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Jan D. Hodge, Poet
Jan D. Hodge grew up is a letterpress print shop in small town Michigan, was more or less
educated in English Language and Literature at the Universities of Michigan (B.A., M.A.)
and New Mexico (Ph.D., dissertation on Charles Dickens), and spent thirty-plus years
teaching (mostly British literature and expository writing) in small colleges in Illinois and
Iowa.
Now happily retired, he still writes poetry, a passion he backed into while writing parodies
as a break from dissertation work. He has never belonged to any particular school,
movement, or style of poetry. His tastes are reasonably eclectic, though solidly grounded
(or entrenched, depending on perspective) in the traditional, especially British, canon, and
he writes in several styles and genres--free verse (open form), traditional stanzaic and
fixed forms, and carmina figurata (shaped poems). The latter is a particular interest; he
contributed an essay on "The Art of Carmina Figurata" to the anthology An Exaltation
of Forms, ed. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes.
His poems have appeared in Negative Capability, The Beloit Poetry Journal, E.L.F.,
Nebraska Review, South Coast Poetry Journal, Defined Providence, Buckle &, and
several others extant and extinct, and his Poems to be Traded for Baklava was the
Onionhead Literary Quarterly annual chapbook for 1997. He has also self-
published (remember, he grew up in a letterpress print shop) Searching for the
Windows, a lyric sequence in (mostly) free verse, and a collection of his earlier shaped
poems, though the improved and much expanded collection still seeks a
publisher. To visit three poems of Hodge's, "Carousel," "He Responds to His Analyst's Count" and "At a Loss," click here. |