Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. They grew up in New Mexico and are currently pursuing a PhD at Trinity College Dublin. They are a 2024 Djanikian Scholars Finalist and a 2023 Obsidian Foundation Fellow, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in LitHub, Guernica, London Magazine, fourteen poems, The Hopkins Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. Their debut poetry collection, High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press), was shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. What was the most rewarding aspect of this recognition?
The most rewarding thing has been noticing a difference in my self-confidence. Not that I suddenly feel like I’m a really good writer, but now there’s this safety net underneath me that wasn’t there before. I can see the writing I produce in the future getting more of the benefit of the doubt, and the idea of this is really heartening. There’s so much less headspace used worrying about trying to prove that I deserve to take up space on the page, which I think is something many emerging writers contend with. It feels like a really nice gift to be able to move forward into a career with some of that assuaged.
Your poetry collection offers readers many lessons, from reimagining mythical figures like Icarus to critiquing societal expectations. What did you come to learn through the process of crafting High Jump as Icarus Story?
I think the main thing was grappling with language as this imperfect means of capturing or describing experience. It’s like a self-supporting bridge that you’re extending out into the dark that will inevitably collapse. Poetry, more than other forms, situates itself at that moment of collapse where that bridge crumbles and language starts to come apart.
I guess the subject, or obsession, of a poem necessarily needs to be different than that of an essay or short story. As this was my first collection, I learned a lot about what poetry can and can’t hold. I feel like I know those things in my body now – maybe less so intellectually, but I feel it in my body. I know what a good poem should feel like, what a good idea for a poem feels like.
I’ve been thinking about the limits of language and getting more comfortable writing in this form. It’s this strange dance where I’m both better at expressing what I want to express and worse, because I’ve also (as I get more comfortable) found myself relying on the language instead of trying as hard to touch what’s behind it.
When writing about musicians like Lianne La Havas or literary characters like Othello, do you find yourself actively revisiting those works of art as part of your creative process? Or is your connection to them more intuitive?
It’s a bit of both, in that with any creative process there’s an element of meeting the piece of art and capturing the spirit of it and then taking it a step beyond, mixing it with part of yourself.
In these specific cases, it was a very personal process. The Lianne La Havas poem came from a dream where I was singing ‘Ghost’ along with her and was able to sing well. When I woke up, there was this sharp contrast, like I had lost something, and I thought, oh my god, why did that feel so good? I started to think, why is this so intimately, emotionally important to me?
Other poems have come from being inside an idea academically. I wrote the Othello poem while I was working on a PhD essay about blackface and performances of Othello. I was reading academic papers and had just read Jason Allen-Paisant’s collection, so I was thinking a lot about Shakespeare’s Black characters and what we can know about them. With Othello, there’s a layer you can’t pass—the true heart of that character is perhaps obscured or off to the side, drowned out or hidden by the gaze he’s rendered in. I was interested in playfully approaching that, asking myself what if Othello was, say, an aspiring singer-songwriter.
Athleticism and art are often perceived as distinct worlds, yet in your writing, they feel evidently interconnected — I’m thinking of the line “I was an artist/ above the crossbar.” What draws you to explore the overlap between these two realms?
I think writing, specifically poetry, and high jump are quite similar, weirdly. They’re both compact and iterative, both really concerned with the intricacies of form. They both deal with a kind of unavoidable failure. In high jumping, you’re always going to come down on the mat at the end. It’s never about trying to fly permanently—you’re just trying to push the bounds of how gravity holds you. A poem feels this way, too.
For both disciplines, I think my body knew what to do through muscle memory more than I could articulate. With high jump, so much of my practice was through iterations, doing bridges, holding my body in that shape, or watching others’ form on YouTube, hoping my unconscious would sort of bring it into being.
Similarly with poetry, you’re often trying to touch things beyond language. The only sense you can trust is the sense that’s beyond language—the parts of your brain that are emotional before language or are able to sense before language. Both practices are almost spiritual, encountering this vast unknown that feels akin to the divine or sublime. Like disciplines such as math and physics, there’s this reverence for the unknown.
In times of ongoing discussion around gender and athletic ability—where trans, non-binary and queer athletes are so often scrutinised and excluded—your work offers a rich, nuanced exploration of sport as both a site of constraint and a potential for self-discovery and liberation. What perspective on gender and sport do you hope your readers will gain from this collection?
My body’s queerness or non-binary-ness and that body in sport have just been me—so in a lot of ways, it’s personal before it’s political. I think that’s true to the way anyone approaches sports, even if your body is inherently political or politicised. Weirdly, at a time in my life where I felt so constrained in every other arena, high jump was where I could free myself from that constraint and connect on this personal level where I wasn’t thinking about the political. So it’s about the personal relationship with the sport, before it’s anything political.
There is also the sense that visibility is very important, that marginalised bodies in sports can have this political resonance that can be valuable. So many civil rights moments in the 20th century are tied into sports—like Carlos and Smith at the 1968 Olympics with the black gloves, or Jesse Owens in 1936—and we’re currently seeing a dramatic rise in viewership of women’s sports. We’ve already got a number of out nonbinary and trans athletes competing (like Nikki Hiltz in last summer’s Olympics, or Laurel Hubbard in 2020, or Layshia Clarendon on the Minnesota Lynx), and I’m excited to see more in the coming years. People in these moments can be of real importance for progress, moving public opinion in the direction of acceptance.
I’ve been thinking about why that works so well, this political tie to bodies and sports, especially around Blackness, but also around transness and queerness. Sports, I think, are principally about beauty. They make bodies beautiful, make people feel beautiful first. Then others can see that beauty. As Elaine Scarry writes, beauty is by nature unprecedented—every time we encounter a beautiful object, we can’t find a precedent for it because it breaks out of our categories. When spectators see a queer, trans, or Black body as beautiful, it breaks them out of the category they would have otherwise put them in.
The poem ‘Self-Portrait as the Form of Other Jumpers’ explores three different approaches to perfection through the jumpers Ukhov, Holm, and Sotomayor. How does the pursuit of perfection manifest in your own life?
I really enjoyed writing this poem in parts because I think all of those relationships to perfection have been mine in different ways. For years, I felt constrained in the sort of way that I maybe project onto Holm’s jump—he’s famously one of the shortest high jumpers ever to be as successful as he was. When you watch him jump, there’s not an ounce–or rather, joule–of wasted energy. It’s all purposeful. I related to this idea of having to work really tightly within constraints, where the stakes are high and you have to maximise every sort of output.
With Sotomayor, when you watch him jump, it’s musical—you hold your breath until he lands. It’s momentous. I’ve always related to that. And Ukhov is this contentious figure because of the doping scandal and that time he showed up really drunk to a meet. But something I always saw in his jumping was this delicate precision. He revels in his form in a way that seems Icarian, maybe somewhat arrogant, but then there’s also something so human about the complete satisfaction that can come from doing something you know you’re good at.
How important were the structural patterns—like the ‘High Jump as’ series and poems that play with space—when crafting the collection?
Very important, actually. They allowed me to bring in an element of play and enjoyment, especially in the poems where I’m experimenting with spacing the words out on the page. Initially, I was just trying to listen for what felt right as the poems developed. It was nice to work towards that. I was very anxious that those poems would go out into the world and people would say I didn’t actually know what I’m doing, or that the underlying logic I found wasn’t actually there. Like with prose poems—I started writing them because I didn’t know how to write a prose poem. I didn’t think my writing style lent itself to that form. Different forms of poems are best suited to different types of content, so I had to figure out what content would work better in a prose poem, how to make the sentence structures work, how to make it not just feel like a paragraph. I think one of the basic tensions in poetry is that between the sentence and the poetic line—you can’t play with that in a prose poem. It’s just a block of text.
Exploring different forms also allowed me to approach the same subjects from multiple angles. It’s hard to capture something perfectly in writing—you’re always going to leave out elements. But being able to come at things from different angles and in different forms was both generative and helped assuage some worries. High jump felt like this to me, but it also felt like that, and I couldn’t write about one feeling without acknowledging the other. This multi-formal way of writing was really enjoyable.
Are there particular themes, forms, or creative experiments you’re excited to tend to as you move forward in your writing career?
For my PhD, I’m working on creative nonfiction. Much of the poetry collection was written in the spaces between trying to write the nonfiction, because I had this creative energy that I didn’t know how to translate into prose. Poetry felt more fluent.
Poetry and prose feel like completely different languages. For a long time, it felt like I was translating my thoughts from poetry to prose in order to make them fit. When the collection came together, it felt like a good pausing point. I realised if I wanted to successfully write prose, I needed to immerse myself in it, to become comfortable thinking in a prosaic mode.
I haven’t written a poem in about six months—I’ve actively been trying to stop myself. I need to get comfortable in prose without stepping out occasionally into poetry. I’m looking forward to coming back to poetry after finishing this essay collection. It’ll be nice to return to this language I know better, though by next year I might feel differently about prose. I’m slowly improving. The things I learn while finding my footing in prose will translate to poetry, and I’m excited to see what new skillsets or avenues that opens up.
Finally, what piece of literature have you been recommending lately?
Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. Before this she mainly published academic work, which is also exceptional—she wrote this beautiful book called In the Wake in 2016, where she uses the term “wake” to talk about Black existence in modern day. Ordinary Notes has all this underlying Black theory, but she’s distilled it very carefully into something beautifully situated between forms. It’s almost poetry—248 individual notes ranging from one sentence to a few pages. The little notes are able to amalgamate meaning through this constellation and association of ideas.
It’s brilliant, kind, and deeply observant. She’s taken such care in distilling what she’s examining. It’s accessible for anyone, whether or not they’re in academia or have read Black theory. She’s thinking about certain functions and realities of Blackness, but also about what it means to be human in this current world—what history is behind (and around, and on top of) us, how we move through spaces meaningfully or ethically, even as that remains opaque and complicated. It’s a work of genius.
