Six Questions interview #91 : Adrienne Stevenson

Adrienne Stevenson is a retired forensic scientist living in Ottawa, Ontario. Adrienne writes poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. She has completed and is now querying an historical novel. Her stories have won prizes in contests held by Capital Crime Writers, Canadian Authors Association and the Ottawa Public Library, with some published in Byline. Non-fiction articles have appeared in Byline and Anglo-Celtic Roots. Her poetry has appeared in over thirty print and online publications, most recently in Train Poetry Journal, Planisphere Q—Summer Rain, MacroMicroCosm, Page & Spine, Poetry and Covid, Jaden, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Lifespan vol.2, Bywords, Masque & Spectacle, Constellate Literary Journal, Uproar, Pages Penned in Pandemic. Twitter @ajs4t

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I've been in Ottawa 47 years. I came in 1974 to attend grad school at the University of Ottawa, in Pharmacology, and stayed when I got a job here with the federal government after graduation.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I've written poems as long as I can remember, and songs during high school and university, being caught up in the folk music revival and the work of singer-songwriters. I began to learn the craft then, tending to rhymed verse in song lyrics, less so in other poems. Parody and satiric verse have always appealed. I like playing with words.

Creative writing took a back seat during my career as a federal public servant, with technical writing at the fore during my thirty-two years as a forensic toxicologist, regulator and research manager, so I've come late to writing for myself. I had kept in touch with the folk music and crime writing communities, and after retirement started taking poetry workshops held by the Ottawa Public Library, and other writing courses both locally, linked to conferences like SIWC, and online. I always find lessons useful—even if I've heard most of it before there's always something new to pick up. Besides which, if the instructor offers to critique a few pieces or a story, that's feedback from a completely disinterested and dispassionate source. And I hope I've reciprocated usefully in workshops. The exchange of ideas is what matters.

I've been a member of a local poetry workshop (Time & Again) since 2012, and two prose critique groups in that period. I'm also a member of Capital Crime Writers and Canadian Authors Association (both local) and the Historical Novel Writing Society, and an active participant in the online community Creative Academy for Writers (both international), all now via Zoom. I haven't participated much at local in-person poetry events or reading circles, or their current online versions, so am not as plugged into the broader Ottawa poetry community as I could be. I find myself a bit reticent in a poetry crowd, perhaps because on the whole I enjoy writing poetry more than reading it? Although I like hearing others read their work and digging deeper into the process. Maybe after the pandemic…

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? 

Working with other writers taught me that writing is much like any other occupation. Lots of tough slogging with occasional pings of recognition, which is perfectly fine with me since my first goal is to satisfy myself. I've learned to accept constructive critique but rely on my own judgment regarding which suggestions to adopt. Other eyes can often see flaws that I may be too close to the work to focus on. These are things I knew intuitively, but the writing community showed me the proof. I'm an evidence-based thinker, so that was important.

I respect published writers more than I did when I was a casual reader, because I now know how hard it is to push through a whole project. You have to believe in your own work, have enough courage to face the high proportion of rejections and keep sending material out. I have learned to do that, although I still get goosebumps when I hit "send" on a submission, and I dread the self-promotion required to sell a book. The main problem I find with my thinking shift is that I no longer seem able to read casually—the read-as-writer habit is now too ingrained. I put down a lot more books without finishing them than I used to.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Ottawa is still a small enough city to retain some cross-pollination between different writing groups. Various writing events, some of them collaborative, help with that. We have the cultural resources of the capital in libraries and museums, a diverse population, a beautiful and varied physical environment, and stimulating seasons. There are down-sides too, in the over-abundance of politicians and their sycophants at all three levels of government, tensions between local special interest groups that form a quasi-political layer, and the tendency of those in the rest of the country to blame us collectively for the antics of the previously mentioned, but those are also rich sources for satire and debate.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I've entered a lot of local contests, for poetry, stories and articles. For stories, the Audrey Jessup at Capital Crime Writers, the OPL 50+, and the Canadian Authors Association-National Capital Branch contest. The encouragement of fellow members and my prose critique group were instrumental to my successes in those. One of my non-fiction articles was based on my work experience in technical writing. I also won a local contest for a genealogy article, later published in Anglo-Celtic Roots. Without access to Library and Archives Canada's reading room, that wouldn't have been possible.

My poetry has appeared in print or online, mainly outside of Ottawa, but I've had a couple in Bywords, which is a marvellous local resource on many fronts. Of course, I submit work to other local publications, but most acceptances have been elsewhere. That may be a comment on my work or its fit for the journal or the taste of the editors—or all three. My greatest local success was in the Poets' Pathway Lampman Challenge in 2018, where my entries won both first and third place, appearing in their chapbook of longlisted poems. Fun sidebars to that—my husband subsequently cycled the entire pathway, which I couldn't do because of physical challenges, and a long-time friend is a descendant of Lampman.

You can't live in a place for 47 years—most of my adult life—without the place and the people in it influencing everything about you. My writing practice is coloured by all of my experiences in Ottawa to date. I've been fortunate to be able to work with people in our writing community who've helped me develop my style and voice in ways that satisfy me.

Q: What are you working on now?

Probably too much. Since I reignited my creative writing later in life, I have some time to make up. I've just completed an historical novel, provisionally titled "Mirrors & Smoke", set in the Niagara Peninsula before and during the War of 1812, and am querying agents to place it. I'm also assembling a selection of my poems into a chapbook or possibly a longer collection. I'm editing a few of my short stories for submission, and planning my next novel. I continue to write poetry at least weekly. Our monthly workshop usually sets prompt words, and sometimes forms or themes, and I like the challenge of finding something to say about them. I enjoy working with traditional poetic forms, and trying out new ones. Ekphrastic poetry is my most recent passion, finding words to reflect my take on someone else's artwork. Collaborative vision, a great concept.

 

Six Questions interview #90 : Cara Waterfall

Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara Waterfall’s poetry has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry, CV2, The Fiddlehead, SWWIM, The Night Heron Barks and more. She has won Room’s 2018 Short Forms contest, Room’s 2020 Poetry Contest and PULPLit’s 2020 Editors’ Prize. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s The Coniston Prize and shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Most recently, her manuscript was a finalist for the Animal Heart Press Poetry Chapbook contest. She has a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse from The Writer’s Studio at SFU. www.carawaterfall.com

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
I was born in Ottawa in 1976, left when I was one and a half years old and then returned for high school (Go Lisgar Lords!). My father was a diplomat so we lived in Nairobi and Vienna before returning. I then left after high school to attend Queen’s University.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
My father adored the classics so I was introduced to Shakespeare, Jane Austen and poets like William Blake, William Wordsworth and John Clare early on. I also have a dog-eared copy of Robert Louis’ Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse that I will always cherish. We used to attend his favourite Shakespeare productions of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Stratford or Toronto. Literature was prevalent in our household. When I attended Lisgar, I was encouraged to write and enter writing competitions.

I was not involved with the writing community after I moved, because I returned to poetry in my late thirties and was living in other countries at the time. I regret that I wasn’t able to forge those bonds while I was in Ottawa, because the writing community seems incredibly supportive of its poets.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
The nature of my partner’s vocation has changed how I define my writing community. I have moved a lot in the last decade. It has shifted from my belief that physical presence is essential to realizing that much can be accomplished remotely if you have the passion for your craft. When I was pregnant with my third child, I was living in London, England and I pursued a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse with SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. I woke up at 2:30am twice a week to attend the poetry workshops and it lit a fire that has remained with me.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?  
I can only speak to what Ottawa meant to me when I was in high school, but I recall my writing endeavours with such fondness, because I was open to the world and how to write about it in a way that seemed natural then, but it took me many years to get back to that mindframe. I had a scarcity mindset for so long about what I could achieve with poetry and forgot that it’s in the pleasure of creating poetry that one “achieves”. My memories of writing in Ottawa fill me with a hopefulness.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I would say that my projects respond indirectly to my engagements in Ottawa. It helps me recall a time, where life made sense. I spent the most amount of time growing up in Ottawa and I try and draw on those memories to help me navigate my own feelings about belonging, identity and family.

Q: What are you working on now?
I am circulating an abridged version of a  chapbook I wrote about my experiences living in Côte d’Ivoire. I am also working on my first book of poems that grapples with losses, both large and small, that I have experienced in the last year and a half.

 

Six Questions interview #89 : Alison Gresik

Alison Gresik is a writer living in Vancouver, BC. Her debut short story collection, Brick and Mortar, was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award in 2000. She self-published her travel memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, in 2015. Raised in Kingston, Ontario, Alison is a graduate of Redeemer University and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Calgary. She has published stories in the journals Descant, Grain, and IMAGE and in the anthologies The Company We Keep and Decalogue 2. Alison trained as a creativity coach with Eric Maisel and is certified by the Creativity Coaching Association.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I lived in Ottawa for 13 years, although I grew up in Kingston so I often visited when I was younger for canal skating and trips to Parliament.

My husband Shawn and I moved to Ottawa in 1998 so he could get his master’s degree in public administration at Carleton University. He also got accepted at the University of Victoria in BC, but we had already been living out west for two years, and we wanted to settle closer to our extended families in Ontario. Ottawa was a very appealing city because of its green space and proximity to wilderness, and because of its arts and culture infrastructure.

We left Ottawa in 2011 to travel full-time with our kids. Shawn quit his job, and we sold our townhouse on Nepean Street and almost everything we owned. After a year of living and travelling in different places—Detroit, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, China, France, and the Netherlands—we came back to Canada to see family, and Shawn got a job offer in Vancouver that was too good to turn down. Within a few weeks, we had flown out, rented a house in Kitsilano, and put the kids in school. We’ve been here ever since, going on nine years.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I started doing journalism and creative writing during undergrad at Redeemer University. I had always been a reader and book lover, so I was studying English, but it had never occurred to me that I might have something important to say or an interesting style. I started writing for the school newspaper and took all the writing courses available. It was all so new and exciting: trying different forms of poetry and fiction, publishing and getting praise, experiencing a state of flow.

Then I did my MA in creative writing at the University of Calgary with Aritha van Herk, which was a whole new level of challenge. There I learned how to take feedback and criticism, how to persevere through a longer project, and how to be part of a community of writers.

When we moved to Ottawa, I missed that writing community, so I signed up for a writing workshop with Richard Taylor at Collected Works (RIP to that wonderful bookstore). It was thrilling to be part of a group again. I met Susan Robertson, Judy Redpath, and Michelle Desbarats at that workshop, and we formed an ongoing writer’s group. Richard Taylor sent my master’s thesis manuscript to the folks at Oberon Press and they published it as the short story collection Brick and Mortar.

When Brick and Mortar was nominated for the Ottawa Book Award, I met Susan Zettell, one of the judges that year. She generously invited me to join her long-running writing group, and that group formed the backbone of my writing life for the rest of my time in Ottawa.

We met monthly in each other’s homes, read and critiqued each other’s work, chatted and commiserated, asked for and gave advice. We published an anthology called The Company We Keep, and we wrote letters of reference for each other and cheered every successful grant proposal. I am grateful for every single one of those women and still keep in infrequent touch with many of them: Nadine McInnis, Rhonda Douglas, Gabriella Goliger, Kim Reynolds, Debra Martens, Barb Sibbald, Mary Borsky, Nancy Baele, Sandra Nicholls, Vivian Tors.

I also attended many readings and writing festivals during that time. I would buy a pass for the Ottawa International Writers Festival, pack up my knitting, and attend every session. And I met you, rob, and was included as an author in readings and anthologies you organized (thank you!).

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

Being fresh out of school when I came to Ottawa, I was desperate and determined not to let writing fade out of my life as I got busy with work and family and pastimes. I learned that writing on my own took a lot of energy and discipline, but when I was writing as part of a group, whether I saw people often or intermittently, I stayed connected to my writing practice much more easily.

Community sustained me and continually brought me back to writing when I was confused, discouraged, or distracted. I saw people with many different kinds of relationships to writing: some who pursued it professionally, some for whom it was another in a stable of creative practices, some who wrote quickly or slowly, regularly or occasionally. It helped me remember that there was no “one” “best” “right” way to be a writer, and that helped me tune into the kind of writer I wanted to be and what was possible for me.

Toward the end of our time in Ottawa I developed more of an online community of writers. I worked with Cynthia Morris, a creativity coach in Colorado, and I trained to become a creativity coach myself with Eric Maisel. I started working with clients around the world, and met people through Twitter and my blog. When we left Ottawa to travel, those online connections sustained me.

When I arrived in Vancouver, I wanted to return to in-person writing relationships, so I found Just Write Vancouver, which ran multiple meetings every week across the city for people to gather, chat, and spend time working on their writing projects together. I started a group in Kitsilano and ran it for five years, which helped me finish my self-published memoir, Pilgrimage of Desire, and many smaller projects. Because Just Write was more of a drop-in group, the relationships were more casual, but it was great to meet so many different folks and see the role writing played in their lives.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

The Ottawa literary community felt very accessible and welcoming to me. That may have just been because I was ready and eager to engage with people, or because Ottawa is a smaller city, or because I lived downtown near the Library and Archives and the NAC, so I was always walking to readings, seeing people I knew in the audience, attending book launches. It felt like there was no barrier between me and the people on the stage. That helped me claim and inhabit my identity and sense of belonging as a writer.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How has the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

Some of the fiction projects I worked on after Brick and Mortar were set in Ottawa. None of them were ever finished or published, but I did like engaging with the city as a literary setting and seeing how other writers depicted it (Elizabeth Hay’s book Garbo Laughs comes to mind).

I wrote a bit about Ottawa in Pilgrimage of Desire too, and it was fun to memorialize people and places there that were important to me.

Q: What are you working on now?

a)     Nothing.

b)     This interview.

c)     A midlife crisis.

d)     Becoming the person who can write my next book.

e)     Therapy.

f)      A half-dozen assorted unfinished manuscripts.

g)     My blog.

h)     Content marketing for tech companies.

I haven’t worked on any significant personal writing projects since I published Pilgrimage of Desire in 2015. I had a bad bout of depression not long after finishing that project (related, definitely) and it’s taken me some time to get stable again. A few years ago I was accepted to the MFA program at UBC but I couldn’t go because our family couldn’t afford for me not to work; I had to get a full-time job instead. That was a tough disappointment to get over.

Since then I’ve been wondering if I want to keep writing at all. At a certain point, my identity as a writer got too enmeshed with my sense of worth as a person. I have this belief, going back decades, that I have to work really hard, all of the time, to prove that I’m valuable and that my life has meaning. My quarter-life crisis was about 1) recognizing that I was working hard to do what other people wanted and 2) deciding to work hard on what I wanted instead. Writing was a big part of that.

Now my midlife crisis is about moving beyond the belief that my value comes from what I do. It has something to do with recognizing my intrinsic value as a human being and with being myself as fully as I can be. I still don’t know what part writing has to play in that. It might be about letting go of writing as an existential activity of self-expression and just embracing the craft and experience of writing, which I still love and practice at my day job.

I appreciate your invitation to answer these questions as part of that process of reinvention and reunion.

 

Six Questions interview #88 : Robert Hogg

Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta, grew up in the Cariboo and Fraser Valley in British Columbia, and attended UBC during the early Sixties where he was associated with the Vancouver TISH poets, co-edited MOTION - a prose newsletter, and graduated with a BA in English and Creative Writing. In 1964 he hitchhiked east to Toronto, then visited Buffalo NY where Charles Olson was teaching. After spending a few months in NYC, Bob entered the graduate program at the State University of NY at Buffalo, completed a PhD on Olson under Robert Creeley, and took a job teaching American and Canadian Poetry at Carleton University in Ottawa for the next 38 years. His books include: The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez, 1966; Standing Back, Toronto: Coach House, 1972; Of Light, Toronto: Coach House, 1978; Heat Lightning, Windsor: Black Moss, 1986; There Is No Falling, Toronto: ECW,1993; and as editor, An English Canadian Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1, Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. He recently published four chapbooks: from LAMENTATIONS, Ottawa: above/ground, 2016; two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days – The McIntosh from hawk/weed press in Kemptville, ON; Ranch Days—for Ed Dorn from battleaxe press (Ottawa 2019); A Quiet Affair – Vancouver ’63 (Trainwreck, May 2021); and in August 2021 a chapbook titled From Each Forthcoming (above/ground). In April 2019 Hogg edited a Canadian Poetry issue of The Café Review in Portland, ME. His poems have appeared in over seventy periodicals, most recently: Pamenar Online; Empty Mirror; The Café Review; Dispatches; Arc; Some; BlazeVox Online Journal, The Typescript, Caesura, Ottawater 16, Sulfur Surrealist Jungle, Touch the Donkey and recent issues of Periodicities, Bandoneon, and Taint Taint Taint. In early July 2021 a Spoken Web podcast was presented by the UBC Kelowna Amp Lab featuring Robert Hogg’s life and career; it can be heard here.

Books currently in the works for publication include: Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; Amber Alert; Not to Call It Chaos – The Vancouver Poems; Oh Yeah—More Poems. In progress are The Offending Temple, and Ill Parodies – O, a selection of satires on various Shibboleths and current affairs. Now retired, Hogg continues to write at his organic farm in Mountain thirty-five miles south of Ottawa.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I came to Ottawa in 1968 to teach at Carleton University but never lived in the city. This is curious because I’d spent many years living in Vancouver and Buffalo before arriving here, with a few significant months in NYC. So I was pretty urban oriented on arrival. My young wife, Leslie, had grown up in NYC; we met in Buffalo, and she had no history of a rural background. We found a place to live first on the Rideau River just north of Manotick, but were turfed out when our landlord discovered birth control pills during some renovations they were doing. What could we be thinking? And what were they thinking, renting to a professor from Carleton?

Our next lodgings were in the far off town of Vars where we rented a large house connected to an empty store—a 22 mile commute from Ottawa, and a peculiar place to be living we felt. The following summer we rented a cottage on Hawthorne Rd in Gloucester, where we spent two years, and where our first child was born; needing more room, we then moved up the road to a farm property also owned by the NCC (National Capital Commission), a large and endearing house and property of 100 acres. During our second year there the airport decided to reroute planes coming in from the east directly over our farmyard—the noise and intrusion were unbearable and we decided it was time to look for a farm to purchase where we could raise animals and have a garden. We ended up buying a farm thirty-five miles south of the city in Mountain Township where we’ve resided ever since.

So for me, Ottawa was the place I went to teach, and where I had over the years wonderful students and was permitted to teach Modern American, Canadian and British poetry in the main for a nearly 40 year career. I had known Bill Hawkins whom I’d met in Vancouver during the summer Poetry Conference which he’d come west to attend. And I became a close friend to George Johnston, one of the earliest faculty at Carleton, and a fine poet and mentor to me over the years.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

In my position as a prof at Carleton I was able, early on, to bring in a fair number of American poets to read at the university and to engage with the students I was teaching in my seminars. These were glory days before the Canada Council began funding university readings; when they did, they stipulated the readers had to be Canadian. And the Dean’s Fund which had once been more than generous, dried up with the reckoning that the CC was funding readings, so why should they? The list of poets, American, British and Canadian, I brought to read over the years included:

1969:  Lionel Kearns; Allen Ginsberg; Robert Duncan; and Victor Coleman;

1970: John Newlove; Robert Creeley (twice); Ron Loewinsohn; Ed Dorn; Cid Corman; Paul Blackburn; Ed Sanders; Doug Jones; and Joel Oppenheimer;

1971:  Basil Bunting;

and over subsequent years, Daphne Marlatt & Betsy Warland; Roy Kiyooka; bpNichol; George Oppen; Tom Raworth; David Bromige; George Bowering (twice); Gerald Nicosia; Robin Blaser; Roy Miki; Doug Barbour (twice); Christian Bok; Frank Davey.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? 

During my first two decades in the area, the Ottawa literary scene was not very encouraging. I remember that, on learning that John Newlove, with whom I’d had a good friendship early on in Vancouver, and had visited and corresponded with while he was an editor at McClelland and Stewart, thinking to myself, how fine it would be to have him nearby. I called him up and said how glad I was that he’d moved to town, and that we should get together soon. His curt, and not very pleasant reply was, “Why?” I didn’t bother to answer and made no future efforts to connect. I learned later that he was drunk much of the time now, and attributed his rudeness to that.

During the nineties Rob Manery and Louis Cabri ran an exciting series of readings under the general banner of The Transparency Machine. They organized a series of readings at Arts Court over several years which included experimental poetry from Britain, the US and Canada. In particular, they invited many associated with the Language School, such as Maggie O’Sullivan, Ted Pearson, Jed Rasula, Melanie Neilson, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Steve McCaffery, Charles Bernstein and Karen McCormack. Other experimental writers included Erin Moure, George Elliott Clarke, and myself, who also gave a weeklong seminar on Olson’s The Special View of History.

In the following years, this was followed by a similarly oriented set of readings organized by Max Middle (aka Mark Robertson) which he dubbed the AB Series, which ran from about 2007 to 2015, to my recollection. Poets featured included: Jap Blonk, Christian Bök, Lisa Robertson, Jeramy Dodds, Christopher Dewdney, and Gerry Shikatani, as well as Bill Bissett, Colin Browne, Fred Wah, and many local poets such as Cameron Anstee, Brecken Hancock, and Stephen Brockwell. I was unable to attend many of these readings because by the time they got going the Natural Food Distribution business I’d developed had become pretty time consuming. It was not until after it closed and I gradually retired from both teaching and business that I could find time to engage in the local poetry scene. I made a good friend in the poet Chris Turnbull, who’d come to Carleton from Vancouver expressly to do her MA with me on Lisa Robertson about 20 years ago. She has remained a mainstay in my poetry world, and quite fortunately, she and her family moved out to Kemptville about 10 years ago—so I have an ally nearby!

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

In the last ten years or so Ottawa has developed a recognizable poetry community. This has happened, as it should happen, quite haphazardly, I think. People have simply drifted to Ottawa and stayed and made it their home. The various reading series which have operated over the past fifteen years or so brings many of these writers out to listen, or to participate, in readings. Both the Sawdust and Tree Reading Series did much to provide an outlet for such work, and others, like your own Peter F Yacht Club’s annual events have allowed a coalescence of poets. Some local authors have been engaged in editorial work with ARC Magazine which provides a nexus, though not exclusively for local writers. And VerseFest has operated over several years now to bring local and international writers together. These are all signs of a healthy writing environment. And while venues sometimes prove tenuous, new venues are constantly springing up. Many poets have attested to the strong local support they’ve received in the Ottawa poetry scene. And as someone who has always lived somewhat outside the urban area, I‘ve found this to be true for myself as well. Three local publishers: above/ground press; balttleaxepress; and Hawk/weed press have published three, and a soon to be fourth, chapbook of my poetry in the past three years.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

Much of my poetry over the past decades has responded to my rural life south of Ottawa. I have still a strong attachment to my youth in BC, both to the interior Cariboo country and to Vancouver where I developed my sense of writing. There is both an urban and a rural current running through my poetry, and I don’t at all feel like a ‘regional’ poet whose work expresses ‘life in the Valley’ or some such notion. My sensibilities are rooted in my reading as much as in my environment, and I am as much engaged in the process of writing as in telling a narrative of some kind. From the outset I have been moved by the music that underlies the best poetry I’ve read. And it is this music which I hear when I listen to what wants to be said.

Q: What are you working on now?
Right now, my primary objective is to get into print work that I’ve done over a lifetime which, for various reasons, I did not see a reason to publish when it was completed—or in some cases, left incomplete. So for the past two years, while I’ve written two new books of poetry, I’ve also been much engaged in reclaiming poetry that I simply abandoned or left incomplete decades ago. I had a strong sense, early on, that a book of poems had to cohere and should include nothing extraneous to its essential thrust. So, beginning with The Connexions, my first book in 1966, I left out a number of poems which were written at the same time, as well as a host of poems which had been written in Vancouver before coming east. I included one of those poems in my second book, Standing Back (the fragment called ‘Waki’s Dream’ from an unpublished Noh Play called, variously, The Marijuana People and Cannabis Sutra). So I’ve spent a good bit of time going over that early work, discerning what was worth keeping, and revising many of the poems. This has resulted in four collections: The Vancouver Poems; Postcards, from America which will include The Connexions along with many other poems written while in the USA; The Cariboo Poems, many of which were written in the Sixties; and Lost Poems, those written in the Seventies which did not seem to fit into Standing Back or Of Light.
A recent engagement has been with writing satire. I’ve satirized several canonical English and American poems, from Wyatt to Frost and Creeley. This has been a healthy exercise, and one I quite enjoy. I will likely go on to satirize some of my fellow Canadian poets as well, but felt that before I did so, I should first satirize one of my own. I chose a poem written with Robert Kroetsch half in mind, my poem called “This Bent” which owes something to his “Stone Hammer Poem.” I’ll close by first quoting my homage to Kroetsch, followed by my self-satire as an example of what I might be up to in coming days.

This bent – by Robert Hogg, after Robert Kroetsch

and rusty
nail

pulled
from a rotted
baton 

back
wall of
our house 

slips in
my left
hip pocket 

auto
matic
as any 

thing I
do and gets
forgotten 

until next
day I’m
doing a clothes 

wash it
falls out
clink 

on the concrete
mudroom
floor 

so I pick
it up
examine 

it and
say
Oh yes 

this bent
and rusty
nail 

how
did it
get here?

RLH: Mtn: 2018-05-27 (pub’d in The Typescript, 2020-07-11)

 

Petrified Poem by Robert Coproetsch 

This worn
and rusty
thought 

pulled
from a potted
poem 

by Robert
Kroetsch
left 

on a
prairie
porch 

to bleach
in the winter
sun 

shoved in
my left
brain socket 

auto
matic
as any 

theft I’d
make and then
forget 

where I
stole it
from 

until next
day I’m
writing a poem 

and out
it pops
cool as 

any idea
I might
have had 

on the pot
all by
myself 

lands
clink on
the porcelain 

bowl
just another
frozen 

thought
caught
in the down

stream
flush of
Precambrian 

time while
I wonder
where did 

it come
from
this idea 

I reach down
to rescue
from oblivion 

but just in
time
resist 

picking
it up
for it is 

a worn
and hapless
thought 

now as
it disappears
but still 

I wonder
how did it
get here? 

RLH: Mtn: 2021-06-21 (unpublished)