Gustav Parker Hibbett: ‘I grew up with other people being the authority in defining my identity.’
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Gustav Parker Hibbett’s collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, is shortlisted for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize. You can hear readings from all the shortlisted poets at the Southbank Centre on Sunday, January 12, and tickets for the event can be found here.
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First, congratulations on being shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize! You’ve spoken about the long wait to actually feel like a writer, even while recognising that your work is for you and that has to be enough. It’s a tension that I think a lot of people will recognise. What was your initial reaction to the news of the shortlist?
I think shock and disbelief initially. At first, it was a lot to wrap my head around. Miraculous, of course, but also hard to process. I’ve been able to move into this beautiful sense of calm, though, where the recognition has come to bear professionally but not necessarily artistically. I feel much more like a writer in the sense that I now see a path into a (hopefully somewhat stable) career as a writer, but the craft of my writing feels comfortably separate. Like, I think I’ve been gifted a little bit more room to keep those two things separate, if that makes sense? It’s lessened the professional pressure, which means my writing going forward feels in some ways like it’s more my own, and I have more space for my own priorities and preoccupations because I’ll be less concerned with proving myself. I feel really fortunate; I’m not taking it for granted.
Let’s start with the high jump poems, as we’ve discussed them before. In your work, jumping and poetry share an iterative, almost prayer-like quality – an incantation of ‘pure potential’ made concrete. When did this theme first emerge in your writing? Has your view of track & field and poetry evolved through these poems?
I actually didn’t start writing about high jump until maybe four years ago, because my relationship to it felt so delicate and intimate that language seemed almost beside the point. I was afraid, I think, that I could never quite capture what it meant to me in a way that other people could read and understand. It seemed like it was just a big opportunity for a misunderstanding. I would need to translate my private understanding of it into language other people could connect with, which would inevitably involve the kind of contextualisation that can only hold poetry down, and this all seemed insurmountable. So this book (both its writing and its reception) has felt charged with almost the same unlikely magic that a successful high jump had for me – like a bid for beauty on its own terms that is, against all odds, accepted. I’ve opened up a really deep part of myself and been rewarded for it, and this has changed what I understand to be possible (both in poetry and in life in general).
Form plays a key role in the book. Sometimes it feels like there’s a distinct mode: ordered stanzas, precise line breaks. But there are also prose poems, and more unconventional uses of white space. Is there a mode you feel most comfortable in? Do you consider yourself a formalist, or is that label unhelpful?
I think I might consider myself a formalist, in that I’m very excited by the intricacies of form? I don’t think I ever felt like I had a claim to that label – so many of the iterations of forms in the book were experimental to me, driven by an attempted faithfulness to form-content unity that I couldn’t explain in any authoritative sense. I guess I used to consider formalists to be masters of form, but I don’t think I’m particularly interested in mastery, so maybe a formalist can also be someone who enjoys playing in and with form. ‘Play’ is maybe the right word. My relationship to form is iterative like high jump and therefore playful. I really enjoyed thinking about the elements of form I play with in the collection – that’s one of the most rewarding parts of poetry for me.
The book’s epigraphs point towards a frustration with being defined or othered. I’m interested in how that relates to your experience of Blackness and Queerness. Do you see poetry as a way to assert your identity on its own terms?
Yeah, definitely. I think it always needs to be more than this (an end in and of itself as well as a means to this end), but it has been one of the ways I’ve grown to feel so safe in poetry. I grew up with other people being the authority in defining my identity (which I think is such a horrible, disempowering reality for most Black and queer people), and so much of this obviously takes place in and through language, so building a page full of language that operates (as much as possible) on my terms has been important to me. In poetry, my identity and perspective have begun to feel like this gravity, which shapes not just the content of the things I write about but the form as well, and this feels so true to being human that I sometimes have to step back and remind myself it’s not so cleanly one-to-one, that language is still imperfect.
Throughout the collection, the speaker often re-arranges themselves, or plays with other identities. Sometimes this seems liberating, other times, like in the Joni Mitchell poem, that is inverted. How did you approach the sequencing of these different kinds of poems and the collection more broadly?
Sequencing was one of the most difficult parts of putting the collection together for me. My brain is good at holding the individual poems as wholes, but when I need to think about the shapes that emerge when they come together (how to build an emotional arc over the course of an entire book, for example), it overflows. This was where my editor, Jessica Traynor, was really crucial. I had a lot of different pieces where I was looking at identity and self-fashioning from a lot of angles. Writing the different pieces felt natural (in that their accumulation is not exactly linear), but assembling them felt hard and artificial (in that it involved imposing some kind of linearity). Jess was better at this than me, and she was able to step back in ways that I wasn’t.
Finally, if you were to pick a collection to be read alongside High Jump as Icarus Story, like a poetry double feature, which would you choose and why?
Ooh, this is a good question and a very difficult one. There are so many favourite collections that immediately come to mind that I want to encourage people to read. I can think of many that would pair well on different aspects of the collection, but maybe since we’ve been speaking about formal play, I’ll pick Karisma Price’s I’m Always So Serious, which also plays (more than I do, actually) with form, and which brings that sense of serious (by which I mean probing, fruitful) playfulness to bear on things like history, pop culture, the classical literary canon, place (specifically New Orleans), Blackness and identity/self-formation.
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Image credits: Abbie McNeice
Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet and essayist. They are originally from New Mexico and currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow and were selected as a runner-up for The Missouri Review’s 2022 Poem of the Year Award. Their work has appeared in Guernica, fourteen poems, The Stinging Fly, London Magazine, Adroit and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, published by Banshee Press, has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.
Jamie Cameron was born in Swansea, Wales, and grew up in the Midlands. He is the Managing Editor of The London Magazine.
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