{"id":1337,"date":"2009-09-08T23:54:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-09T06:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1337"},"modified":"2025-02-27T09:49:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T17:49:32","slug":"john-hodgen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/john-hodgen\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 64: John Hodgen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About John Hodgen<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

John Hodgen is married, with two daughters. He is Visiting Professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry; Bread Without Sorrow (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize; and In My Father\u2019s House (Emporia State University Press, 1993), winner of the Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas. He is the winner of the 2005 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain (Vermont College), and the 2005 Foley Poetry Prize from America Magazine. He also won the Chad Walsh Prize in Poetry for the best poems submitted to Beloit Poetry Journal in 2008, and author of Heaven and Earth, to be published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2010.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cWitness\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWitness\u201d grew out of a trip to New Orleans a year after Katrina. A good place for poets. There was that extra element in everything that happened, something alive and conflicted in every gesture and smell and sound, that cultural crossroad resonating with the reverberations of deep tragedy and that need to heal and find how to move on. Each busker, preacher and street dancer seemed aware that death was still in the air, as it always is, lingering somehow. Each song was a little more needed, each drink tasted just a bit better, and each word seemed a little more desperate and necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moment was just what it was, a bright, angry college kid suddenly erupting at a preacher in the French Quarter, just snapping, unable to contain himself, seeing in the man with the bullhorn a target for all his wrath. It seemed to occur in slow motion, a boozy explosion that might have gone unseen at first, yet filled with that sudden rippling violence as his friends dove in to pull him away. It was all there, the street a tableau, a modern morality play, the French Quarter, the place we go to lose ourselves, suddenly peopled with a preacher reminding us that we shouldn\u2019t be doing that, and a young man saying that that\u2019s the exact reason we come there. Each espoused his own religion, each saw his own deep truth, and each stirred up emotions and visions of the world as he saw it. For a moment it was possible to see each one as Jesus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

If Katrina were coming again, I\u2019d grab the following: everything by Shakespeare; everything by Keats, including the letters; everything by John Donne; James Agee\u2019s A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the unforgettable Walker Evans photographs; Willis Barnstone\u2019s Modern European Poetry, where I discovered Lorca and Machado, and the Russians Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky; Hayden Carruth\u2019s anthology of 20th century American poets, The Voice That is Great Within Us; Bly\u2019s edition of Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems; two books by Frank Stanford, who loved Lucinda Williams and then shot himself, You and Crib Death, both out of print now from Lost Roads Press; Anne Sexton\u2019s The Awful Rowing Toward God (which I let someone borrow and never got back); Carolyn Forche\u2019s The Country Between Us, just for \u201cThe Colonel,\u201d which I still teach every year; Philip Larkin\u2019s High Windows; Billy Collins\u2019 Picnic, Lightning; anything by Chris Howell; and B. H. Fairchild\u2019s The Art of the Lathe. Great book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I\u2019d go back, water up to my neck, for Salinger\u2019s Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories. I\u2019d grab Huck Finn, Sound and the Fury, Waiting for Godot, Gatsby, Farewell to Arms, To the Lighthouse, my daughter\u2019s Jeweler\u2019s Eye for Flaw, and Hello, I Must Be Going, and the collected screenplays of Charles Bogle, a.k.a. W. C. Fields. Then I\u2019d climb Frost\u2019s birch tree and wait for FEMA, happy as A. Pismo Clam.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Issue<\/figure>\n\n\n

“Witness” by John Hodgen<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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