Robert Hogg : part five

How does a poem begin?

Archibald MacLeish famously said, “A poem should not mean, but be.” And T.S. Eliot opens ‘East Coker,’ part II of his Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end.” So how, then, can a poem begin anywhere or for that matter, mean anything. Answer? It can’t. Because it is, for the most part, forever in flux, in process. Oh, we can start writing at a given point in a day, of a calendar year, and so forth. But is that the beginning of a poem, and does that mean anything? Not much. What matters—and there is such thing—is that at some point in our day to day life as a writer, we hook into a passing comet, or, it may be, a poem, and suddenly realize we are riding a crest, a wave, heading to, or over, a near or far horizon, and the exhilaration is tremendous. We are suddenly caught up in what feels like a whirlwind, and maybe it is, for all we or Toto know about the matter. Because suddenly we are not at anything like a beginning or an end, but rather in the middle of a cyclone, weightless, terrified, joyful, and about to die. What could be better than this? Not a beginning, surely. And, preferably for the moment at least, not an end! In 1963 I wrote a Noh Play called Cannabis Sutra in which the figure referred to as Waki relates a dream:

Early   before sunrise
I woke to the light of a dream

The dream
was of sunrise,
sunrise over the sea

I lay on a raft
feeling neither cold
nor fear
nor the water
that lay around me

Only the sun
held my attention, rising
in what must have been the east
though there was no sign
no way of knowing
what way
east was
but that the sun
rose out of water
suddenly whole

Poems are born like that --not of a grand idea, but from a state of chaos and disorientation—‘suddenly whole’. 

Robert Hogg : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Luckily, I’ve already partially answered this question in the course of answering questions above. And of course one goes on reading, admiring, and learning throughout one’s life. If I had to narrow this answer down to a few poets, I’d probably say: Yeats; Williams; Pound; Olson; Duncan and Creeley. There are of course dozens of others, maybe most particularly Beat poets like Ginsberg, Corso and in his prose, primarily, Jack Kerouac. All of the above have freed me from previous constraints and ideas of what poetry could or could not do. Pound and Olson had the greatest effect on my notion of theory in writing, while Williams and Duncan had the strongest effect on the way I would write, and in the case of Duncan, the ways I would have to force myself not to write. I fell for Duncan’s melodious verse from the moment I first heard him read in December 1959 when Warren and Ellen Tallman had him up to Vancouver to read to a few interested poets and lovers of poetry in their home. Frank Davey famously dragged me in from my family in Langley, where I was in my final year of high school, saying something like, you don’t have a choice, you’re just coming! Duncan read from his yet unpublished The Opening of the Field and his poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” was the piece that sealed for me the need to listen, read, write and become a poet. What I heard during that reading I could not then have put into words, but it set me afire inside, and I’ve been burning ever since. 

Robert Hogg : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is unique. It has an incisiveness that prose seldom attains. I have never abandoned the lyric, despite the battering it has had over the past several decades. I have written numerous narrative poems as well, but in essence, the lyric underpins even these poems, and hopefully gives them their immediacy. And that, perhaps, immediacy, is the second thing poetry can accomplish. We owe much to Pound and his Imagist accomplices for their recognition of this great value in poetry, and particularly the short, imagistic poem. It is no accident, I don’t think, that Imagism had its heyday not long after the invention of photography, and the two, along with motion pictures, rose to prominence coincidentally. When Pound ‘invented’ what he called the Ideogrammic method of composition, he set the stage for a poetics which would try to capture not just a vivid picture of life, but the leaps and bounds of activity which we might now, since Whitehead, subsume under the term Event. Olson, of course, sought to take this processual approach to nature a step further with his Projective Verse, a perspective which placed the poet not outside, but smack in the middle of the physical world, participant, player, and recorder all at once. When poetry is that engaged in the moment—however long a duration that may span—then there is an urgency to find a language commensurate with that world in flux. We can of course revert to more comfortable modalities. But there is now and forever that pressure of reality, to steal a phrase from Wallace Stevens, which demands our recognition. By adhering to that the poet can, as Olson says, be “contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.” To me, that is the most profound statement in Olson’s Projective Verse essay, and points unequivocally to what poetry alone can achieve. 

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. 

Robert Hogg : part one

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 five 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 2021) and From Each Forthcoming (above/ground, 2021). 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 forthcoming issues of Periodicities, Bandoneon, and Taint Taint Taint. 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; and The Offending Temple. In progress are Furtherings and Ill Parodies – O, a selection of satires on various Shibboleths and current affairs. In Spring 2021 new chapbook will be released form above/ground called From Each Forthcoming. Now retired, Hogg continues to write at his organic farm in Mountain thirty-five miles south of Ottawa.

Statement:
Some years ago I wrote in a poem, “One listens. Poetry speaks--a recognizable language,  never predictable, but sometimes, a familiar voice.”  

How did you first engage with poetry?

I first engaged with poetry quite literally on my father’s knee. He was not the most attentive of fathers, but he did love poetry, particularly Victorian poetry, and Shakespeare, much of which he could recite. He enjoyed reading aloud to me when I was young and before I could read for myself, and so I heard poetry read, not by a poet, thankfully, nor by an actor, again thankfully, but by someone with an ear for the sound of beauty. As for writing poetry, I composed my first poem at the age of nine which, thankfully, has not survived. But I recall typing it up on my mother’s typewriter after having written, or perhaps printed, it out by hand. If I recall rightly, it was several rhyming quatrains, and spoke to a green landscape and a Romantic appreciation of nature. I don’t recall reading any poetry in grade school in Edmonton Alberta, nor later in BC. But by the time I was in High School, traditional poetry was part of the curriculum. In my final year I read a good deal in an anthology then current which covered writing from the Renaissance to the present. We actually read some poems by Earle Birney in that class, and that was the first I knew that there might be a famous local poet or poetry. By then I was also beginning to read the Beats which I discovered on my own, and with the help of Frank Davey who introduced me to Gregory Corso’s Gasoline, Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl—all from City Lights. So, by the time I arrived at UBC I was already crazy enough to want to both read and write more poetry.