AUTHOR PROFILE
Paul Hostovsky is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Bad Guys (FutureCycle Press, 2015). He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the Muriel Craft Bailey Award from The Comstock Review, and chapbook contests from Frank Cat Press, Grayson Books, Split Oak Press and Riverstone Press. He has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and he was a Featured Poet on the Georgia Poetry Circuit in 2012-2013. Garrison Keillor has read eleven of Paul’s poems on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as an ASL interpreter and braille instructor. Visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com
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Why do you write?
Because it’s this benign addiction that I’ve been indulging ever since I was a kid. In fact, in the catalog of my addictions, I’d say it’s gotta be among the earliest entries, right up there with sucking my thumb, kissing the cat, cigarettes and other smokeables (and potables), all of which, except for the writing, I did eventually quit. One day I hope to quit the writing too. But today is not that day. Rilke tells the young poet to ask himself whether or not he must write. “Would you have to die if it were denied you to write?” As for me, I’m not a young poet anymore and I don’t think I would die if I quit writing but I would definitely go into some serious withdrawal. Writing for me is not the noble pursuit it was for Rilke, I’m afraid. He was big into das Schwere. The Difficult. And he had no sense of humor as far as I can tell. But he did have some great lines. “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we’re still just able to bear, and the reason we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Holy shit. What a concept! But me, I don’t like the Difficult; I like the Easy. I’m an escapist from way back. Downright Houdiniesque.
In a way, I’ve only ever really wanted to be excused. From the table. From school. From work. From life, actually. I don’t feel well, may I be excused from feeling? I recently read an interview with a certain writer who was asked if writing was a kind of escape for him. He bristled at the notion, said for him writing was the opposite of escape; it was facing things head-on (Rilke would have liked this guy), meeting life in the refulgent light of day, delving into things deeply and describing them with a lapidary precision and elegance. Yeah, okay. But it’s also an escape. From the business of living. And lapidary makes me think of dromedary, a large, even-toed ungulate with a hump on its back and beautiful thick eyelashes and long powerful legs for running fast when it needs to escape. I write because I like to make things. And I’ve only ever known how to make things out of words. So I make them. I make them lapidary. And I make them dromedary. And one day I’ll probably quit altogether but today is not that day.
In a way, I’ve only ever really wanted to be excused. From the table. From school. From work. From life, actually. I don’t feel well, may I be excused from feeling? I recently read an interview with a certain writer who was asked if writing was a kind of escape for him. He bristled at the notion, said for him writing was the opposite of escape; it was facing things head-on (Rilke would have liked this guy), meeting life in the refulgent light of day, delving into things deeply and describing them with a lapidary precision and elegance. Yeah, okay. But it’s also an escape. From the business of living. And lapidary makes me think of dromedary, a large, even-toed ungulate with a hump on its back and beautiful thick eyelashes and long powerful legs for running fast when it needs to escape. I write because I like to make things. And I’ve only ever known how to make things out of words. So I make them. I make them lapidary. And I make them dromedary. And one day I’ll probably quit altogether but today is not that day.
What other creative activities are you involved in?
I used to play a mean harmonica. And a middling 5-string banjo. But now the banjo just hangs on the wall, gathering dust. And spiders and mites have laid their eggs in the holes of my harmonicas. I spend a lot of time these days with deaf people and blind people and deaf-blind people, making pictures in the air, or in their hands, with my hands. And that’s a rather creative endeavor, I think. I think of American Sign Language (ASL) as being symphonic. What I mean by that is, in signed languages (and there are different, mutually unintelligible signed languages all over the world, virtually in every country where there are Deaf people), meaning is created simultaneously with the hands, face, eyebrows, eye-gaze, mouth, head-tilt, shoulder-turn, etc. (all the various “sections” of the orchestra of the body) all happening at the same time, rather than one by one in a linear fashion where you string words and morphemes together to create meaning, the way English and many other (but not all) spoken languages do. And ASL has no writing system. So its literature--its visual poetry and stories and all sorts of creative confections--is truly in the oral tradition. Except that it’s manual. And then there is braille, all those white dots on the page, which to most sighted people is as inscrutable and foreign as a country of igloos seen from an airplane. But on the ground, if you know braille, you know it all comes down to the six-point snowflake of the individual braille cell, which, like the snowflake, has six dots and an infinite number of permutations. So you can create any word in any language with the various combinations of the six dots. And ASL can express, with the hands and face and body, any thought that the human mind is capable of entertaining. So the braille and the ASL are what I do for my day job, which I have kept all these years in case the writing didn’t pan out. Which it hasn’t.
Who is your favorite author and why?
Okay, I don’t have a favorite author and I don’t have a favorite color and I don’t have a favorite song, sports team, movie star, season, food or animal. My kids were always asking me those kinds of questions when they were very young--well, maybe not the favorite author question, but every other what’s-your-favorite question in the book--and I always had a hard time answering. Those questions always stump me. I vacillate and agonize over them the way I do, when I’m writing, over the question of the best word, tense, voice, person, mood, place to break the line, etc. I could say green but pretty soon I’ll want to cross it out for cerulean, dromedary for sloth, winter for autumn, Scarlett Johansson for Meryl Streep, Mark Halliday for Tony Hoagland, Junot Diaz for T.C. Boyle. My favorite author is the one whose book I’m totally into at the moment, under whose spell I am right now, whoever that happens to be, and it’s always someone different. I’m a total ho’ when it comes to my reading life. I have no favorites, no allegiances, no boundaries, no scruples, nothing I won’t do and no one I won’t hop into bed with.
Tell us about the mechanics of how you write.
I write mornings. Before everyone else in the house has gotten up. Except for the cat. For some reason the cat is always up when I get up, caviling at my ankles as I head down the stairs to the kitchen to put on the water for my tea (I quit coffee a few years after those other potables), and wanting to drink from the sink. I don’t like it when she drinks from the sink but she really really likes to drink from the sink so I say okay and I turn on the water and then I calibrate its flow to just the right thinness, just the way she likes it, which is exactly halfway between a ropy stream and a parsimonious trickle, and this exercise sort of gets me in the mood for the work to come, the work of writing, the stream of the words which has to flow with just the right force, just the right movement and sound and energy and it requires a similar kind of calibrating and testing with the eye, with the finger, with the tongue. I like to write on the computer because I’m a good typist, thanks to Mrs. Stachel, my typing teacher in the 8th grade. But I’m computer illiterate and I have been known to forsake the computer, when it frustrates or disobeys me, in favor of the vintage manual Royal typewriter I still keep on a shelf in the basement for just such occasions (I buy the typewriter ribbons from an old guy in Quincy who sells them along with replacement parts for typewriters and who reminds me of Mrs. Stachel in a way, though I don’t think they’re related). Then when I’m done writing in the morning (after an hour or two or three) and it’s time to head off to the day job (see above), I print out what I was working on if I was working on it on the computer, or else I keep turning the cylinder knobs of my typewriter clockwise until the page curls up and out of the carriage and then I hit the paper-release lever and take the page out and fold it over three times. Then I put it in my shirt pocket right next to my heart. And I carry it around with me all day like that. I think just being there all folded up next to the rhythm of my heart makes the thing a little better in some mysterious indefinable way. Like maybe there’s a kind of osmosis going on between my heart and the poem as I go about my day doing other things. But in addition to that, I take it out a lot and tinker with it at lunch time, or while waiting in lines or in waiting rooms, or on the train or the bus, tweaking it, trimming it, tunneling around in it, jabbing, primping, plumping, crossing things out and putting them back in again, making circles and exes and arrows and underlines all over the page. So maybe it looks to anyone observing me like I’m sketching rather than writing. And in a way, it feels more like sketching than writing, more like drawing and shading, like scratching things out and painting over them again and again, like a pentimento. Then when I get home I toss it onto the kitchen counter with my wallet and keys and coins and phone and it stays there all night, throbbing like a wound. And maybe it congeals a little overnight. And by the time me and the cat come down the next morning, it’s ready to be typed up again. So I put on the water for my tea, and I turn on the water for the cat, and I sit back down to the page and begin to painfully, deliciously, pick at the scabs.
Finally, what do you think about Carp, the fish, not our website?
I think that some people confuse the carp with the nase or the sneep. As for me, I tend to get carp mixed up with harp. As verbs, I mean. As nouns the difference is as clear as a freshwater pond, clarion as a vigorously plucked string. But as verbs I tend to conflate them. Maybe this is because I have been known to carp a lot and to harp on about it at the same time and in the same place and about the same things, both in my writing and in my life, both with my pen and with my mouth, and sometimes with my mouth full, but never ever with my mouth full of carp or nase or sneep, though possibly with smelts, yes, possibly once or twice with smelts.