Jan D. Hodge

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Half a Dactyl…

To Alex, from a Kindred Spirit

Passionate
dactylist,
I can’t re-
sist

challenges
though I may
therefore be
hissed,

merit a
virtual
slap on the
wrist,

or (as the
welcome mat’s
yanked) be dis-
missed

for my thus
crashing this
lexical
tryst.

Since discovering double dactyls several decades ago, Jan D. Hodge has developed an obsession for the form (and its variant, the double amphibrach), writing not only dozens of occasional verses and portraits of real and fictive persons, but adapting the form for longer narratives by waiving the opening nonsense syllables (why squander six syllables?) and the second-line proper name requirement, while retaining the metrical and rhyme structure and the requisite didactylic word (or two) per stanza. His The Bard & Scheherazade Keep Company (Able Muse Press, 2017) contains renderings of 16 of Shakespeare’s plays, six tales from the Arabian Nights, and Reynard the Fox—a total of 317 double dactyl (or double amphibrach) stanzas.