Milestones
{An Umbrella Invitational}


Jan D. Hodge

grew up in a letterpress print shop in small town Michigan, and earned a B.A. and an M.A. at the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, where his dissertion was on Charles Dickens.  He taught for 32 years at colleges in Illinois and Iowa before retiring.

His poems have appeared in North American Review, New Orleans Review, Iambs & Trochees, South Coast Poetry Journal, Western Wind, and elsewhere, and his collection The Bard Double-Dactyled was recently published by Morningside College Press.




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He Responds to His Analyst’s Count (a cardinal ideogram, after May Swenson)

0    A target of some kind?

1    Mumblety-peg;
       a knife quivering at my foot

2    A hanger for the neckties
       I gave father for Christmas
       that he never wore

3    How my chapped lips felt
       when I ate popcorn

4    The chair the acrobat balanced on
       just before he fell

5    The ball I threw broke a window.
       I cut myself picking up the glass.

6    Walking the dog with my yo-yo
       (the only dog I ever had)

7    I was tied to a giant wheel.
       It was spinning slowly.
       The hatchet came straight at me.
       My screams woke me up.

8    When he hit me
       my glasses hit the table.

9     I took a balloon on a stick
        home from the circus
        but Kenny broke it.

10   That was close.
        Next time, bull’s eye.


[Originally published in Negative Capability]

 

Artist’s Statement

My degrees being in literature, I backed into writing poetry as a diversion while writing a dissertation on Dickens. Colleagues were writing a study of popular culture, and as they produced chapters I would parody them in verses modeled on familiar works in the British and American canon. It turned out to be a pretty fair education in poetic form, style, and tone, and led me to a more serious poem when I decided to appropriate the device of May Swenson’s “Cardinal Ideogram” and give it a more coherent dramatic focus.

Not only was this one of my first poems to be published, but I discovered that I had created a character whose story I was interested in pursuing, and subsequently wrote a narrative sequence of thirty poems in both free and traditional (metrical) forms, Searching for the Windows.



 
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