new from above/ground press: from Lamentations by Robert Hogg

from Lamentations

Robert Hogg

$4

The Creative

No poet spoke

From the balcony of the foreign mind

all voice fell away

and the shattering

silence crashed

the land

what rose

knew no sheets

nor tore from music

kindness meant

But for all that

fans kept turning

electric and heat

rushed back into

the made thing

published in Ottawa by above/ground press

May 2012

a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, Alberta on March 26, 1942. When the child was nine, his father bought a ranch in the Cariboo region in the interior of British Columbia, where the family spent three years; from there they moved to Burnaby, and later Abbotsford and Langley in the Fraser Valley where Hogg finished high school in 1960. He spent the next four years in the English and Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia where he came into contact with the Black Mountain poets and their poetics and participated in the Tish poetry movement. After graduating in the spring of 1964 Hogg hitch-hiked to Toronto, visited the poet, Charles Olson, in Buffalo, and applied to study under him in the graduate program of the English Department of the State University of New York. Hogg later wrote his doctoral dissertation on Olson under the supervision of Robert Creeley. He completed the course work for the PhD in the spring of 1968 and accepted a position at Carleton University in Ottawa where he taught Modern and Post-Modern American and Canadian Poetry and Poetic Theory until his retirement in 2005.

While at Buffalo Hogg met and married Leslie Flaig, then a music major at the University, who has since become an accomplished artist and photographer. During the next two decades they raised three children on their farm in Mountain Township, about 50 kilometres south of Ottawa, where they grow organic crops and operate a commercial flour mill and natural food distribution company called Mountain Path Inc. At present, Hogg is working on a sixth book of poetry, and editing an extensive anthology of Canadian poetic theory.

PUBLICATIONS

The Connexions. Berkeley CA: Oyez Press, 1966.

Standing Back. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1972.

Of Light. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1978.

Heat Lightning. Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1986.

There Is No Falling. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993.

An English Canadian Poetics, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1. Editor. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009.

http://www.theeastvillage.com/tc/hogg/p1.htm

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com