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