in the tumult of the Vietnam era, Ramke was launched into his life's trajectory. "It was really around '66 that I first started writing poems," he says. "There was a sense of a voice, to use the cliché, which could become available to a person. People were organizing little readings, and a lot of them were in connection with protests. So there were these opportunities to have a public." But Ramke never felt drawn to poetry as a forum for sharing his wisdom or opinions: "From the beginning I was leery of the idea of having something to say. I kind of knew that I didn't. Instead, I had a sense, not well stated at all, that the need to do something, to make things of language, mattered."

After completing his BA at LSU, he pursued a masters at the University of New Orleans, and then, with Plumly's encouragement, a PhD in English literature at Ohio University. For the past twenty-two years Ramke has lived in Denver with his wife, Linda, a fiction writer, quilter, and former elementary school teacher, and their son, Nic. Ramke continues to teach at the University of Denver's PhD program in creative writing, he edits the literary magazine Denver Quarterly, and sometimes, in the fall, he teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ramke's poetry career officially launched in 1978 when his debut collection, The Difference Between Night and Day, was selected by poet Richard Hugo for publication in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets. At the time, Ramke was teaching a heavy course load of freshman composition, literature, and creative writing classes at Columbus College (now Columbus State University) in Georgia, his first full-time teaching job after finishing his PhD. His manuscript, however, was not Hugo's first choice: The judge had originally chosen a manuscript by Greg Pape, who had, before hearing from Yale, been offered a book contract by Paul Zimmer, founder of the Pitt Poetry Series at the University of Pittsburgh Press. Hugo had to go back into the pile and pick another book: He chose Ramke's. "I've always been grateful to Greg Pape for that," Ramke says.

From the beginning, Ramke wrote autobiographical poems, though many of his earliest efforts, rooted more in his sense of place than his actual experience, are persona poems about very smart loners whose only friends are their imaginations—characters much like Ramke himself, who grew up with a passion for math in rural West Texas. For Ramke, mathematics was the light illuminating the long, dark tunnel of adolescence. "I had always assumed that some element of physics, science, or mathematics was what I was going to do," he says. While his plans clearly changed, readers can still see the influence of those disciplines in his poetry and his approach to writing it. Ramke says he doesn't imagine a listener when he writes; instead his test for a poem is one he borrows from mathematics: "Either the proof will hold up to scrutiny or not."

In 1979, a year after The Difference Between Night and Day was published, Ramke's son was born. The life change is reflected in some of the poems in Ramke's second book, White Monkeys (University of Georgia Press, 1981). "The Petting Zoo," for example, includes the lines "my first son dreams of the sheep / he first touched today." The poem becomes a meditation on human isolation, on how people can seem separated from each other and the world by a "membrane... / ...through which / no one can reach, nor no star shine." The poems in this book seem written into a void, the work of intense—and intensely experienced—aloneness, evidence of a mind communing with itself.

In Ramke's next book, The Language Student (Louisiana State University Press, 1986), the poems begin to grow more abstract, though they are still largely rooted in the Texas and Louisiana landscapes of Ramke's youth. Poems haunted by what Ramke calls "the guilty sleep of fathers" look back at his own father's life, and increasingly toward Nic's future. Ramke's father, who died in 1984, had a complex career that was, perhaps, the inspiration for the poet's restless imagination. During World War II he served in a navy bomb disposal corps, was passionate about drawing, and worked with explosives and water treatment as a chemist for DuPont. "He showed me much of what he did," Ramke remembers. "He took me with him on boats in the swamps where there were test wells to be examined, and took me into cavernous treatment facilities in a hospital where he sometimes worked. While we had the standard conflicts, he is for me a model of a certain kind of wholeness."

In Ramke's next two books—The Erotic Light of Gardens (Wesleyan University Press, 1989) and the Iowa Poetry Prize-winning Massacre of the Innocents (University of Iowa Press, 1995)—the elements of Ramke's mature style begin to emerge and crystallize. Ramke had begun teaching in Denver in 1984, and traces the shift in his work to his friendship with the poet Donald Revell, then his colleague: "We were both intensely reexamining what our respective connections to ‘poetry' might be." These poems are obsessed with the moments of their own making, and, for the most part, are obviously autobiographical only in the sense that they narrate the leaping processes of thought that brought them into being.

This period also marks the point in Ramke's work at which casual readers may have begun to scratch their heads and wonder what was going on. Alongside intense and increasingly fragmentary accounts of his experience, Ramke's poems are scattered with verbal artifacts from his wide reading in literary, scientific, mathematical, religious, and philosophical texts, giving them a more experimental feel. Both books are full of sequences that bring together disparate subjects that sound similar emotional notes. This is the key to Ramke's difficult poetry: Even his most disjunctive poems center around a clear emotional core.

While Ramke's work has become increasingly complex with each new book, he's not trying to create puzzles, but to render a certain kind of experience that could only come from writing the way he does: "It's like steeplechase or running the hurdles—you'd actually get around the track much faster if you took out the hurdles, but it would be a different experience." Ramke likes the paradox of concepts that are simultaneously simple and difficult, which he also relates to his love of mathematics. "There are things like Fermat's last theorem," he says, "which was so fascinating for so long because it was so simple and direct."

Ramke doesn't sit down and work on a single poem until it's done. Writing, for him, is a process of collecting language—from notebooks of his own jottings, from texts he's reading, and from works of visual art he's seen—and then experimenting, over time, with how the pieces might fit together. "I'm generally working on a number of different poems simultaneously," he says. "There are a bunch of different files, and various things I might be reading will get tossed into them. At the same time, I continue to dismantle older things and rework. At various points, I'll just find some sort of nexus around which things have been accumulating. It will seem to sort of catch and maybe feel complete." Ramke oversees an ever-evolving laboratory of poems: "It occurred to me not terribly long ago that I had stopped confronting the blank page or the blank screen."

The most singular, powerful, and difficult period in Ramke's work unfolds in his four most recent books—Wake (1999), Airs, Waters, Places (2001), and Matter (2004), all published by the University of Iowa Press, and this year's Tendril. By the late '90s, a typical Ramke poem would be five to ten pages long and include a half dozen or more extended quotations from obscure texts, jagged free verse lines alternating with a few tercets or a prose paragraph, and citations for his sources listed on the right margin of the page. Ramke calls his first collection of these poems, Wake, "probably the most interesting of my books." It is almost certainly his densest. Just scanning the first ten-page poem, one finds descriptions of a postapocalyptic world; quotes from the poets Shelley and Robert Duncan, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Nietzsche, John Cage, the Aeneid, and a book called Beekeeping for Profit; and references to Kant and Elizabeth Bishop. Yet despite how allusive and crowded the poem is, what it's after is actually not all that complicated. In the middle, Ramke is again mulling over fatherhood, as he recalls a memory of his own father, whose life and death came to preoccupy Ramke as he wrote this book: "My father, too, knew words for things, the chemical compositions, / formulas that applied to the normal family... / He knew secrets of the soul, I am sure he did. He must have been / a man of passions, he would have told me if he could." All of Ramke's references and castings-about are attempts at explaining the ineffable. What is a father? How are we to take on the tremendous responsibility of fathering another, who will look to us for answers we simply don't have? The power in Ramke's recent poetry derives not from what it says but from the Herculean effort Ramke undertakes to search every corner of the mind, every cranny he can locate in Western literature and thought, for answers to basic human questions.

Tendril is at once the most public and the most private of Ramke's books. The poems deal with wide-ranging subjects, including the contemporary political scene in America, the last days of a famous mathematician, and the poet's own relationship to writing. These poems are Ramke's most difficult and abstract, but also his most penetratingly clear in their emotional revelations. Experimental techniques abound. One poem deals movingly, and disjunctively, with the death of Ramke's mother from Lou Gehrig's disease. Footnotes throughout the poem offer historical citations and commentary about the history of shorthand, in which Ramke's mother was an expert. "She told me once that in telephone conversations she would see everything that was said in shorthand," recalls Ramke. Toward the end, her disease made her unable to speak, so she had to write whatever she wanted to say in little notebooks; his mother's life-or-death relationship to writing, and her deep engagement with shorthand, made Ramke rethink his own relationship to the written word.

Elsewhere, quotes are inserted suddenly in the midst of poems, stanzas are placed side by side, and sentences jerk words around, seeming to converse with themselves: "I was / a body, a boy not in a body but like you I was // a body and mind which are, is, the same, a life." The long, sweeping title poem brings together all of Ramke's poetic concerns—childhood and parenthood, the poem as self-conscious object, the origins of words, and the literature of the past and present. "I don't want to artificially eliminate any knowledge," Ramke says, meaning his poetry tries to encompass as much of what he encounters as possible, from his biography to his bibliography. It is a hard-won achievement, and there is probably nothing else like it in contemporary poetry.

There is always a lot of talk in the poetry world about what experimental poetry is, and whether or not one person's or group's notion of poetry qualifies. Perhaps Ramke has the most humble definition: "I actually think that my work is experimental in a very real way, and experiments can fail." But, as any good scientist or mathematician—or poet—will tell you, there's always more to be learned from those experiments that don't go according to plan than those that do.

Craig Morgan Teicher's first book of poems, Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems, won the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry and will be published in November by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University.