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Robert Hogg

Updated: Feb 18, 2020

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 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 and took a job teaching American and Canadian Poetry at Carleton University in Ottawa for the next 38 years. He currently resides at his farm fifty miles south of Ottawa and is working on four collections: Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; and The Vancouver Work. His publications 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; and from Lamentations, Ottawa: above/ground, 2016. Two Cariboo poems, Ranch Days – The McIntosh from hawk/weed press in Kemptville, Ontario, and Ranch Days—for Ed Dorn from battleaxe press in Ottawa have recently been published (2019). He edited the April 2019 Canadian poetry issue of the Portland Maine Café Review.


 


 

Oil Change



Draining the oil of a tractor


is hardly a mythical act


worthy of classical hexameters





But neither is a seized up engine


a purely metaphysical fact


Likewise: add new




oil and change filter


are poor excuses for


Christian parable




Nonetheless we follow


such modern precepts


happily enough nor chafe





unduly at skinned knuckles


knowing that freedom consists


in meeting perfection half way


 

Dawn Poem


All cataracts


the gray-fall light


stepping between bodies/friends


asleep on the floor



had held itself


openly the white


blind pulled down



can’t keep out


the light


the night


sounds of your child


first chirps of a bird


rattling window night


weariness back


pain can’t


keep anything out


can’t keep out these


thoughts of you


here, turning in


sleep


torsion of your hips


clothed


quietly


sombre


I want to say but what


does that have to do with your lips


which seem to quiver


knowledge and loveliness


in the half light





After breakfast you read my Tarot


the cards falling


spherically the Sun


at center evidently


me


seated