On the value of language and poetry

Gustav Parker Hibbett

This is one of those moments that feels so much bigger and more meaningful than any language I can put to it, but this is, I suppose, what writing poetry is all about: bringing language to its breaking point over and over again, situating oneself at the border of expressibility. So I will try to meet this moment, this amazing (and, frankly, baffling) honour, with some kind of language, even and especially if I feel that language breaking.

In many ways, with awards like these, the shortlist is the prize—to have my book placed next to these incredible, accomplished debuts, and to be able to look back at shortlists past and think of my book as part of a larger family of such books. These other shortlisted collections, which create the context of what this prize means, all share what is one of my favourite qualities in poetry: the ambition and ability to expand the boundaries of what language can do, what it can hold and remake and conjure. The beauty of being awarded the prize is in something similar: having my book placed next to the other winning books, being able to consider myself and my work as part of a lineage of writers I admire.

Since publishing this collection, there have been so many small ways, almost daily, that I’ve been disarmed or humbled or bowled over by other people’s care and generosity, by the time so many people have taken simply to sit with it. With this award, I’m bowled over in a really big way. I’m so aware that we can choose how we engage with art—what we bring with us when we meet it, how willing we are to take it on its own terms—and that each kindness my book receives is a choice.

“At its best, I think, poetry can teach us how to treat other people.”

When I wrote the poems in this book, and even when I began to gather them into the shape of a collection, they belonged just to me and were therefore safe, seen as I wanted them to be seen. The next few steps, those of putting my writing out into the world, were very scary ones for me. This collection felt like a delicate, intimate thing, and it isn’t necessarily often that vulnerable things are treated with kindness, so it’s been disarming how generously this collection has been received. The whole team at Banshee— in particular Jessica Traynor, Eimear Ryan, and Laura Cassidy—were the first to meet this book with kindness. They received it with exceptional care, and they joined, with enthusiasm, in the project of helping it grow. The support of my friends and family, especially my partner Abbie, has been another great kindness that I wouldn’t have been able to write without.

At its best, I think, poetry can teach us how to treat other people. There is a life force to a poem, something that lives not in language but in the haze just beyond it. Each poem is an Other, whose opacity we must choose to recognise. We must listen to a poem in order for it to speak to us, and this models what we must try to bring with us each time we encounter another living being.

This has been a difficult couple of years for my belief in the subversive power of language—years where the stakes of language have been made unambiguous. Among other horrors, we have all been watching the campaign of dehumanisation directed towards the Palestinian people and its harrowing consequences—namely, a genocide—a campaign that is intimately linked with the many other ways our nations, empires, and institutions dehumanise the vulnerable and exploited and inconvenient. Globally, there are rising assaults on the freedoms of trans people, of women, of anyone who exists outside whiteness, and all of these are grounded in and enabled by the kind of language that refuses to see, that bulldozes anyone in its path. We have all been watching how, with power behind it, destructive language can be codified into law, into policy, into “common sense” knowledge.

I want to believe that poetry, with its insistence on a rogue plurality of meaning, its tendency to refuse hierarchy, has the power to undo these systems from below, but it is sometimes very difficult to sustain this belief. Truly radical language must also incite movement, because a call to action is nothing without action, nothing without the means to act. But still, I want to believe, because poetry feels so beautiful and capable and stubbornly hopeful. The theorist Édouard Glissant has written that “The highest point of knowledge is always a poetics,” and I believe this because it feels true when I’m writing poetry. Poetry operates at the very outer reaches of what we know, what we can put into language, and therefore is interested in reaching for the things that exist beyond its limitations.

Like the high jump, poetry has to do, centrally, with failure, or rather with trying in the face of unavoidable failure. Bad poetry mimes this trying, and good poetry enacts it earnestly. The great honour of winning this prize also brings with it a responsibility, an invitation to keep trying.

I want to try. I want to keep trying.