Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. Website: paulhostovsky.com
Enjoy!
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If you could go back to the hardest time in your life, would you change anything about how you acted? What about how others acted?
Hostovsky: I’m trying to think of what would qualify as “the hardest time” in my life. Being born, perhaps, which of course I don’t remember—pushing my way down that birth canal, elbowing, kneeing, shouldering my way out, giving up the warm salt sea of the placenta for that cold punch of air to my nascent tiny lungs—wow! that was hard, and I cried mightily. Since then, thankfully, I haven’t had a whole lot of “hard times” in my life, at least not compared to other lives I have heard about and read about, lives in war zones, lives among evil, predation, privation, loss, heartbreak, pain and illness, etc. I’ve certainly had some heartbreak, and some pain and illness—what you might call “hard times”---but I’m hard-pressed to come up with that one superlative “hardest time” in my life. But your question is, would I change how I acted, and/or how others acted? Well, I can’t change others—I’ve spent a lifetime learning that fact. One can only change oneself. Which is hard enough, right? I have a lot of regrets. I’m not one of those people who claims to have no regrets. I don’t understand those people at all. I think they’re either lying or in denial or flying blind. Of course I have regrets. Of course I wish I had acted differently—acted better, acted more selflessly, more lovingly—on many occasions. The harder the times, the more some of us tend to lapse into fear, selfishness, self-centeredness, lack of empathy. Only a relatively few of us—the truly good, the truly selfless, the truly spiritual perhaps—tend to go in the other direction. But I’m afraid I’m not one of them.
When you think of the word "igneous," what’s the first thing to come to mind?
Hostovsky: Geology. And my Aunt Hannah, who told me she had once wanted to be a geologist, but she ended up being a housewife, a divorcee, a diabetic, an amputee, a kidney recipient. Being a poet, I suppose, I also think of other words that sound like that word. Like Ignatz, the name of the mouse in the Krazy Kat cartoon. And ignominious, which I just looked up, and which has to do with shame, and which I’m ashamed to admit I thought was a synonym for infamous. But it’s not. Ignominy is all about shame, public shame, or disgrace. Being a poet, for me, has always meant loving the words—especially the sounds of the words—more than knowing them. I don’t know all the words, and half the time I can’t remember them, even after I’ve looked them up. But I keep looking them up, keep looking them over, looking them up and down and all around, looking and listening—because I love them.
If you could say one thing to your past self, what would it be?
Hostovsky: “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Your poem, “Fondly,” begins with the line “I remember my illness fondly.” There’s a stark contrast between the narrator’s view of his illness, and the reality that it brought.
Do you think that there is anything comforting in being ill? And what truth does this comfort hold? Or, rather, does the narrator have it wrong—does nostalgia cloud our memories and make us long for what we shouldn’t?
Hostovsky: Malingering is a great word, don’t you think? It has linger inside of it, which always makes me think of a wistful sort of sticking around because you don’t want to leave, the wistfulness and laziness of childhood, and maybe the reluctance to leave childhood. And so yes, there is something irresistibly sweet about being sick. Or pretending to be. Beyond the getting a pass, the being excused—from school, from work, from life, actually. Something about life and death and lying down in the place where they meet: the sickbed, that approximately-equal-to sign with a squiggly on top that looks like a rumpled sheet or blanket, so inviting, so irresistible, so sweet. Come back to bed, it says. Climb in and lie down here in the middle of the equation: two expressions of approximately equal value: life on the one side, death on the other. In this warm bed (you are very warm, where is the thermometer?) you can really stretch out. Go ahead, stretch your arms over your head and you can almost touch life itself somewhere just beyond your head. Stretch your ten poor stubby toes and you can almost feel death down there, just below your feet–what a sweet tease. Tickle, tickle.
The form of your poems is one body without any breaks. What makes you choose this specific form? And, overall, what did the writing process look like for these three specific poems?
Hostovsky: Sometimes I write in stanzas, sometimes not. Sometimes a poem will start out in stanzas, but then the stanza breaks can start to feel forced, self-conscious, unnecessary, and I’ll get rid of them. I honestly don’t remember the writing process for these 3 particular poems, but all of my poems tend to be narrative in nature, telling a story, often in only a few sentences, sometimes in one long single sentence. I find that the best way to keep the reader’s attention—sometimes, often—is to forgo the stanza breaks, and sometimes I’ll forgo punctuation altogether, forgo all the pauses and just get on with the story, its immediacy, its swift movement, trying to engineer the perfect short-story poem (the line breaks I keep, I agonize over the line breaks) that animates experience with the perfect pitch, the perfect rhythm and movement, from beginning to end, and with very few breathing spaces in between.
The Igneous concept is almost reversed in “The First Day.” The perpetrator, guilty as cuffed, must revert back to the simplicity of school, to learn or re-learn how to be a kind person. How to be empathetic towards others.
In your opinion, what value does childhood hold, and do you feel this is lost in the world of today? How can we best connect back to our childhood curiosities and kindness for others?
Hostosky: Wow, great question. Well, I wrote “The First Day” in response to a news story I read or heard some time ago—I won’t go into the details—about a particularly brutal, violent, and sexual crime that was committed by gang members in a country in Central America, I think, but it could have been committed anywhere—is, in fact, and probably always has been, committed everywhere. A terrible, unspeakable act. I didn’t know what to do with that information, and the question stayed with me for a long time: what to do with these people? How to punish them, how to teach them, rehabilitate them? And the answer came in the poem: they must begin again. Go back and learn again the things we learned as children, things they either never learned in the first place or somehow unlearned in the unspeakably violent place that the world is, and has always been. But your question about what value childhood holds, how it is lost in the world of today, and how we can best connect with childhood curiosity and also kindness to others, well, I don’t have those answers—I think I try to answer them every time I start to write a poem. Most of my poems are about childhood in one way or another. And writing is how I get my playtime in as a mature adult hominid in the mid-to-late Anthropocene (igneous, indeed). Some people play around, some play sports, some play card games, board games, video games, the stock market, the casino. Me, I write. When I was a child, I couldn’t wait to be an adult. Now as an adult in my late middle or early old age (I just turned 65) I can’t stop thinking about, contemplating, revisiting, revising, reimagining, probing and plying and haunting my own one and only childhood.
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