Review of Paul Hostovsky's "A Little In Love A Lot"

Review
by Scott Owens

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT
Paul Hostovsky
Main Street Rag, 2011
ISBN: 9781599483030

I think anyone who doesn’t love Paul Hostovsky must not know Paul Hostovsky. I said once that “he always finds a way to make me happy.” Having just read his third book of poems, A Little in Love a Lot, that statement remains every bit as true as it was when I first said it. What makes me happy in this book is the way his poems remind me of all the loves I’ve had -- brief ones, long ones, foolish ones, serious ones, deep ones, simple lusty ones -- and how in the end all of these loves, even the failed ones, are part of the same love, the human love for life, for human life, an appreciation of the familiar, of sharing, of recognizing the possibilities of joy and the never-ending quest to attain it.

One of the qualities that makes reading Hostovsky’s poems so enjoyable is the lack of pretension. Mostly what we find here is just honest, entertaining poetry about things we’ve all thought but never had the wisdom, passion, chutzpah, or facility with language to put into words. One of my favorites, “The Debate at Duffy’s,” illustrates this point well:
She said that sex was a yearning of the soul.
He said it was a very compelling argument
of the body, a compulsion. She said it was
a spiritual compulsion. He said it was nothing
if not carnal, carni, meat. This conversation
took place in a bar. The background music was
so loud it was in the foreground. The bodies
on the dance floor were moving in ways that
would interest even the dead if they could only
remember how to live. There was a baseball game
playing on television. On the table were two
empty glasses, and the bottle’s green phallus
which she took in her hand and pulled toward her,
pulling him toward her as she poured them both
another drink. he drank deeply, felt the spirit
filling his cup. Then he looked into her eyes and saw
that she was beautiful, sexy, and at the bottom
of the 9th, suddenly, surprisingly, irrevocably, right.

Not only is the language and imagery of these poems smooth and approachable, but there is a decided absence of unnecessarily complex academic language and obtuse imagery. Nor is there excessive allusiveness. It is almost as if (Gasp!) Hostovsky wants to be understood. What allusiveness there is exists on a level where it doesn’t bring distracting attention (Hey! Look how clever I am!) to itself. Rather, it is like a subtle sauce added to an already delectable dessert, not entirely necessary to enjoy the experience, but a deepening and enriching element for those with a more discriminating palette. Such is the case in “The Affair in the Office,” where the reader need not recognize the echo of Roethke’s “Dolor” in the line, “full of the inexorable sadness / of cubicles” to enjoy both the communal gloom of office life and the shared guilty pleasures of gossip and forbidden love “among the ruins.”

Perhaps the quality that most endears Hostovsky’s work to the reader is that he more than any other poet I’ve read in the past decade truly “gets” the necessary duality of human existence. He is neither glib nor morose. He takes life seriously but simultaneously recognizes the near absurdity of it all. He wants things his way but readily laughs at himself and moves ahead when he doesn’t get it. The self-mocking tone in the opening lines of “Battling the Wind and Everything Else” show his ability to exist within this duality of gravity and levity:
My neighbor -- the one with the flagpole
and the flag, and the pickup truck
and the patriotic bumper sticker and the perfect
lawn, and the leaf-blower with the power pack . . . .
As this poem about contentious neighbors continues to unfold, one can’t help but recall the neighbors in Frost’s “Mending Wall” as well as Frost’s similar ability to poke fun at himself while criticizing others. Even the title of this collection tells us the speaker of these poems is a man who not only reads Hikmet (“you must live with great seriousness / like a squirrel, for example”) but knows how, and can help us learn how, to live those lines.

Usually, when I read a writer as remarkable as Paul Hostovsky, I can’t help but dislike them a little. Jealousy, envy, fear of my own inadequacy combine to create an irrepressible sliver of animosity towards them. However, something about Hostovsky’s grace with language, willing self-effacement, charitable spirit, and clear grasp of the paradox of human life and the negative capability necessary for the daily survival of it make even the most illogical ill-feelings towards him almost impossible. “Almost,” because any writer reading A Little in Love a Lot will experience some jealousy, will wish at least a little that they had managed to write these poems first.

How Does Poetry Work

How Does Poetry Work?

Any attempt at answering that question is doomed to be inadequate for the simple fact that what we call poetry varies greatly and works in an incomprehensible range of ways. Nevertheless, as Robert Frost said, “There are roughly zones,” and there is a great deal to be learned as a poet or a reader from attempting to answer the question, and besides, it can be a lot of fun to joust at windmills from time to time. So why not?

How does poetry work? Perhaps not surprisingly, most poetry tends to work (my composition students will notice the carefully-worded avoidance of absolutes) just like every other art form. Well, mostly anyway. Art tends to be sensuous, that is, it works through and appeals to the senses. We see color and lines and form in a painting. We see or feel texture in a sculpture. We vicariously feel movement in dance. We hear rhythm and tone in music.

In poetry, as well as in other written communication, on the other hand, we literally see only symbols, letters that are combined to represent sounds that we recognize as words with particular meanings (that’s the difference from other arts). On the surface it seems an entirely cognitive process. Those words, however, in most “artistic” writing don’t relay only cognitive concepts. They also call up images that appeal to the reader’s senses. Thus, a reader not only translates words into meanings but also “imagines,” meaning to craft into an image, or sees what the writer describes.

Sensory input is processed in the limbic system of the human brain. This is the same system that regulates heart and respiratory rate, blood pressure, and hormone production and release, all of which are physiologically involved in what we call emotion. It should come as no surprise, then, that the sensory input of art elicits emotional responses from its audience. Piano music can make us melancholy; we cry or laugh at plays and movies; violins increase tension; and Edvard Munch’s The Scream creates a sense of imminent and omnipresent terror.

The limbic system also facilitates long-term memory, and predictably we usually respond most deeply to that art which reminds us of our own experiences, the art which seems most relevant to us. We can respond emotionally, however, even to art that seems at first unrelated to our specific pasts because we may recognize a similar situation, image, or theme to something we have experienced.

In essence, then, a poem works by using words and sounds to cause the reader to imagine sensory input which, in a good poem at least, is associated through the limbic system with particular emotions and memories. And all this happens simultaneously with a conscious consideration of the cognitive meaning of the words being used. Thus, a good poem (re)creates a complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and mnemonic experience.

Recently I told one of my students who was attempting to write descriptive poetry that the problem was he was choosing words that only described the object or experience, and that instead he needed images that “dripped” with meaning, feeling, associations, and memories. The ability to find those words that create this sort of resonant imagery in the reader’s limbic system is ultimately what makes one a poet. Perhaps the best short example of the sort of imagery I mean comes from Ezra Pound, an early 20th century poet often considered the Father of Imagism. The poem’s comparison, with no elaboration, of ghostly faces in a station of the Metro to limp, washed-out flower petals suggests the lifeless, spent potential that Pound feared characterized much of the urbanized, industrialized, and heavily impersonalized world he lived in. Here is the poem:

IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.