Did It Work? An Interview with Vincent Hostak

Interview by Rebecca Hargus

I had the privilege and opportunity to interview Vincent Hostak, a writer of poems, and a person who has a tight grip on the natural world. Hostak believes that in our modern world, there is a movement, or inclination, at least, to remove ourselves from the natural world in lieu of the blue light of the virtual realm.  His poetry aims to reconcile this movement.

Producer of the literary journal, Sonder Midwest, and a Langston Review of the Arts contributor, Vincent Hostak spent thirty years in the film and TV industry working with postproduction sound editing. It wasn’t until his fifties that he became serious about poetry. This interview took place via Google Meet.

I have read your bio and poems in the Texas Poetry Assignment, and I'm wondering what else you might want readers to know about you and your background as it relates to you and your poetry. Are there other experiences in workshops or readings or publications beyond Texas Poetry Assignment you want to share?

VH: I worked in the film and TV industry for thirty years doing postproduction (video and sound editing). I have done audio documentaries for world literature and English translation. I am not from an academic background. I did not go to a creative writing college and did not get serious about poetry until my fifties.

Beyond Texas poetry, I produced a journal called Sonder Midwest. I was also published in the Langston Review of the Arts. I have also done a TPA project, entitled Lone Star Poetry. I am not from a traditional academic background, but I am a lifelong reader of poets and have learned much from my reading. Mary Oliver spoke of the utility of imitation when finding your voice, I would paraphrase this as “Steal—but within reason, of course.” Also, I’ve heard it said that poetry is highly generative and ideas continue to sprout in another author’s work.  I wrote a visual poem as a dialogue between Sappho’s lyrics and my own, referencing the author and translator.  It was actually fun.

Workshops that I have attended in the past five years or so include the National Association for Poetry Therapy and a summer writing workshop for poetry in Boulder, Colorado at Naropa University. Naropa University is a Buddhist adjacent university. Anne Waldman (current director of the MFA program) and Allen Ginsberg were founders, Yoko Ono and John Cage were important contributors and teachers. My work is not as radical as theirs. My work is more conventional— while I try to be contemporary, mine is not radical poetry.

My interests include the physicality of the book—I have an emotional interest in the creation of the book, so my hobbies include working with things that are real like the antique art of the letterpress to create broadsides and books.

How would you describe your origin story as a poet? What are your first memories of reading and writing poetry?  Which people, teachers, and poets were most influential to you in the beginning?

VH: My father was an English major. He was an editor. His texts weren’t literature, but he was an editor and had a thick library. The first poets that I remember reading prior to high school were Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, and poetry of the Ecopoets, like Wendell Berry. I wanted to sound like them in my writing. I also liked Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnel, and Marvin Bell. They were new voices in the 80s. They were sparse, less verse, but still metered. Their meter wasn’t always in the traditional iambic pentameter. There is a mystery as to why something works with a hanging line and hard stops. I picked this up from reading and imitating these poets.

 How would you describe your writing process when it comes to poetry? How do you know when you are ready to write a poem and how do the drafting, revising, and editing process work for you?

VH: Laurence Musgrove is famous for saying, “Sometimes I wake up and say I am going to write a poem today.” My generative process is to read, then think, then continue another chapter of the poem.

Galway Kinnel wrote “Wait,” a poem for a student who was contemplating suicide. I believe it helped save the student. It is edited but retains the urgency he felt, I believe. Amazing things happen when you don’t make rash decisions, so editing, for me, can take years. One wonderful way to get there is to write from a prompt, and then you have a wholly new creation. This sometimes leads to going back to find what it was about, kind of like exploring “My Backpages” by Bob Dylan.

I recently conducted an interview with David Unger, a Spanish translator of the ancient myth of Mesoamerica, from his title, “The Popol Vuh.  He was speaking of a poet from Guatemala who reminded him of William Carlos Williams as a writer of wrote poetry about things, not ideas. You could write a poem about the “Border” as an idea or a thing. For example, the border as an instrument of political control, not a wall. So, I think it is important to hold the idea that writing poetry is a continuous process that changes. I hold as certain proof poetry made from experience and reading other poets can be a long process.

What topics or issues frequent your poems?  Have those changed over time?

VH: When I was young, I began writing about love or lovesickness. Now I write about aging and mortality. Poetry can be about so many different things. I am currently also interested in the idea of the intersection of poetry and the science of the natural world, with the role of the poet to demonstrate this. Universities are beginning to teach this, to teach physics and poetry together.

The visual artist and poet, Amy Catanzano, has written a scientific novella studying physics and expressing scientific principles in poetry—poems about shooting stars, and the cosmos. Wendell Berry wrote about listening to the wood drake, expressing that the natural world is not something other than us. There is a movement now away from the natural world, and I want to write poetry that brings us back to it.

I have read your poem "Quiet Beauty" on Texas Poetry Assignment. What do you recall about the inspiration for this poem? How does it reflect the choices you regularly make in crafting your poetry on the page? Shape? Line? Music? Comparison? Balance? Were there any new craft choices you made?

VH: The Japanese phrase, “Shizukana utsukushi-sa” is best translated as “quiet beauty.” I imagined this scene and created the poem during the height of the pandemic. This is an example of a poem about the experience of the city of Chicago. I was in Denver during the lockdown, and the city looked so different. I imagined what the Chicago River would look like in the downstate rivulets. I imagined the transformed, calm atmosphere of Chicago looking like the Illinois River downstate with no industrial traffic. I took off on the Japanese phrase.

My choices kept balance and harmony, and I built the conclusion of why this is quiet beauty. The flow of the poem followed the downstate rivers. The empty city streets were deer paths. Coyotes were crawling in office parks. In Denver, I had seen a coyote in the parking lot of a huge tech center, and this was my inspiration for the coyotes in Chicago.

The shape of the poem emulates the physical shape of a flowing river. This is not a choice I always make in a poem.  The flow of the downstate rivulet was literal in comparison to deer paths.  I like dissonance and consonance.

The words “bistros bereft of buyers” were deliberately percussive—I would say I continued this in my other poetry after this poem was written. I kept lines short, and there were deliberate choices in the last third of the poem to be more percussive and have a musical conclusion. Every line is building a definition of what that means.

I hope the tone was not too deeply dark. I saw pictures of the L.A. skyline at this time, and there was no smog! I hope this poem served to be some small archive of the details of what was happening in our world at that time.

I like consonances in poems. I like line. Poetry can be a highly experiential process. When you are writing as fast as you can think, the intention is not formed; the music is not there yet. You see how the form will emerge.

What advice would you give to young people who are interested in reading poetry, writing poetry, and publishing their work?

VH: If you find the impulse write it. The best advice I have heard is, not everything has to be a monument—you don’t have to build pyramids. Read, read, read. Not all lines have to be the same length. Coleridge’s poetry was kind of like that.

I like small journals dedicated to poetry. Read these journals, and make sure you understand we are connected to the natural world. Find editors who like and respond to your work. The problem with some publishing processes with paid entries is that you must have money to invest for them to look at your poetry, so don’t expect to make a living through poetry. Poets make a living through teaching.

Understand the journal you are submitting to and the character of the poetry they publish. Is it traditional? Is it experimental?  Many journals are seeking to publish writers underserved by publishing.  This is necessary and a journal seeking to publish work from the BIPOC community may not be the community you represent, but one looking more generally for first-time authors may be. Find an editor who gives valuable feedback and does not charge for the privilege. This is a great way to learn and extend your practice.

Right now, I am working on my first full volume of poetry—poems on fabric and clothing. These are both culturally and historically interesting. Victoria Finnley wrote a book, The Hidden History of the Material World. My work is a collection of poems, a manuscript about exploring what I can say about fabric. The history of fabric that says things about colonist practices, the racism that can be seen, and the historical expression of who we are is an interesting topic.

If you had to recommend one or two Texas Poetry Assignment poets to other readers, who might you suggest?

VH: There are so many. Jesse Doiron and Betsy Joseph top my list. Jesse Doiron’s language is clean and plain but still, it is a language that is sensuous. Betsie Joseph weaves Texas surroundings into her poetry.

How would you distinguish contemporary poetry from poetry from earlier eras?

VH: Themes have not changed—mortality, beauty, mortal life. The idea that life will end is so much more adventurous than the idea that we will live forever.

Moving from the classic poetic direction, there is greater experimentation in contemporary poetry. Most poets I have studied wrote differently to bring about meter and rhythm.

Wanda Coleman’s Book of Sonnets is not looking for clues in poetic diction or paired lines. But she still uses an adaptation of iambic pentameter. Contemporary poetry is experimenting with classical forms. Poets of the 19th Century, like Whitman and Dickinson, I would still argue that they are experimental in meter, invented language, and the end-stopped line. People are still trying to emulate them.

Contemporary poets use parse, yet fully develop musical language. Modern-era poets like Carl Sandburg and Robinson Jeffers have a deeper concern for the natural world.  As I mentioned, they are probably the inventors of “Ecopoetry.” There is also a lot of blending of artistic disciplines in contemporary poetry. There are poets who are also visual artists, using words in a highly experimental form in physical installations, like Julie Carr. I have not built forms of expression on visual arts.

If you had a chance to ask a question to a poet you admire (living or dead), who is the poet and what would you ask?

VH: I was fortunate enough to see Galway Kinnel read once. His poem “Blackberry Picking” was an expression of living life to the fullest. He relished small moments. His poem, “Wait,” was in response to a student who was contemplating suicide. I would like to ask Kinnell if that poem worked. What stronger outcome can you expect from poetry or any work of art than that you saved a life? Did you achieve the outcome of a saved life?

Rebecca Hargus is a graduate student at Angelo State University, majoring in English. A lover of literature and poetry, she hopes to bring this appreciation to students at the collegiate level. She is a dog lover, empty nester, mother of one, and soon-to-be grandmother. She has been married to her husband for twenty-eight years.