When I first read Gustav Hibbett’s poem “Upon Leaving my Labyrinth” in 32 Poems 19.1, I got that rare experience of total reading-rapture. My eyes were locked onto the page, heart quickening, and I could hear the poem’s speaker in all his awe and entreaty right before my face, or, should I say, right by my ear. The combination of tumbling run-on sentences and fragments clipped as if by caught breath disoriented me while also drawing me into the poem more intimately as a witness to (and participant in, since the “I” of a poem’s speaker becomes the “I” of the reader through the act of reading) an extremity of feeling.

I love Hibbett’s poems for their attention to the body, their corporeal sensitivity that sometimes allows his poems to cross over into territory I experience as spiritual or sublime. I had a chance to discuss this aspect of his poems with Hibbett recently, as well as how Greek myth, racial embodiment, and postcolonial literature inform his writing. Hibbett was also kind enough to share two additional poems with readers here— “Rococo,” which also operates in that realm of the transcendent, and “The Cretan Bull,” which explores the poet’s mixed-race identity again through the stories of ancient Greece. Hibbett is currently working on a creative nonfiction dissertation for a PhD in Literary Practice at Trinity College in Dublin, as well as on a collection of poems, so there should be ample opportunity to discover how his poetic and literary lives develop in the coming years.

—Sarah Rose Nordgren

Gustav Parker Hibbett is a Black poet, essayist, and MFA dropout. Originally from New Mexico, he is currently pursuing a Literary Practice PhD at Trinity College Dublin. Most recently, he was selected as the runner-up for the North American Review’s 2021 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction. His work also appears or is forthcoming in Witness, Adroit, MAYDAY (where he was selected as a finalist for the 2021 MAYDAY Poetry Prize), Peach Mag, Déraciné, and phoebe (where he was the runner-up for the 2020 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize). You can also find him on Twitter (@gustav_parker) and Instagram (@gustavparker).

Poems:

“The Morning of the Flight” (from 19.1)
“Upon Leaving my Labyrinth” (from 19.1)
“Rococo” (featured below)
“The Cretan Bull” (featured below)

Interview:

SRN: Your poems utilize Greek mythology in a way that feels uniquely intimate and personal. Can you speak a little about your relationship with the stories of classical mythology and how they play a part in your poetry?

GH: I think I’ve long had an affinity for those characters in myth whose stories feel told without real consideration of their perspective, those who have not been allowed control over their own narratives. The first character I thought about this a lot for was Icarus, whose story seemed to cast him in an unfair light. He’s imprisoned his whole life with only his father for company, and the moment he has a chance to escape, to push not only against the limits imposed on his life but those of humanity itself, he is shamed for flying too high. His name has long served as shorthand for greed, over-ambition, and teenage angst, but I’ve always felt that there’s so much more going on there. One of my favorite books, too, is Helen in Egypt, where H.D. not only works to free Helen from the misogyny of her myth but also refuses to confine her to a new one.

In terms of my poetry, I think myth has provided me a fertile ground to explore issues that affect us in modern day. For example, writing about or in the voice of Icarus allows an exploration of flight, of post-adversity exaltation, of a human interest in pushing against limits; the Minotaur has allowed me a space to talk about my own mixed-race identity; Ariadne’s story has been helpful in thinking about what happens when betrayed trust leaves you stranded and there is a need to construct a survival self in a toxic or enervating space.

In a way, Greek mythology can be like chess, where a standardized board has 32 pieces and 64 squares, but so many intimate possibilities for moves and interpretations. You get to start from a common cultural reference or archetype and then move in the direction of new meaning.

SRN: I love this metaphor of chess regarding Greek myth. It’s pretty amazing that these stories and characters that arose around four thousand years ago continue to be so evocative and resonant for contemporary artists and audiences. You mention here that the figure of the Minotaur has offered an avenue for exploring your own racial identity, and this story comes up in both “Upon Leaving my Labyrinth” in issue 19.1 and in “The Cretan Bull,” included here. Can you say a little more about how these two poems came to be and about their explorations of race?

GH: I’ll start with “Upon Leaving my Labyrinth.” While not explicitly from the perspective of the Minotaur, it does come from something which is intimately tied to my identity as a Black man and is easily connected to a Minotaur-like perspective.

In adopting this voice, in being able to plead submission to this queered archetypal hero, I’m able to express my exhaustion with a kind of hyper-vigilance. I find that I think so much more than White people do about the way my body exists in or moves through spaces, and I’m so much more conscious of the myriad ways a phrase or gesture I make could be interpreted. Often, it feels like it doesn’t matter how I mean something, because how people interpret it can, for example, put me in physical danger (e.g. cell phones being mistaken for guns, or an excited gesture being mistaken for violent anger).

Part of what I’m trying to get at in the poem is this idea that I want, even just for a second, to be able to put that in someone else’s hands, to trust that they’ll hold all of it so I don’t have to. To abandon myself in someone else’s arms. For a long while, this want was a huge source of shame for me; this kind of thing is a lot to ask of another human being, and there was always the understanding that this was something selfish that I’d have to extinguish without telling anyone about. Being able to express that want here so nakedly is a surprisingly nice feeling. Once this was written, it took me a long time to be comfortable submitting it anywhere or showing it to very many people. I was still quite nervous when it first came out in print, so I’m really grateful for how kindly you’ve received it.

I think the ties to race in “The Cretan Bull” are probably a lot more straightforward (and maybe even didactic), as well as being a lot more conceptual than emotional. With this one, I was trying to do something tongue-in-cheek with the (much too pervasive) associations of whiteness with cleanliness and purity, and those of blackness with animal dirtiness. The Minotaur is born of the Cretan Bull (who was a famously clean, white bull) and a human woman, and I wanted to dig into that.

The Minotaur is a monster in his half-ness, but there’s also something dangerous and animal in how he’s seen that goes beyond mere mixed-ness. Which half produces what’s interpreted as monstrosity? Whiteness as value and caste system is so arbitrary, and that can be seen best when we look at its margins, where it mixes with other things. Think of the confusing ways the US law has dealt with mixed-race marriages and identities—if you look at that history, it’s clear that race has always been a system of rules arbitrarily created and enforced based on the self-interest of those in power.

SRN: One of the aspects that attracts me to your poetry is its attention to the body, not as an object but as a fully-inhabited, sensual/spiritual state of being. I would describe both “Upon Leaving my Labyrinth” and “Rococo” as ecstatic, in the sense of being devotional and longing toward a power beyond the self, and sublime in the Romantic sense of reaching beyond ordinary experience and states of consciousness. Do you have favorite poets or poems that operate in this mode? And do you think this mode (what I’m calling ecstatic or sublime) in your own poems is at all related to the heightened racial body-awareness that you were describing above?

GH: It really means a lot to me that you’d describe my poetry that way. I would usually associate sublime and ecstatic with out-of-body experiences, so I love your idea that those states can be experienced through habitation of the body.

I think many writers who work with myth end up operating somewhere near this space, partially because myth often already feels like a meeting-point between the sublime and the diurnal. I’d consider Anne Carson to be a prime example—her language has a magical way of elevating the ordinary. Alice Oswald’s Memorial is also somewhere in that ecstatic/sublime myth space. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Richie Hofmann, my undergrad poetry mentor, who certainly writes in this mode, and whose work continues to guide me. And this isn’t strictly poetry, but I also want to connect Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer album—in her lyrics, there’s this insistent return to her body as a site of cultural processing. We’re shown hopes, fears, insecurities, and fantasies, all through the lens of her body and its sensations. In terms of favorite poems in this mode, I think I’d offer Carl Phillips’ “Domestic” and Nicole Sealey’s “Imagine Sisyphus Happy.”

I would also agree that, for me, it’s connected to that racial body-awareness. I’ve come to the realization over the past year or so that much of my sense of my own body has been about minimizing it for the comfort of others; it feels like so much of my physical existence has been on others’ terms. My body was somewhere I used to be terrified to inhabit, and I usually preferred to stay kind of mental (focusing so much more on the neocortex meaning-making filters than the mammalian or reptilian brain sensations and emotions).

A big project for me recently has been trying to change that—to begin to learn to inhabit my body on my own terms, and to let things exist in that senso-emotional space for a little longer before attaching logical meanings to them. My roommate back in Tuscaloosa (hi, Annika!) jokingly termed this past summer the “Summer of Hedonism,” and that sort of attentiveness to body and sensation is an ethos I’ve been trying to do a better job of embracing. I’m working to move more towards that in my writing, too, so it’s really heartening to hear that it’s something you’re already seeing there (thank you!!!).

SRN: You’ve recently embarked on a PhD program in Literary Practice at Trinity College in Dublin. Are you a lover of Irish Literature? And how do you see your studies at Trinity and your own poetry practice informing each other?

GH: I like what I’ve read of Irish literature, so I am certainly looking forward to being introduced to more of it. In my understanding, it feels like there’s a sizable vein of Irish literature (both older and contemporary) that is concerned with what it means to live in a previously colonized space—to have lost so much and to have experienced such a specific type of violence. I’m really interested in the ways different writers are grappling with that past, and how they contrast with or compliment my own Black American perspective on the same sort of issues. I figure that the more angles you look at a thing from, the better you can see it. Specifically, I’m looking to be introduced to more answers to the question of how to move forward, how we can start to go from “postcolonial” to “decolonial.”

At Trinity, my dissertation, which is taking the form of a series of autoethnographic CNF essays, is focused on the relationship between language and power, especially as it relates to colonialism and marginalization. (The first of these essays, “Endurance,” was actually just published in the most recent issue of the North American Review, if you want to check it out!) I see this semi-academic dissertation and my creative poetry practice as mutually important. My research will help me be more mindful in the language I use, as well as ensuring that I have access to new ideas that can enrich my poetry. On the other side of things, I’m conscious that my PhD will necessitate a lot of dense academic and historical reading, and I think I’m sort of relying on poetry to ground me, to keep me centered in the creative. Plus, I’ve found that some thoughts are better expressed in poetry than in essay, and I’m working towards my first poetry collection, so I’m hoping that my research (and the feelings it stirs up in me) will naturally translate into both genres.

Featured Poems:

The Cretan Bull

They say that my father’s skin
was the cleanest white they’d
ever seen, his very pores filled
with an almost godliness. So white,
he was no longer animal,

almost. He was given as a gift, a sign
of right to rule, with a sweet
gold bell he could jingle
and lovely grass to eat
and Minos loved him so very much

that he couldn’t bring himself
to butcher him. Like all animals, like me,
he was born for sacrifice, but
he wore his innocence like some small
and tender mountain’s snow

before it melts or greys
or hardens. Like the lilies
that grow native in the foothills
of Olympus. They say this whiteness
was god-given, that before he was created

like this, he was just a dirty brown
bull on some hill somewhere. They say
he was plucked from his hill by great
Poseidon, bathed and whitebleached
in horsehair and sea foam, presented

shining to Minos. He served as proof
of something higher, proof such brown
could be erased. His child, I am proof,
perhaps, that it can be brought back.
Proof not of gods but of monsters.

Rococo

ornamented into motion, like a dancer paintbrush-cast in costume
in the background of a fête galante, like the way you wake up into dreams,
i’m somewhere without knowing how i got here. clouds fluffed pink,
skies as sinuous and rolling as they are in fresco. taken by surprise
and i’m still finding bearing; from here, the pastel fields of lavender
seem to stretch forever, all directions. trompe l’œil breeze—real, now,
as brush on gessoed canvas—warm against my cheek.

and what i mean by this, all this, is that i’m lucky—these days,
when i find my world falling, this is always where it lands.
some nights in dreams i see your lilied figure spread above me
on the ceiling, a better place’s favorite goddess. a deity who always answers
prayers, with ears for only mine. in the blue and holied seafoam of your eyes,
in the early morning trumpets of your voice, i find my absolution. Just,
i need for you to understand the way it felt for me to be nowhere,
and then—with you—such a rosy, stunning somewhere, suddenly.