Poet Robert Hogg spent almost half his life teaching poetics and English literature at Carleton University in Ottawa and published five books of poetry and six chapbooks.Courtesy of the Family
The poet Robert Hogg’s passion for the word influenced generations of students.
An avuncular figure who could not hide from his face delight with word play he admired, Mr. Hogg convinced many students that profundity and pleasure were to be found in even the most obscure literary journals.
Mr. Hogg, who has died at 80, spent nearly half his life teaching poetics and English literature at Carleton University in Ottawa.
He published five books of poetry and six chapbooks, as well as editing a comprehensive anthology of Canadian poetic theory. His poems appeared in more than 70 periodicals.
“Hogg’s splendidly sublime poetry defies easy description and resists labels of all kinds,” the poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald wrote in the Globe and Mail in 2011. “His work simply dazzles.”
Poet Robert Hogg.Courtesy of the Family
A familiar figure at readings in the Ottawa area, he was known to purchase whatever printed material was on offer, both in support of the writer and in search for overlooked gems. He combed dusty shelves in second-hand bookstores in search of forgotten treasures.
“He was extremely generous of heart,” said the award-winning nonfiction writer Julian Hoffman, who studied under Mr. Hogg and now lives in the Greek village of Agios Germanos. “He urged us to recognize the value of a work, whether in a tiny pamphlet produced by students out of the back of a house or released by a big-name publisher.” The lesson: “The words themselves held the value.”
His own writing was precise, measured and remarkable for its sonic quality. As a reader, he was considered to have a helpful critical eye and ear, reading even student work with attention before delivering an honest verdict.
“Bob connected people,” said Chris Turnbull, a poet who lives in Kemptville, Ont. “A strength of his was to connect poets and poetry to other poets and their poetry.”
While he had an expertise in American literature, notably the Beat Generation writers and the Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson, whose writing was the subject of his doctorate, Mr. Hogg felt Canadians were too often overlooked. He expressed delight when students discovered the works of such poets as Erin Mouré, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt and George Bowering, the latter two whom he befriended as an undergraduate student in Vancouver.
Cheeky students felt comfortable enough with the affable professor that in the early 1980s they referred to the teacher as Boss Hogg, after a character on the popular American television show The Dukes of Hazzard. As it was, he pronounced his family name to rhyme with “rogue,” though he rarely corrected even friends, some of whom inadvertently mispronounced it for years.
Robert Lawrence Hogg was born in Edmonton on March 26, 1942, to the former Florence Drebert, a daughter of Russian-born immigrants, and George Harold Hogg, an English-born accountant and bookkeeper. He spent part of his childhood on a ranch on Green Lake in British Columbia’s southern Cariboo region before the family settled in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver. The rural upbringing sparked a lifelong love for motorized vehicles, a passion also fuelled by the Beats’ pleasures in being on the road.
As an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Hogg, then known as Bobby, fell in with the older students producing TISH, a poetry newsletter whose title is an anagram for excrement.
In 1963, Mr. Hogg, 21, who was working as a shoe salesman as he completed his senior year, was arrested and charged with possession of narcotics after police discovered a marijuana plant at his rented home. A professor covered his $500 bail, while another served as a character witness at trial. He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation for one year.
After his arrest, a visiting poet sympathetically signed a copy of his Kaddish and Other Poems with the inscription, “Protect yourself! Allen Ginsberg, Vancouver ‘63.”
Mr. Hogg, pictured in 1972, was an early proponent of organic farming, and moved to a 150-acre farm south of Ottawa.Courtesy of the Family
It was on campus that Mr. Hogg first met Mr. Olson, the postmodern, avant-garde writer who became an immediate friend and mentor. The visiting lecturer was “a tall, rather scruffy giant,” in Mr. Hogg’s recollection, while the admiring pupil stood less than five-foot-six and weighed just 120 pounds (1.67 metres, 54 kilograms.) The younger man could not help but wonder what others might think of the pair: “We must have looked like an act from the circus.”
A degree in English and creative writing in hand, Mr. Hogg hitchhiked to eastern Canada. In the Centennial Year of 1967, he took part in a poetry reading at the Parliament Street Library in Toronto with Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, among others, which was later broadcast on television by the CBC. He took up postgraduate studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he began his dissertation under the supervision of the poet Robert Creeley, another friend of Mr. Olson’s. It was while living in an apartment building in Buffalo that he met a shy, downstairs neighbour who had been dispatched by her roommates to fetch from him a cup of sugar. He married Leslie Joy Flaig in 1968. It was a second marriage for Mr. Hogg, as a short-lived marriage in Vancouver ended in divorce after a year.
After being hired by Carleton, he lived in a house in the Ottawa suburb of Gloucester, which serendipitously shared a name with the Massachusetts seaside community that inspired much of Mr. Olson’s poetry. Mr. Bowering, who would be named Canada’s first poet laureate, remembers his friend working on his thesis in a room whose walls were covered by maps of his subject’s adopted hometown.
In 1973, Mr. Hogg moved to a 150-acre farm near the hamlet of Mountain (despite the name, the “flattest country you’ve ever seen,” Mr. Bowering said), about 50 kilometres south of Ottawa. An early proponent of organic farming, Mr. Hogg over time amassed machinery to mill wheat, selling his own organic wheat and vegetables in Ontario and Quebec, as well as distributing products imported from the United States through his Mountain Path Inc. company.
An unpaginated, limited printing of 500 copies of Mr. Hogg’s first collection, The Connexions, was released by Oyez Press of Berkeley, Calif., in 1966. It was later described by an Ottawa Citizen reviewer as a “precocious and linguistically sumptuous volume.”
A second collection, Standing Back, including “L’Anse aux Meadows,” a meditation on early Viking visitors to Newfoundland, was issued six years later by Coach House Press of Toronto.
These were followed by Of Light (Coach House, 1978), Heat Lightning (Black Moss, 1986), and There Is No Falling (ECW, 1993). The Ottawa poet E. Russell Smith praised Mr. Hogg’s commitment to language in a review in the Ottawa Citizen citing the latter two volumes, noting “single words and short lines perform extra duty as they hang unresolved in the consciousness of the reader.”
Three more volumes are scheduled for posthumous publication.
Diagnosed and treated for tongue cancer 12 years ago, the disease later metastasized to his throat. Mr. Hogg died on Nov. 13 at Ottawa General Hospital. He leaves Leslie, his wife of 54 years; two sons; a daughter; six grandchildren; and, a brother, George Hogg.
He spent the last full day of his life responding to many correspondents who had reached out to him electronically.
Earlier this year, he wrote a 22-word poem titled,
Pre-emptive Epitaph
May it never be said
he died bereft
of his beloved
Ethiopian
cappuccino
medium roasted
espresso ground
the aroma
wafting to heaven