Book Review

Much like African-American writing in the mid-1900's, disability poetry is always between scylla and charybdis when a new book comes out. If the author has the good fortune to get published by a press that is main stream enough to be able to pay him in the first place, he has to then turn his head in the opposite direction asking the audience most likely to be interested in his work "am I disabled enough for you?" On top of that, as reading theorist Robert Scholes has pointed out, when a new group or genre threatens to break into conventional literature, the artistic merit of those writers' work is always suspect. After all, how many people remember who was published in Towards Solomon's Mountain, the first anthology of disability poetry? Fortunately, Paul Hostovsky's Bending the Notes is able to put most concerns about disability poetry to rest.

One doesn't have to get far into the book to see that Hostovsky is in control of his poems and is serving up his own personal style. In the first poem, "Coconut," he uses a series of repeating words that loop back on themselves, making it clear from the beginning that music is an important element in his poetry, and that, for this poet, meaning is not the shortest distance between two points.

If this is not clear in the first poem, then the second poem "Every American Child," one of the most pregnant and beautiful poems in the book, leaves no doubt. The opening lines:

[Every American Child]
will be issued a blues harmonica at birth
and taught to bend the notes because the notes

are for bending

reflect right back to the book's title.

Blues, of course, is not only about bending notes but is at the base of the country's most American music, jazz and rock and roll, yet it is a music that cannot truly be recorded within the system of symbols available for notation in a classical framework. It slides between.

And every American child will
be expected to learn by heart the history of the blues
because the history of the blues is an American
story, which some American grownups can't be trusted
to tell, much less sing, to their American children.

Nor can grownups and mainstream culture be expected to tell the truth about the history of disability in this country or of the effects the values derived from that history that are still so much of our cultural heritage. By combining music and meaning, however, Hostovsky in Bending the Notes gives it a try.

One of the poems that takes up the effects of American cultural heritage on disability is "People in Pediatric Oncology". People, of course, is People magazine with its

glossy pages
like the shiny, poisonous leaves
of Beauty

Though the poem begins,

Like jars of jelly beans
someone has left out on a table
in the house of spastic colons – maybe
you wonder who could be so thoughtless –

But, of course, the point is that concepts of beauty and body are so culturally pervasive that unless one happened to be a person who catches their fallout, they do not realize its insidiousness. Nevertheless, there are no quick fixes. One cannot "just say no" to what is as ubiquitous as air. As Hostovsky says, these images

belong to her the way her own
hair belongs to her
even though she has no hair.

Naturally, many of the poems in Bending the Notes - eight in the first section – deal with aspects of what it is like to be deaf in American society. Given his personal experiences, Hostovsky is able to guide the hearing reader into a world they do not generally have access to. In "Away Game at the School for the Deaf", he leads the reader into this world in an almost comical way:

maybe we were thinking ears instead of emhands 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 table cloth, 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, and our bus driver
was departing in our empty yellow school bus
leaving us standing, wondering
where the gym was.

None of the poems on deafness in Bending the Notes, however, is a polemic or even overtly political. What the poems do is to take Hostovsky onto ground where he can talk about communication, language and, eventually poetry.

Mercifully, Hostovsky does not burden the divisions of his book with labels like "Thoughts About Nature"; nevertheless, "Love Poem, " the first poem of the second half signals a change in emphasis. Concerns about beauty and cultural hegemony are still there, but, just as the deaf life emerged as a touchstone in the first half, the nature of poetry surfaces as the tonic key of the second.

Fully half of the poems in the second half of the book explicitly take some aspect of poetry as their subject, and it could be argued that virtually every poem is about the function of poetry in some way. Readers are hit with a number of poems about poetry right away, but "Mr. Putnam Clark and the Sprinkler", in particular, forces them to examine some issues about the composition of poetry, right as this section opens. Hostovsky considers how the poet of today connects to the older forms inherited from the traditions of poetry. He also sets forth his belief that poetry works by making connections, not only between the individual words of the poem and the reader, but between the past and present:

I love to watch my neighbor as he works
on his lawn as I work on my poems
on my porch, making these connections I imagine
do not occur to him,

Hostovsky admittedly admires

the older, oscillating kind
which I loved—those ascending parallel streams
like the strings of a lyre, perfectly spaced, the shape
of an older day, an older poem

which are created, "squatting by a sprinkler,/ measuring time and space, patiently." But he wants the older generations, the keepers of culture, to be able to see that what he is doing is valuable, too, and that what he wants to express in his work is really "just/ an old idea in a new head." Much as Baldwin tried to show in "Sonny's Blues," each generation needs to be able to find new ways that relate to their generations to essentially say the same things, to participate in the same song.

The poems surrounding "Mr. Putnam Clark and the Sprinkler" all comment on poetry in various ways. "Poetry Unit" takes aim at the analytic approach to reading poetry (think Robin Williams in Dead Poet Society). "Solitary Reaper" spins off of the Romantic concept of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of emotions ("Wordsworth was a wanker"). "Wincing at the Beautiful" pivots around a self-announced metaphor comparing the effect of a Rilke poem to sinking a three-point basketball shot. "Arse Poetica". . . take a guess. And this is just a start. Milton, Frost, Stephen Dunn and Brittany Spears all make their way into Hosotvsky's poems. With these motifs fixed firmly in the reader's mind, the explicit references to poetry thin out, almost to the point of disappearing, but the roles of associations, imagery, imagination, word play and metaphor are carried out throughout the remainder of the book, even when the poems are ostensibly about Braille or being bullied.

Inclusivity and beauty, two themes prominent in the first half of the book also re-emerge in the second, and one could make the case that in Bending the Notes they are inseparable. Hostovsky's poetry is surely nothing if not democratic. He may tip his hat to the traditions of formal poetry from which American poetry grows in the way that the U.S. constitution recognizes its debt to its British inheritance, but in the end, in both government and poetry, structure needs to derive from the heterogeneity within - "I don't like/ perfect rhymes in my poem." Like Billy Collins, Hostovsky loves to draw from the ordinary, making the familiar into something much more than banal, and, poetic allusions notwithstanding, he is equally unafraid to use slapstick humor. Thus, in "Driving to Work with Brittney Spears" he is able to legitimate the role of pedestrian pop culture not only in American life but in art, while at the same time asserting the ultimate power of language over violence in his tongue-in-cheek, revenge-of-the-nerds poem "Getting Back at the Bullies of Junior High. "

A confession: this review was originally supposed to encompass both Bending the Notes(2008) and Paul Hostovsky's more recent book, Dear Truth(2009). Clearly Bending the Notes is so multi-textured that trying to convey some sense of all it encompasses is in itself more than a short review of this nature can honestly accomplish even without asking it to share the room with a second work. Suffice it to say that Bending the Notes demonstrates just how far poetry about disability has come since the days of Towards Solomon's Mountain. There will, of course, be critics who will say that Hostovsky should have hammered home harder the inequities that accompany deafness or disability, that he should have been more single-minded. There will be others who say that despite being a sign language interpreter and having a deaf daughter and deaf ex-wife, his poems lack authority beacuse he himself is not deaf. Maybe. But few, if any, single-poet books in this developing genre combine the breadth of field in subject matter, the wide context in which it is possible to place disability, and the attention to the possibilities of the poem itself. While one virtue of the book is its appeal to a wide range of readers, it is one that also deserves a deep reading by other poets. Bending the Notes is available Main Street Rag Press. More about about Paul Hostovsky's work may be seen on his website at www.paulhostovsky.com.