Feb.27~ PAUL HOSTOVSKY

Hello, poetry lovers and thanks for stopping by SHINE poetry series this Friday. It's an honor to shine the spotlight, today, on award-winning poet Paul Hostovsky, who hails from Massachusetts. Thank you, Paul, for bringing us "The Poetry Police," "Smelts," and, my favorite, "Negative Happiness."

The Poetry Police

They had a warrant.
I was suspected of lying,
not only in the poems,
but about the poems:
I had said they were available
when they weren’t.

They knocked at the door:
one bold rasp followed by two
softer ones: a dactyl.

I wondered, if I waited
a little longer, what feet
would the knuckles sing next?

Four stressed loud knocks,
as it turned out: two spondees.
Insistent, official, unmistakably
constabulary. I got up

from my writing desk
and peeped through the peephole:
They didn’t look like
readers of poetry. But then
who’s to say, dear reader,
what you look like anyway?

You will want to know
I never opened that door--
I returned to the poem,
and deleted them penultimately,
ultimately getting away with everything.

Smelts

​My father loved smelts.
My mother introduced him
to my grandparents
at a fancy seafood restaurant.
My father ordered smelts.
My grandfather said, “Smelts? No,
try the lobster. Try the swordfish.”
“He likes smelts,” said my mother.
He’d been married twice before.
His second divorce wasn’t final yet.
He had two daughters. My grandparents
weren’t happy about it. But they were
cooperative. Especially my grandmother.
“Let him have his smelts,” she said.
And they let my mother marry him.
Of course I didn’t know all this
until she told me many years later,
after my father died. That was when
I tried smelts for the first time. I didn’t
love them. But I love that my father loved them,
that my mother loved my father,
that my grandfather tried and failed
to dissuade him from his smelts,
tried and failed to dissuade her
from my father. I love the story
about the smelts but I can do without smelts.

Negative Happiness

I’m happy just to sit in this chair
and breathe, and read a little
about Arthur Schopenhauer
who said life wasn’t worth living.
No one could abide his pessimism,
least of all his Mutti
whose unconditional mother-love
had only one condition: leave
her alone. So he moved to Frankfurt
and studied philosophy on her dime.
People found him intolerable,
and the feeling was mutual--
he spent long depressive periods
in self-imposed isolation
meditating on the nature of
happiness, which he said was
the breathing place between
pain and suffering. And I’m thinking
he was onto something there,
sitting here in my chair, breathing
happily ever since I got out of the hospital
where I ended up because I couldn’t
breathe. God, it feels so good
just to sit here and breathe normally,
and read about Arthur Schopenhauer
who said we don’t know what we’ve got
‘til it’s gone, in so many words, in German. ​

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer’s Almanac, and Best of the Net. He has been published in Poetry, Passages North, Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, The Sun, and many other journals and anthologies. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Award, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and chapbook contests from Grayson Books, Riverstone Press, Frank Cat Press, Split Oak Press, and Sport Literate. Paul has 14 full-length collections of poetry: Sonnets from South Mountain (2001), Bending the Notes (2008), Dear Truth (2009), A Little in Love a Lot (2011), Hurt Into Beauty (2012), Naming Names (2013), Selected Poems (2014), The Bad Guys (2015), Is That What That Is (2017), Late for the Gratitude Meeting (2019), Deaf & Blind (2020), Mostly (2021), Pitching for the Apostates (2023), and Perfect Disappearances (2025). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He lives with his wife Marlene in Medfield, Massachusetts.

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