Robert Hogg : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

One’s consideration of poetry comes as much from reading as from the practice of writing. Perhaps I should have said, “as much from the practice of reading…” since it is how we read, and why we read, that largely determines how we will compose our own poems. From very early on I had some inkling that I was a poet, and that I could learn to write expertly. But to do this, I had to pay close attention to what I was reading—how it was written, how it sounded to my ear, how it forced me to pay close attention—or if not, why not? That critical sense of reading is germane to any qualitative ability to write well. Of course, one is always limited, and thus it is useful to have teachers in one’s life who themselves show a deep consideration of the written word. Some of these may be friends, or they may be university professors with a keen ear for the music of poetry and subtleties in composition and effect. I was lucky to encounter Warren Tallman at UBC who was all of the above for myself and many poets of my generation who studied with him, however briefly. Warren made a habit of reading the poems under discussion in his classes out loud. So whether he read a sonnet by Wyatt, passages from Pope, Lapis Lazuli by Yeats, or a contemporary poem by Robert Creeley or Robert Duncan, poets he personally knew, he inevitably read the poetry as he personally heard it, and articulated every sound and syllable present. It was that attention to what was on the page that made one consider what had been written, what was being said. That was decades ago, now. But in some way that ‘learning to hear’ has stayed with me and remained forefront in my current reading and in my own composition. And of course I chose along with my contemporaries to write in free verse and to experiment with form without the constraints of our forebears in the practice. And yet…, and yet…, in my own case, and again in that of many others, I’ve chosen to apply constraints on my style for most of my career. I am more at ease writing quatrains, probably, than any other particular stanzaic pattern. But just as often, I will begin a poem in couplets or as a single narration, and then later, when I come back to it, break it down into one or another specific pattern. In my earlier writing, I often experimented with line breaks and stanza structures, breaking them up and seldom following through with a single pattern. Recently, I’ve tended to maintain a discrete series of quatrains or tercets, particularly in longer poems.