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
nailpulled
from a rotted
batonback
wall of
our houseslips in
my left
hip pocketauto
matic
as anything I
do and gets
forgottenuntil next
day I’m
doing a clotheswash it
falls out
clinkon the concrete
mudroom
floorso I pick
it up
examineit and
say
Oh yesthis bent
and rusty
nailhow
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
thoughtpulled
from a potted
poemby Robert
Kroetsch
lefton a
prairie
porchto bleach
in the winter
sunshoved in
my left
brain socketauto
matic
as anytheft I’d
make and then
forgetwhere I
stole it
fromuntil next
day I’m
writing a poemand out
it pops
cool asany idea
I might
have hadon the pot
all by
myselflands
clink on
the porcelainbowl
just another
frozenthought
caught
in the downstream
flush of
Precambriantime while
I wonder
where didit come
from
this ideaI reach down
to rescue
from oblivionbut just in
time
resistpicking
it up
for it isa worn
and hapless
thoughtnow as
it disappears
but stillI wonder
how did it
get here?RLH: Mtn: 2021-06-21 (unpublished)
