I spoke of the cock sorrel stem
The cock sorrel grew
east of the woodshed
green and like reeds in the spring
By autumn the stalks grew
brown and brittle
and you could break them
easily at the six-inch joints
nip off the joints
and pop them in your shirt
pocket for smoking later
at night when you lit them
the tips would glow
like a little circle
in the dark and the smoke
was hot and harsh
and burned your throat (“3,” Ranch Days (for Ed Dorn))
Ottawa-area
poet Robert Hogg hasn’t been terribly active, it would seem, for some time
(above/ground press released a chapbook in 2012, and then an updated version in 2016), but this year saw not one but two different chapbook excerpts of his
work-in-progress, “The Cariboo Poems”: Ranch Days (for Ed Dorn) (Ottawa ON: battleaxe press, 2019), which includes a
foreword by Lionel Kearns, and Ranch Days
– The McIntosh (Kemptville ON: hawkweed press, 2019), which includes a
foreword by Bruce Whiteman. One of the later editors of the infamous TISH magazine, Hogg is the author of
five full-length poetry collections—The
Connexions (Berkeley CA: Oyez Press, 1966), Standing Back (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1972), Of Light (Coach House Press, 1978), Heat Lightning (Windsor ON: Black Moss
Press, 1986), There Is No Falling (Toronto:
ECW Press, 1993)—as well as editor of An English Canadian Poetics: The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1. (Vancouver BC:
Talonbooks, 2009), so one might understand why, after nearly three decades of what
felt like near-silence (a period that included his retirement from teaching at
Carleton University to become a full-time organic farmer), the appearance of
new material might be considered rather exciting. Even further to this is the
acknowledgement in his author biography that he “is working on four
collections: Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; American Postcards; and The
Vancouver Work.”
From its opening line, Ranch Days pulls us immediately into its story and does not let us
go. Perhaps that puma is real, perhaps not. Even the poet seems unsure,
remembering his experience as a ten-year-old boy. But we are compelled to read
on by the power of story and the authority of the storyteller’s voice. Technically,
the poem constitutes almost an apotheosis of enjambment. It constantly pulls
you ‘round the corner of the next bit of narrative or the next bit of time, as
a well-told story ought to. Lacking punctuation and capitalization, we always
nevertheless know where we are, and where we are is from beginning to end in
the hands of the voice, if that is not too odd a way to put it. It carries us
forward, “swinging,” “hanging,” “tumbling” from the beginning to the restful
end of the day, when the tired horses gratefully receive their water and oats.
The tang of the real in this poem is
extraordinary. It is partly the sharpness of Hogg’s memory and the precision
which ranching jobs require. The specificity of the vocabulary also adds to the
sense of authenticity; window, sloop, snaffle, shock. (I worked on a farm one summer
as a kid, and remember what we called “stoking,” i.e. standing the fresh-cut
hay to let it dry out before it was baled). Cutting and gathering that wild “reed
grass” which Hogg tells us about has parallels all over the world and all
through the ages, going back to the very beginnings of agriculture; but the
poet puts us unarguably in the Carbioo region of central B.C. and in the early
1950s, where a lake near Spooky Springs is as “round/as a plum” and a boy skids
a sloop over the stubble as part of his job. The cougar may be a figment of a
feverish imagination, rousted from the poet’s boyish brain by “long days in the
hay”. Everything else is tangible and clear and unforgettable. (“Foreword,”
Bruce Whiteman)
These
two self-contained sequences are poems originally composed during the 1960s,
poems already looking back at a period of time quickly slipping away, and
recently revisited, reworked and restructured. There is almost a sense of
layering, memory upon memory, as Hogg not only revisits his youth in the
interior of British Columbia, but those early days of writing and engaging with
poets and poetry in the 1960s. As Kearns writes: “However, the poem is more
than a memory of a memory. It has come to us through the years to deliver a
vivid encounter with a piece of personal experience. Heed those images. Take in
the smoke from the tree moss in the boy’s pipe and the Bull Durham tobacco in
the old rancher’s cigarette as it mixes with the smell of the unfortunate calf’s
burning hair and flesh. No ideas but in
things wrote William Carlos Williams, laying down the principle for
conjuring up the essence of experience in a poem.” As Hogg himself writes as
part of the “Afterword” to Ranch Days
(for Ed Dorn):
This poem, originally called simply Ranch Days, was the first of a series
of poems I began writing in early 1962 after hearing Ed Dorn read his poetry to
a large audience at UBC when I was in my second year. Dorn’s attention to his
rugged upbringing in rural Illinois and his more recent experience of the open
landscapes of Idaho and Montana spoke so strongly to me that I felt an
uncontrollable urge to respond with a poem which would capture my own childhood
experience on the ranch where I lived, briefly, in the Cariboo from 1951-1953. I
went home after the reading and wrote Ranch
Days in the course of a couple of hours. It was my first attempt at writing
about my ranch life which by now was a full nine years before. Only a few
months later I would learn from the Vancouver Sun that our ranch house had
burned down, killing an infant and sending two children on an arduous three
mile trek to safety. I responded to that event with a poem called The Ashes of Two Fires.
What
is compelling is in how Hogg writes both poems as a curious combination of
meditation, action and description, composing a deceptively-straight line
across a series of actions and movement, looking back at his looking back, and
managing something unsentimental and contemporary through the process. There is
something really compelling in the light touch of Hogg’s lyric, as he ends the
chapbook/poem Ranch Days – The McIntosh:
so glad to get that
bit out of their mouths feel
the cool water on
their lips fresh hay
in the mangers and now at long
last a coffee can
full of oats the long
day done
