CLERC SCAR 19.3
29 December 2009

=====
PAUL HOSTOVSKY
John Lee Clark
Words: 1,859
[Review Essay]

Books discussed in this essay:

DEAR TRUTH
Paul Hostovsky
Main Street Rag, $14

BENDING THE NOTES
Paul Hostovsky
Main Street Rag, $14

Both available at http://www.clercscar.com/?page_id=12

To read Paul Hostovsky’s poetry is to stumble upon something rare and wonderful. Too many gifted poets get sucked up in academic theorizing, causing their work to be quite unreadable, and too many poets who do write clearly lack the magic glue that makes words stick. But Hostovsky has the good glue all over his hands, and interesting things have a way of ending up in them, including deaf people and ASL.

=====
Featured Ad:

Julia Cameron’s Integrative Massage

303.243.2240 voice/text

Experience the work of the listening hands of a certified deaf massage therapist.
Swedish Integrative ~ Lomi Lomi ~ Ashiatsu Oriental Bar Therapy
Will Travel: corporate, parties, individuals, gift certificates, out-call and in office.

=====
In his day job, Hostovsky is a staff ASL interpreter with the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Boston, where he works mainly with deaf-blind people. In an interview, he told The Main Street Rag that:

“How I got into [interpreting and the worlds of the deaf and the blind] is the proverbial long story—which I guess is why I keep writing about it—but I guess the short answer is, I fell in love. First I fell in love with Braille, then with sign language, and then with lots of deaf and blind people, some of whom I have married. But for a long time I didn’t write about it, because I didn’t know how. I had tried writing about it, but the results were always either too sentimental or too esoteric.”

Now, it will help us appreciate the challenges that Hostovsky faces when we remember that hearing poets have been patronizing deaf people and romanticizing silence since before the Elizabethan age. In fact, poets have indulged in sentimentality so often while being so narrow in what they say about deafness that the English language itself poses an almost physical barrier against anyone attempting to write honestly about deafness and sign language. It is as if the English language has a mind of its own, and no matter how sincere our intentions, it is English’s corrupt and audist blood that spills onto the page, not our enlightened words and views. Few readers realize what a triumph it is when someone writes freshly about deafness, especially if it is in a poem.

One way to do this is to take something tradition has used and turn it on its head. For example, hearing poets have often referred to birds and their song to dramatize the isolation of a girl who does not hear the birds’ beautiful music. It was Deaf poets like Earl Sollenberger who began catching the birds with their hands to make them our allies. In the Deaf cultural perspective, birds now represent signing, their wings becocming hands flying in the air. Hostovsky’s poem “Feeding Nancy” is a fine addition to this new tradition. Nancy is his favorite ASL teacher, but she is now bedridden with multiple sclerosis, no longer able to sign. He visits her to feed her

and to mourn the death of her beautiful
eloquent hands
lying heavy and cruel now as poached
game at the feet

of the heartbroken girl
who taught those birds how to talk
and sing—
this is crueler than Beethoven going deaf,
the loss
of the music of these birds.
It wasn’t

enough that her teachers
at the school for the deaf punished the birds
for singing,
whacked them with a ruler, locked them up
and let them starve—
little cages of bone inside a cage—
till her friends sprung them

and they were happy,
happy at last to be among their own,
and they couldn’t
stop talking, and they couldn’t stop singing,
because this
is the most beautiful singing the world has ever seen.

I love how Hostovsky brings Beethoven into this poem about an unknown ASL teacher, to say that what the teacher had to offer was, and is, more important than the world-famous composer could have ever hoped to offer. While such high praise for ASL borders on the sentimental, and would have been gauche in almost any other hearing poet’s hands, the poem is grounded in the reality of the teacher having suffered oralist repression. So it is a fact, not a fancy, that her and her friends’ liberation is so important that there are only a few things in the world that is as important, as beautiful.

So this is a great poem in the Deaf bird tradition. Now what? What else could we write that would work? It is to Hostovsky’s credit, and a sign of his commitment to his calling as a poet, that he didn’t, couldn’t, get stuck in just one mode. So his work is a study in shifting approaches; he has poems that are entertaining lessons (“Deaf Culture 101″), philosophical (“Poem in Sign Language”), personal (“Deaf Ex”), and realist portraits that are also parables (“Dracula’s Rat”). And Hostovsky has hit upon an ingenious method. As he told The Main Street Rag, this device is to take “the persona of the ignorant or uninitiated speaker.” This has yielded some neat results. In “Away Game at the School for the Deaf,” the narrator is a hearing high school basketball player witnessing the Deaf world for the first time:

Maybe we were thinking EARS
instead of HANDS.
Stepping off the bus, we glimpsed
a flicker, then a flitting
from a sleeve. We felt
annoyed, then afraid,
like spotting an ant on the tablecloth, then
another and another till it hit us:
what we had on our hands was a nest,
a population:
everyone here signed
except for us . . .

Indeed, this approach works much better than a lecture. Maybe most basketball players would not be so attentive and think much of going to a Deaf school for a game, but if a player did, this is what he would have thought. Maybe Leonard M. Elstad had the exact same reaction. He was playing on the Carleton College basketball team nearly a century ago when it played at the Minnesota School for the Deaf. The experience was profound enough for him to go on to study in the Normal program at Gallaudet before becoming superintendent of MSD and then president of Gallaudet.

Less plausible but still effective is “Deaf,” in which a farmer is telling us about this deaf boy who is good with animals. One day, the non-signing farmer and others circle around the boy who is telling them about what he’d just aw happen on the road.

He was the only witness when the
neighbor’s dog
got run over, and he told us the whole story
with his whole body, how the pickup
swerved to avoid her, grazing
her shoulder, the angle of impact
throwing her into the woods.
We all stood around, ignorant
of what happened exactly, hoping
and fearing as his story unfolded
and he embodied first the dog running, then
the truck braking, then
the dog then the truck then the dog
so we had the feeling we were seeing it all
just as it happened, and just as it was happening,
but in slow motion and with a zoom lens
and from six different camera angles.

Even though signers are familiar with the cinematic qualities of visual vernacular, it is a bit of a stretch to think that someone completely ignorant of ASL would recognize this, much less describe this feature. But this doesn’t matter, because it’s still a poem that does its job well within poetic license, and non-signing readers will learn a great deal without thinking it is something they’re not supposed to know until they’ve taken a workshop under Bernard Bragg. Information like this about the rich possibilities of ASL should be easy for hearing people to appreciate, and this poem is one good way to make this information approachable.

“Deaf Love Poem” is another interesting example, but one with a different angle. Whereas the basketball player and the farmer talk about deaf people, the speaker in this poem is talking TO a deaf person, whom he has a crush on after watching her watching the interpreter in class. He notices that there’s a lag in time between what’s spoken and then interpreted in ASL, so that there is a “space” between the class’s laughter and the deaf woman laughing. He says:

I want to slip inside that space and sit
across from you, legs crossed, hands
folded in my lap. If I made myself very
small, inconspicuous, insignificant as
another pair of antennae on the wall,
just watching you, quietly, watching the
interpreter, could I, could we, fit?

What I admire most in this poem is the delicacy with which Hostovsky presents the speaker’s desire. Certainly a great many hearing people have experienced a wish to connect with a deaf person, but equally true is how uncertain, how tentative they can be when they act upon it, if they do at all. That the speaker is in love makes this even more precarious. I suspect that Hostovsky was in a similar position before, perhaps when he first encountered ASL. But since that time, he has grown bold and assertive enough to make a valuable contribution to our community’s literature with these poems.

There is one more aspect of Hostovsky’s work I’d like to discuss. An example of this is “Little League,” which was broadcast on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. The great Garrison Keillor read this poem aloud to millions of listeners:

When the ump produces
his little hand broom
and stops all play to stoop
and dust off home plate,
my daughter sitting beside me
looks up and gives me a smile that says
this is by far her favorite part of baseball.

And then when he skillfully
spits without getting any
on the catcher or the batter or himself,
she looks up again and smiles
even bigger.

But when someone hits a long foul ball
and everyone’s eyes are on it
as it sails out of play . . .
the ump has dipped his hand
into his bottomless black pocket
and conjured up a shiny new white one
like a brand new coin
from behind the catcher’s ear,
which he then gives to the catcher
who seems to contain his surprise
though behind his mask his eyes are surely
as wide with wonder as hers.

As millions of listeners smiled with the girl in the poem, it’s a safe bet that nobody knew that Hostovsky’s daughter is Deaf. And they didn’t need to know. So Hostovsky sometimes doesn’t mention a subject’s deafness, or blindness, or whatever. This is in stark contrast with other poems by hearing parents of deaf children, most notably Paul West in his collection WORDS FOR A DEAF DAUGHTER. (Notice that the title refers to the daughter as an “a” and not “my,” suggesting that West is holding her at arm’s length.) Most have trouble seeing past their kids’ “disability,” or else they are unable to recognize them in such a way that their deafness is absorbed completely into their whole beings. Whether or not Hostovsky mentions a disability or a label depends on the poem. His brilliant and humane discretion in this matter lends a wonderful honesty and freshness to his poems.

=====
John Lee Clark is the author of SUDDENLY SLOW, a chapbook of poems, and editor of the anthology DEAF AMERICAN POETRY, both of which are available at http://www.clercscar.com/books

=====
We welcome letters to the editor in response to this piece. Send to editor@clercscar.com. We reserve the right to edit letters for space and clarity or not to publish a letter.

We are always open to submissions. Submit your writing, artwork, or video to editor@clercscar.com.

To subscribe, email subscribe@clercscar.com with the message “Subscribe daily” or “Subscribe weekly.”

To unsubscribe, email subscribe@clercscar.com with the message “Unsubscribe me.”

Find us on Twitter and Facebook!

Visit our archives or bookstore at http://www.clercscar.com.

Copyright 2009 by Clerc Scar. All rights reserved.