A Chorus of Selves

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Gustav Parker Hibbett begins

I also think finding it through poetry has been a healing process. As a black body, as a queer body, I've been taught not to trust, trust my body, or like, trust its instincts, its feelings, and High Jump was so important to me when I did it, partially because it was all about me trusting this sense of my body and its own sort of rhythm that it knew better than I could.

Seán Hewitt
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a poet and essayist. Their first collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Their work has appeared in Guernica, Adroit, The Stinging Fly, and Poetry Ireland Review, among many others. Gustav Parker Hibbett is our guest today on The Glimpse.

In Gustav Parker Hibbett’s poems, we are let loose into a world of transformation and flight, though Parker is always aware of the forces of gravity, pressure, and the ties that bind us. With a daring gymnastic ability to adapt the forms of their poetry and the glittering intelligence just as at home in the world of Greek mythology as in critical theory, music, and athletics, Parker's is a poetry that lifts up the self, the body, and the world in which we exist for brilliant and powerful examination. Stylish, tender, playful, and rigorous, Parker is a poet whose poems have the ability to remake themselves and to remake us along the way. Parker, welcome to The Glimpse. Thank you so much for being here.

Parker
Thanks for having me, and thanks for such a lovely intro.

Seán
You're very welcome. I want to start by congratulating you. Your debut collection, High Jump as Icarus Story, which came out this year, was just recently shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, which is the biggest prize for poetry in the U.K. and Ireland, so well done. It's such a brilliant book, and it's threaded through with a sort of coming-of-age narrative. I think it's such a beautiful exploration of the way in which we are kind of pressurized and molded into, into people, and what we can do about that, how we might kind of explore our own metamorphosis, and how we might change ourselves.

I wanted to start by asking you, you know…one of the things that really struck me when I was reading your book was the way you pull in mythology and athletics and music and critical theory and so many other things to talk about transformation and, and the way we exist in the world. I wonder what it is about poetry and metamorphosis that, that seem to go so hand in hand for you.

Parker
Yeah, I've actually done a lot of thinking about this recently, because I think I feel so much more at home in poetry than I do in many different types of prose. I don't know, and there's something about poetry where…I think part of it's the lyric “I,” I think the lyric “I” is a little bit more, I think, flexible in holding a self in a way that maybe borders, like, fiction and non-fiction. But then I also think that poetry, more than any other form is, like, open to formal and linguistic experimentation.

Seán
Yeah, yeah.

Parker
Which means that it's just like, it's open to, I think, evidencing or making manifest, like, transformations.

Seán
Yeah, I think there's something about the way poetry, particularly your poetry, moves. That seems to—you know, I keep on wanting to make kind of circular gestures with my hands, but I'm thinking of kind of unfolding things and unraveling them and re-raveling them and remaking them. It seems to go hand-in-hand with, with transformation. I wasn't going to ask you about the lyric “I,” but now I want to. What is your relationship to that “I,” that speaking voice in the poem, and has it changed over time?

Parker
Yeah, I think it maybe changes every time I sit down to write, and I think that's why I feel really at home in poetry is… I think there's that, the “I” from poem to poem can be a different angle of yourself, and you get to sort of exist fully in that angle, and think through that angle.

Yeah, I think, with the poems in this book there was this, I think, gathering of mass, if that makes sense, where it slowly had to sort of build itself as making me comfortable, I think, writing in a way that I was able to have that relationship to the lyric “I.” And then I think once I accumulated enough mass there, enough poems that I'd sort of written that way, that relationship felt really natural. And I think still feels quite natural.

Seán
Yeah, I love the idea of an accumulation, particularly because it could be the case that an “I” speaks for us in a totality. You know, it's expected to perhaps represent us at all times, which is, of course, kind of impossible. And I like the idea that when you start a new poem, you start again. You kind of essay your way forward. You try another angle. You come at a different direction. And there's a freedom in that, because you don't have to sum everything up, but also a freedom in that you can be a different part of yourself. And I wonder if, you know, looking back over, over the collection that you have now, do you feel that you have got a more pluralistic sense of the “I”—that is, the speaker of all of these poems. Is there something kind of choral about the book?

Parker
Yeah, I think I would definitely say that, because I think a lot of the poems were written not necessarily with the intention of being put together in this way. Like, that all sort of came together as it came together. So it's been interesting to, like, read the book, since it's been like a physical, completely together book because, yeah, there is this, I think, chorus of selves that I'm quite proud of, I think.

Seán
I think you should be; it's such a great book. And I mean, you know,
writers, I think, are often asked about other writers who inspire them. But for the subject of your poem this week—and also a lot of the poems in High Jump as Icarus Story—I wanted to talk to you about music. Do you feel that you take inspiration in any way from music, whether that's the musicality or the emotion of a song or a singer's voice, and do you listen to music as you write?

Parker
I do. I think, I'm trying to maybe cool it with this, but I'm one of those people who, like, has to be listening to music almost every idle [moment]. So if I'm, like, in the office, working, I'm listening to music. If I'm writing, I'm listening to music. If I'm making dinner, I'm listening to music. I think I've had this relationship with a lot of songs, a lot of artists where I'm really interested in rhythm and, like, the sound of how things work. I think I've developed this very personal sense of how, how I think my writing should sound. Yeah, it feels really good to trust that sense and then have that be validated the way that it's been.

Seán
Yeah, yeah. But I think that that is, you know, so evident in your poems that they come with a beat, and you feel them pushing towards the place that they're going to; you know, there's a momentum to them. You know, I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too much, but I think there's something in the body that is rhythmic, and as the title of your book and a number of the poems in the book refer to “high jumping,” I can't help but think that you must be someone who was attuned to rhythm. You know, you need rhythm and momentum for both of these jobs.

Parker
Yeah, I also think finding it through poetry has been a healing process. As a black body, as a queer body, I've been taught not to trust, trust my body, or like, trust its instincts, its feelings, and High Jump was so important to me when I did it, partially because it was all about me trusting this sense of my body and its own sort of rhythm that it knew better than I could.

Seán
Yeah.

Parker
Yeah.

Seán
There's something kind of primal about it, perhaps, which I love for you, that you found that kind of freedom in the voice and, and the rhythm, and it comes through in the poem so, so strongly. You know, that there's something instinctive and primal about needing to find that rhythm in a voice, in a way of speaking, that is definitely yours and definitely free of the sort of doubt that is trying to ground it.

Parker
Yeah, yeah.

Seán
So one of the poems that you're going to read today, your own poem, is about one of my favorite singers—she's having a renaissance again. But Joni Mitchell, I feel, half-raised me. (They laugh.) And, you know, when I was listening to Joni Mitchell as a teenager, I kind of stopped by the time I got to this album. I don't think I was ready for the sort of experimentalism of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. I preferred the acoustic-y…Hejira was kind of as far as I got. But the poem that you're going to read refers to the album artwork for that album [Don Juan's Reckless Daughter], right?

Parker
Yeah, and it was something she did, like, for a series of years. Like, the first instance was at, like, a Halloween party, then on the album of Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, and then kind of just continuously, like, she'd sort of trotted out as this thing that she was really, I think, artistically proud of.

Seán
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's very strange. So give us the context for what we're talking about here.

Parker
Yeah. So I similarly was obsessed with Joni Mitchell’s music. I think the first record that I bought was Blue, like…I was in there. It was just my soundtrack for so much, I think, in the way that—I don't know—you can come to a book and you could think, like, “The whole world is contained in this book.” I really would come to, like, Blue or Hejira and be like, “The whole world is contained in how she's talking in this, this album.”

And then in grad school, a black friend of mine was like, “Hey, like, I don't know if you know this, but the whole, like, blackface thing,” and then—I don't know—it, I was really, I think, hit really hard by that in this weird way, because it felt like someone who had been so close to me had hurt me in this really weird way. Someone who I thought had seen me so clearly had, like, costumed as me.

Seán
I think, you know, that there is something that you can't doubt about the immediacy of that sort of pain and disappointment, because, as you say, we connect with singers and poets and writers on such a deep level, because they become part of who we are, you know, and we feel that they're kind of echoing inside us. And then to see that they're not quite that, that person, and that they're actually taking a, sort of, what feels like a direct aim at you, and to let you down and hurt you, must have been a really, actually discombobulating experience.

Parker
Yeah, I think the weirdest thing for me about it was that people have sort of brought it up to her in interviews. I think as recently as, like, 2015, people have sort of asked her about it, and she's really stood by it, like, refused to apologize, refused to believe that there was anything wrong.

I was reading the Anne Powers biography of her. She wrote: “She didn't just cross a line. She refused to acknowledge its existence.”

Seán
Right?

Parker
I thought that kind of encapsulates it. I was like, whatever about maybe not knowing or not realizing when someone brings it up to you as that you've done this thing that has hurt people potentially, and you sort of refuse to acknowledge that hurt, like, what?

Seán
Yeah, kind of baffling. And especially, you know, when we connect so closely to the voice in those songs, which is vulnerable and empathetic and hurt and expansive and all of these things that feel like the sort of person we want to be beside. To have that, you know, really stern dismissal is crazy.

I was looking at the album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. And I see the album artwork on Spotify. It's changed now, which… it's just, like, a wolf now, strangely enough. But Parker, you've transformed that experience, which is so full of disappointments and pain—but also much wider cultural and historical questions—into the most brilliant poem. I wonder if you would read “Joni Mitchell dresses up as me” for us.

Parker
Yeah.

Joni Mitchell dresses up as me
By Gustav Parker Hibbett

Dark-felt fedora and sunglasses;
little black-haired moustache; afro
wig; skin the hue of walnut wood
painted over face, neck, hands;
gold chains; earrings; jewel-toned
blazer—I am the sort of man
an artist wears to sing in, dons
to shed herself: puffed-up,
pimpin’, perfectly impermanent.
I am beautiful, she says: the wisp
of something Negro in the twilight
timbre of her mezzo, piano riff
of black bird wings, noble sorrow
turned arpeggio. My brass
bravado grand enough
to make her troubles soulful
jewellery, leave her feeling
freer, deeper, natural. She loves
that I'm the friend she's never had
to worry for, the man who jives and jukes
so centrifugal that my noose is dew drops
slipping from a crocus stem, who grooves
so fast the cops can't catch
my saxophone. Seductive, tragic,
lovely, Joni says she loves my self-
possession, how it feels
to possess me.

Parker
That's part one, and then part two is:

Joni Mitchell dresses up as me (II)
By Gustav Parker Hibbett

When she leaves me in a pile
at the end of her bed, turns back
into herself for sleep, I up and walk
the streets, the jagged jazz clubs, alleys
of the white imagination, trail smoky
grace notes in my wake. Dance with
other muses, bodies, curios on break
from metaphor: Saartjie Baartman back
from endless exhibition; the Zealy seven
cut, emancipated, from daguerreotype: Alfred,
Renty, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, Delia; Caliban,
Othello. We end most nights with candles, whiskey
tumblers, playing cards at bars with little tables
where we laugh off all that makes our eyelids
heavy, stay for hours and the minutes before
morning dawns. Part with kisses on both cheeks, reminders of the kind of love that stains us lipstick-red, until we see ourselves again.

"Joni Mitchell dresses up as me (parts I and II)" by Gustav Parker Hibbett from High Jump as Icarus Story, now available from Banshee Press.


Seán
That's so strong, and this poem is kind of riffing off dress-up and these “costumings of the self.” You know, lines like, “I am the sort of man / an artist wears to sing in,” which is such a brilliant line, and the idea of being free from metaphor and seeing ourselves again, it made me think, you know, that this is a poem about the gaze, in some ways, and various gazes being seen from without and being seen from, from within. And I just wondered if you could speak a little bit about how you're navigating those, those gazes in this poem.

Parker
Yeah, I think, I initially sort of had the two parts of the poem together, and I think was very interested, maybe principally, in that, that gaze element. What it all came down to, sort of, for me, was this idea of the way that I think people might see me, or that I think many different types of marginalized people have to be sort of hyper-aware of the way that people might see us in these bad ways, and how that, I think, just, like, dominates our thoughts. And I think I was interested in the idea of, like, when she goes to sleep, and Art Nouveau is just off to his own devices, as an opportunity to be in this space where he and all of these other sort of historically metaphorized and exhibited and violated black bodies are able to, I don't know, exist, seeing only themselves.

Seán
Yeah, yeah, “Art Nouveau” is the, what she calls the alter ego, right? This black-face alter ego on the album artwork. You know, one of the things that this poem does and many of the poems in your book do, is, you know, they're really concerned with the interplay between the self and history, or a singular and a collective imagination. And, you know, these are really big things to get inside a poem. And I just can't help, in some ways, marvel at how you get them in. How do you approach such a big subject within a poem, without it collapsing the poem? Because it never does with your poems.

Parker
I don’t know. I think weirdly with this one, especially, I think, almost focusing on something else, like, knowing that was what I was in there writing about. But I really, especially in the first part of the poem—in ways that at the time I was maybe like, “am I enjoying this too, too much?”—I got really, really into the sound and like trying to set up these line breaks. I think, thinking of the poetic line as this, like fabric that I was, or the sentence as a fabric I was stretching over the poetic line and, like, making that as tight and smooth as possible, and making all those little moments. I think having that to focus on meant that, I think, I was able to hold the sort of bigger ideas, because there was, there was another engine, also sort of driving, driving the way that the poem moved.

Seán
Yeah, it feels like an engine. It feels like there's so much surprise and energy available in those line breaks, you know, even the one where you split, “she loves my self-,” break, “possession.” And there's something so jugular about that line break that feels that it pulls the poem. “With an engine” is a lovely way of putting it. Parker, we're going to take a quick break now, but when you come back, you're going to tell us a bit about another sort of mythical creature, which is a goat's head, the lion's body, and a snake for a tail.


BREAK

Cathy and Peter Halstead

We hope you’re enjoying this second season of The Glimpse. It’s just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We’re the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone, and we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you’re on. Thank you so much for listening.

Sean
Welcome back to The Glimpse. So, Parker, you've chosen a poem by Donika Kelly as your inspiration. Will you tell us a little bit about what drew you to this poem first?

Parker
Yeah, I think there's just this, this charge like, I think she's doing something really exciting here. And it's something that I think that has really inspired me in my own writing, this sort of mythology made personal, yeah? And mythology made not just personal, but, like, intimate and moving and shifting.

Seán
Yeah, and we were talking before about that kind of energy of form in your poems. And this poem feels to me like it has such energy in its form. Would you read it for us? It's called “Chimera,” right?

Parker
Yeah.

“Love Poem: Chimera”
By Donika Kelly

I thought myself lion and serpent. Thought
myself body enough for two, for we.
Found comfort in never being lonely.

What burst from my back, from my bones, what lived
along the ridge from crown to crown, from mane
to forked tongue beneath the skin. What clamor

we made in the birthing. What hiss and rumble
at the splitting, at the horns and beard,
at the glottal bleat. What bridges our back.
What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie
are we. What we've made of ourselves.

"Love Poem: Chimera" by Donika Kelly (Bestiary, Graywolf Press, 2016)


Seán
I feel like you need to take a breath after reading that poem. When I first read it, it really took me by surprise, because it was almost as if there was this kind of creature emerging out of it, breaking out of this poem, and it took me a while to recognize what was happening in the poem, and then I was kind of bowled over by the end of it.

Parker
Yeah, I have like exclamation points written in the book next to “What bridges our back,” and then “what menagerie,” line break, “are we.”

Seán
Yeah, yeah. I was staring at that line, “what menagerie / are we.” And I was trying to figure it out, you know, why is it so good? And I kind of came to this idea that there was… “bright eye,” “menagerie,” is a kind of rhyme, and then “menagerie / are we” is a kind of rhyme, but it's, it's kind of a changed rhyme. You know, “are we” doesn't rhyme with “bright eye,” but with “menagerie” in the middle, they both rhyme. Do you know what I mean? There's some trickery going on in this poem, which is…

Parker
Yeah, it works so well on a sonic level.

Sean
Amazing, and I think it just has a soundscape that, that just keeps fizzing and kind of detonating in places. And, you know, it feels like it's almost gymnastic, like dancing and moving on, on the page. Was it something about that movement and the kind of soundscape of it that drew you to this poem?

Parker
I think so. And I think it's those lines, like, that hit really well. But as I mentioned, I love, I think, all of the poems, all the, the love poems that kind of sequence throughout the collection. But there's something about this one, and it was, it was almost intangible, like, I couldn't exactly describe why this one, but it was just, I think, that sort of double valence of the, the “what,” like, how it sits somewhere between question and statement, which means that as you're reading forward you're kind of, it's kind of taking shape as it moves through each of those sentences.

Seán
It is, it's kind of, it's kind of shifting the poem. It's just kind of inching its way forward in such a surprising grammatical way. “What bridges our back. / What strong neck, what bright eye”—something of it reminded me of “The Tyger,” the William Blake poem, you know. I had, you know, “What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain?” You know, I wondered if there was something of the monstrous vision of “The Tyger” in the back of the monstrous vision of the chimera in this poem as well.

Parker
Yeah, I'm sure that before and in the process of writing this book she must have sort of read just a lot of, like, animal or monster poems.

Seán
Yeah, the book is called Bestiary, right?

Parker
Yeah.

Seán
Yeah. It also seemed to me, you know, to be a poem about hybridity. It's about community or interdependence. I'm gonna butcher the line if I don't look at it, but “Thought / myself body enough for two, for we. / Found comfort in never being lonely.” You know, and the whole poem kind of breaks open that certainty or the stubbornness of the idea of self-sufficiency, you know—it has to break out of itself. I think in that way the, the poem kind of becomes a metamorphosis poem, you know, in the same way that, that yours, so it fits so so well alongside the poems in High Jump.

What is it that kind of drew you originally to the mythology and these myth-making poems? Has that always been a kind of obsession for you, or has it come later?

Parker
I think I always, as many adolescents did, that, had that sort of Icarus obsession, just…I think I was really interested in the idea of this transcendence and then, like, failure, which in turn, sort of evidenced, like, not a failure of him, but a failure of the world that he was in to hold him or something. Which I think speaks to a lot of sort of adolescent growing pains, especially for any sort of marginalized kid. There's this, like, fierce desire to, like, become…I don't know. So I think Icarus was my sort of entryway into a lot of stuff. But then it became, like…the labyrinth was sort of a heavy focus.

Seán
Right, because the Minotaur shows up in your book as well.

Parker
Yeah, I feel like Minotaur was another big one from that kind of set of mythological figures. And then I read H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, and that made, I don't know this, like, enormous impact on just what you could do with myth. H.D. does this thing where she frees Helen from her myth without really confining her to a new one. She gets to exist in this, like, plurality of the lyric “I,” like…she is poetic, opaque in like a Glissant way, like, thing, and she is free. Like, the details are fuzzy, it stays, like, hazy, and it's…oh my god. So I think that sort of helped ignite a lot of stuff.

Seán
Yeah. I think, I think, you know, there's a way in which the myths are always there as a sort of opportunity to transform our own experience through this kind of fund of, of stories and ideas that are a common language between us, you know. And, and it seems that, you know, in this poem, “Chimera,” it's transforming what might have been a poem of ordinary experience into a poem of quite extraordinary power. Because the chimera gets at the heart of, of contradiction or hybridity in ourselves and in our emotions as well, and it…you know, if anything, this poem feels like it's in a locked battle between two, two forms of the self. I wonder, you know, did you say this poem comes from a sequence? Are they all love poems?

Parker
They're all, there's a sequence—it's kind of spaced throughout the book— but there are two “Love Poem: Centaur”s: there's a “Love Poem: Centaur” with a capital “C,” “Love Poem: centaur” with a lowercase “c.” I think this one is in this interesting space of, again, that sort of contradiction, where it's like somewhere in between talking about self-love and, like, I think you can also read it in some ways about sort of the space that opens up between two people in a relationship.

Seán
Yeah.

Parker
I think that has that double valence. Some of them are sort of more explicitly, like love poems to someone. “Love Poem: Centaur” starts, “Nothing approaches a field like me.” They're all sort of like this electric movement. She kind of, like, I think comes at all of these, from these different, I guess, like kaleidoscopic, maybe, parts of sides of a prism or something.

Seán
Yeah, I think kaleidoscopic or, or kind of crystalline, you know, in the way it's bouncing the light around this poem, or refracting things. You know, it just seems to be, the more you look at it, the more it means, but also that it can mean contradictory things. You know, it's both a love poem and, and perhaps a regretful poem about what… “What we've made of ourselves” can be read two very different ways, I think, according to how you want to read this poem. You know, that it can be a kind of sign of strength for what we've made, you know, the strength in the making, but also a kind of “look what we've done,” in a regretful way.

Parker
Yeah.

Seán
I've been reading this poem over the past week kind of repeatedly, and I've still not quite decided the definitive reading, and I think that's what I love about it.

Parker
Yeah, I think in preparing for talking about it here, I was like, “oh my god, I actually don't know how to talk about it.” Like “if I, if I present this reading of it, that's not the only reading, like, I can't!” I don't know, it…

Seán
Yeah, there's something. But I think that's what the best poems do, right? They kind of confound the other language that you might, might try to summarize them with. You know that this poem exists in its own kind of irreducible space, and part of it is that kind of sparking nature of, of the words “What bridges our back. // What strong neck, what bright eye. What menagerie / are we.” So good, so good. I loved it.

So, Parker, it's been a big year for you with the publication of your debut book. What's next?

Parker
I, I’m in the final year of my my literary practice PhD, where I'm working on, like, an autoethnographic series of essays, kind of a memoir-esque. But, yeah, working, working towards, like, a nonfiction book, which has been maddening and impossible, and I think I'm starting to feel like I don't ever want to touch prose again after this. But by the end of this, I will ideally have a, like, a nonfiction book of essays.

Seán
That's something really to look forward to. I can't wait to read it.

Parker, thank you so much for taking the time today to speak to us today, and for reading your, your poems, it's been a real pleasure.

Parker
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.

Seán
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt

Parker’s poem "Joni Mitchell dresses up as me (parts I and II)" is from High Jump as Icarus Story, now available from Banshee Press.

"Love Poem: Chimera" by Donika Kelly is from Bestiary, published in 2016. It was used with permission from Graywolf Press.

Coming up next week, poet Jane Clarke talks about her journey from psychoanalysis to poetry, building a wall, and how her visits with farmers, ecologists, and naturalists inform her work.

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The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.

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