Short, fragmented lines, like shards of broken glass in the sun, skipping from one facet to the next, thoughts interrupted and reconstituted on-the-fly, sometimes wandering, sometimes rushing forward – this was the Bob Hogg I met through the medium of poetry. The Typescript first published his work in the summer of 2020 as part of a tribute to Robert Kroetsch. There were four poems, the last two of which were in those choppy-yet-fluid lines that I am beginning to think of as his late style.
The very last poem references the Buddha in the accompanying illustration; a digital snapshot of his garden:
Hop off
my tractor
snap
a picture of
the Buddha
down
my lane
take a
selfie by
mistake
Flattened into four or five lines – 5-5-4-4-5 – it reads like a freeform tanka, or a gogyohka from Japan’s Taisho period. There is not much narrative there, just a moment consisting of two intentional acts and one mistake, but it is an awakening to the Buddha-nature of his selfie while mucking around in organic agriculture. To my ear, it recalled Ishikawa Takuboku’s reflections upon playing with a crab in the white sands of the Pacific Ocean.
I never asked Bob about his beliefs, and whether I was reading too much satori into the encounter between an old man, a garden-Buddha, and his cellphone in Eastern Ontario, but I could never get past that instant. I can’t claim to be much of an expert in poetry but, as they say, I know what I like; and I have always liked the spare immediacy of Japanese verse (at least since a college friend introduced me to Basho and Issa almost four decades ago). I loved Bob’s poetry.
When Bob joined The Typescript’s editorial board this summer, I asked him about Japanese poetry a few times in our chat and message chains, though always tentatively, and never pushing my curiosity about his relationship to Zen. We discussed the possibility of hosting a collaborative poetry project on the site modeled on renga. I didn’t want to come off as that know-it-all dilettante and floated the idea like a passing whimsy, but Bob agreed that poetry could be a nexus of community, a place where collaborators in dialogue would encounter each other in moments of awakening.
And I could only imagine Bob at the center of those encounters, sitting like a serene Buddha in a growing garden of renga.
It is, of course, unfair to characterize Bob as some kind of smiling Budai atop a woodpile at the farm. He had a wicked sense of humor that enlivened our virtual meetings with wry observations and anecdotes from Canadian literature. In his last comment to our message chain, he recalled Earl Birney making an appearance in Jake Zilber’s poetry class at the University of British Columbia in the early-1960s to promote his own course.
Birney was a principled and sometimes prickly “man of the left,” as my mother (who took his class at UBC in the 1950s) once described him. Bob recalled that he missed studying with him because Birney had boycotted the university’s 1963 summer program because he was “pissed that Bob Creeley et al had invited up all those American poets.” But there he was in Zilber’s class and, “to show he was also oneofus [sic] he took along a can of Chum Tobacco and rolled at least one perfect cigarette. A man of many accomplishments!”
I heard the voice of Birney’s “David,” my mother’s favorite poem, in Bob’s “Lost Lake,” the third-to-last of his poems that we published in The Typescript last month. I didn’t say anything until Bob brought it up in a social media post. The tone of distant memory and youthful adventures, though in much sparser language, and with less ice, rocks, and death, is certainly there, but I didn’t want to impose my amateurish interpretation on it. Yet, commenting on the post I shared in social media, he noted, “the poem in fact owes a debt to Earle Birney’s DAVID and another to a discussion he overheard once about Mystic Lake.”
I plotzed, as my people say, validated by an artist whose work I admired and man I so valued as a colleague and friend. Yet there was much more to say and, above all, to ask.
My brief acquaintance with Bob – I would want to call it a friendship, but that seems to presume much for what was, after all, an association built in the ether of digitally-mediated communication with no real-world contact – electrified my connection to Canadian letters. It was a vital artery to the literary lifeblood of my home.
I let slip once that I was rereading Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John, one of Canada’s great, underappreciated works of fiction. Bob, an Albertan like O’Hagan, leapt at that revelation to a full-throated expression of appreciation and interest. I made a mental note to chat with him at length sometime about Tay John’s wilderness romance, its cyclical storytelling (which, in my arch-intellectual way, I imagine evokes a Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence), and its author’s troubled engagement with modernity.
My plan was to make one of my rare visits back home to Montreal in the coming spring and make a pilgrimage to the Ottawa Valley, where I would finally meet Bob in the garden with his Buddha and just talk. In retrospect, I should have recalled all the conversations that I will never have with my zeyde, and all the questions that I will never ask my father. I knew that Bob was sick – it was no secret – and that he was 80 years old, but that knowledge lay in that mental compartment where I prefer not to look.
“Der mentsh trakht,” my father said in our last telephone conversation a decade ago, when I told him that I would come for a visit at the end of April, “un Gott lakht.” Man plans, and God laughs.
“There’s never enough time,” Bob wrote in his last poem for us, “A Post-Modern Ecstasy – Before the Fact.” The words appear in those short, fragmented lines of his late style, each reflecting like individual shards of glass. As Theresa Smalec wrote earlier this week, we already miss Bob, each of us uniquely, and all of us collectively.
There’s never enough time.
***
Photo by Robert Hogg.