Overview

25 years ago, my new book of poems was "Sleepwalking among the Camels". It was a selected book of poems which means that it included a selection from my previous 3 books plus some new poems. It was among these new poems written close to 25 years ago that the poem "Hopscotch" was first presented in print. The poem combines the shape of the game with a difference: words were substituted for the orderly numbers 1-9 producing a short one-line poem, what we call an aphorism, a statement conveying some sort of truth in a direct manner, a statement that can only be made by words not by images, an observation I made in a tweet in 2014. What interested me was the substitution of words for numbers?