This is one of those stories that makes clear to me – if nobody else – why I’m so happy to be doing what I do. Although, as you will see, I’m only a peripheral figure in this tale.
Sue Gaughan, whom I do not know, sent me an email last week, as follows:
Dear Mr. Silliman,
i was hoping you may be able to help me. i recently found a poem, or a verse from a poem credited to robert hogg.
The sun is mine
And the trees are mine
The light breeze is mine...
all the searches i have done lead me to believe he is a Canadian poet. i would appreciate some confirmation of this and the complete poem if possible.
i would greatly appreciate any assistance you could offer.
sincerely,
sue
Well, I knew that Robert Hogg was a Canadian poet, but was this a poem of his? I couldn’t say. So I forwarded my missive northward to Louis Cabri, who noted that Hogg was
one of the TISH era poets from the 1960s in Vancouver, who has lived in Ottawa since I believe the early 1980s and teaches at Carleton University. (TISH was a poetry newsletter and the poets involved with the magazine were the Canadian counterpart to the New American poetries.) [RS: Jack Spicer fans will recognize the name Tish from Book of Magazine Verse]
Since Louis didn’t have any of Hogg’s books at hand, tho, he forwarded the email chain westward to Rob Manery in Vancouver. Rob indeed had answers, plus a bibliography – and a further poem for our consideration:
The lines are from Bob's first book, The Connexions (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966).The Connexions is a long poem describing a mythological rite of passage into manhood. The lines are from the last poem of the book, an envoi to the poem.
Bob Hogg's bibliography:
The Connexions(Berkeley: Oyez, 1966)
Standing Back (Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1971)
Of Light (Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1978)
Heat Lightning (Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss Press, 1986)
There is No Falling (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993)
Another poem by Bob which I've always thought was his best
Three Rooms
In the midnight
kitchen
the harvest
table
beneath the
light
defies
the essential
emptiness
of the room
into which I
come
disturbing
nothing
but the unseen
molecules
of the air
to place my
elbows on
the table
sit
with my mind
to think
the wheel
of the furnace
could be still
and not forever
circulating air
listen
for the silence
eager
with mind
and ear
for the night
sounds of the house
water
trickling through
crushed stone
conduits
laid on bedrock
networks of pipes
in their gravel
beds
mind
straining
to know
what is really
underground
§
not water
over stones
but a curious
imitation
the mind's
flirtation
with the real
bells
ringing
words
with unique
persistence
singing through
the floorboards
profane
as my elbows
and no less
determined
to prop up
abstract
thought
its single
ambition
a fixed
proposition
a construct a
permanent
word
free at last
of ob-
durate earth
and empty
ether
it can ride
the wind
blow through
walls
enter
the furnace
circulate
as air
perform
acrobatics
of sound
and sense
tumble
down on the nets
of the inner
ear
disturb
the delicate
nerve
signal
being
unending
wave
Finally Robert Hogg himself joined in (copied on all this, I think, by Rob). His note:
Hello folks; the poem in question was printed as the last poem in my first book, The Connexions, Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1966. It was written in Buffalo in May 1965 when I had recovered from a terrible battle with hepatitis that nearly killed me during my convalescence and relapses the previous winter in Manhattan where I had been a welfare patient in St Vincent de Paul’s Hospital, and later stayed with a lover, the “Nadia” of the sequence, in an apartment on West 10th St from the window of which I could see the barbed wire roof of the West Street Jail. The entire text obliquely refers to the rite of passage associated with prolonged fever, jaundice, two serious relapses and the consequent proximity of death. Of three of us who contracted the disease in Vancouver, one died. The exuberance I felt when I recognized my health had really returned is reflected in the repossession of those natural elements celebrated in the final poem. It came in a burst one May day when I was living on Lafayette Ave in Buffalo, the leaves fully on the trees, and the warmth of spring finally certain. It signaled both the end of my illness and the end of the sequence of poems I had been writing since the previous December—I knew also that I had a book with a coherent theme, and that many of the poems I’d written over the previous three years did not belong in it. Consequently, most of those early poems never saw reprinting in any of my books, though many had appeared in small mags in Canada, England and the States. The poem in question has been anthologized a few times, most often in anthologies for young readers. While I am delighted by this, it is also somewhat ironic that the real context has never been recognized or acknowledged. As a final note of interest, that same month I read the poem out loud in Olson’s graduate poetry class in which I was enrolled; he listened to the poem intently, then asked me to reread it to the class. After I had done so he looked at the class in general which was populated with some exceptional peers, and said, “Now that is poetry.” After what I had been through, and the circumstances under which I had been living and studying and teaching first year classes in English at SUNY, that was a great moment. I had just turned 23, and was likely to see 24. The entire poem goes as follows:
Song
The sun is mine
And the trees are mine
The light breeze is mine
And the birds that inhabit the air
are mine
Their voices upon the wind
are in my ear
