Dr. Jan Hodge, the man who taught me how to write, is featured in a story in my hometown newspaper.
Hodge has been writing poetry for some 35 years and is best known locally for his shaped poems, some of which have been reprinted in textbooks as examples of the form. His best known is a poem shaped as a carousel that is included in the textbook "Western Wind."
Hodge's poetry writing began as he was working on a dissertation.
"I got tired of writing footnotes on footnotes. So I started writing parodies to break the monotony," he said. "That was my education in poetry. It taught me a lot about how to write."
Now he does it just because he likes it.
"Basically, that's what I do for fun," he said. "You obviously don't write it to get rich."