Celebrating 15 Years
When ERIN FORNOFF, GUSTAV PARKER HIBBETT, and SEÁN CARLSON met over a drink in the lobby of the Arms Hotel, located on the main square of Listowel in southwest Ireland, they introduced themselves by comparing their American upbringings. Having grown up in North Carolina, New Mexico, and Massachusetts, respectively, they shared their experiences residing and writing in Ireland.
For Fornoff, Hibbett, and Carlson, their lives in Ireland have granted them new perspectives on their lives in the U.S. and welcomed them into new communities that help bring their poetry to life. Before leaving, they all paused for a photo beside a typewriter and a goose-feather quill pen on display under the gaze of a countertop cherub sculpture. In the longstanding hub of an agricultural community, where tractors still regularly cart calves to market, the traditional tools of writing also reinforced the lifeblood of local literature.
This interview took place in person during the 2024 Listowel Writers’ Week literary festival in County Kerry, Ireland. Discussions of the significance of Hurricane Helene and the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist occurred shortly before publication.
Seán Carlson (SC): All three of us come from the United States, with deep but differing relationships with Ireland as well. I wanted to begin by asking about how you each approach the nature of your own motherlands, so to speak, and the experience of having home here and home there.
Gustav Parker Hibbett (GPH): I feel like growing up in Albuquerque, it’s a very natural city. There are lots of trails. It’s the high desert. And that shows up in some of my poems, but it really related to me a little bit of the natural world. I definitely think it forms part of the concept of home, but I found my footing in the Irish poetry scene. A lot of my early publications came out here, and it’s just a really good vibe. I’ve been grateful to be part of the Irish poetry scene.
Erin Fornoff (EF): I grew up in a unique place on the side of a mountain in North Carolina. Where I’m from we spent a lot of time hanging around bonfires, and I wrote about this in the title poem of my first book, Hymn to the Reckless. There was this game that you can play around a bonfire where you get a hot coal out of the fire and you can hit it back and forth on your hands. If you do it fast enough and on the hard palm of your hands, it doesn’t really burn you that much—like, this is clearly a game that dumb drunk people play there and my brother taught me how to play it, and we were very good at it. You sometimes have to modulate these stories from home. Like, I would be at the pub, talking to Irish people, and mention that my childhood dog got killed by a bear. And it was just like a record scratched. I lived for a long time in Dublin, and there was an alleyway behind my house where the trees meet overhead like a tunnel and I would always walk that way. And I realized at some point, it’s just that it reminded me of home where I grew up. Currently, I live in East [County] Clare, and it has a very similar vibe in terms of the greenery and the tall trees and the tunnels and so on. There’s definitely an overlap.
SC: Yet the distance must have felt impenetrable during the recent catastrophic storm damage back in North Carolina. In response, you organized a sold-out benefit concert at Whelan’s in Dublin, bringing nearly 300 people together and raising several thousand dollars for the nonprofit BeLoved Asheville.
EF: My hometown was devastated by Hurricane Helene and members of my family are surrounded by apocalyptic destruction. It made me so protective over them and that place, but also feel so incredibly far away. That was a thing that happened to them, it’s not something I can take ownership of, or even relate to, and that made me feel so distant. And the resilience that has emerged there, and the profound kindness and community ties, it is very moving.
SC: Sometimes to understand a place, you have to leave it. Then when you have some distance, everything can feel new. Have you found the right distance to make sense of your own pasts?
GPH: A lot of the experiences that I had in high school or college or grad school even—some of them definitely needed that distance. There were many pieces of Albuquerque or the Bay Area or Tuscaloosa that I could only see in focus once I’d left. But sometimes I’ve found with poetry you have to be in a place, and there’s this sort of energy that only can come from being in that moment as you write about it, but I think a lot of the time, I would agree that it’s very much this distance. I’ve been surprised at the clarity with which I started to see the United States. I don’t think I grew up feeling very American or feeling like I was part of the fabric there, but there are these things that I do or say, or habits that I have, or just like little compulsions, within the context of Ireland. I’m like, oh, wow, this is really American of me to do, or to say, or a very American way to think. A lot of that clarity couldn’t have come without the distance.
SC: You also realize that the sense of your own definition can often be tied so much to a place like when you’re from somewhere, you’re actually from a particular street or another reference point. You see that across Ireland too, with the identity of being Irish often forged away from Ireland, that locally, people identify smaller geographies—their county, their town, their village. Each carries a whole set of unique associations that shape your experiences at home and away.
EF: It’s funny because you can move here to Ireland and a lot seems similar on a surface level—people dress essentially the same, listen to the same music, watch all the same prestige, drama, TV shows, and movies, speak roughly the same—you can almost convince yourself that it’s like moving from New York to Boston, that people just have a different accent and like different sports teams, but then there are these deep underlying cultural differences and different ways of meeting each other and speaking that really can trip you up for quite a while.
SC: How about when it comes to words with double or multiple meanings? For me, when somebody says “buggy,” I can’t help but think about a little insect rather than a baby stroller. Parker, in “Tortoise,” you set up the word “jumper” literally to mean one who jumps, as in a high jumper, and yet the initial reaction in Ireland may be to think of its meaning as a sweater. Erin, you’ve written about “football,” in a way that leaves open whether it’s American football or soccer. I’m curious about how you’ve thought about this kind of code-switching in your work.
“There are these deep underlying cultural differences and different ways of meeting each other and speaking that really can trip you up for quite a while.”
GPH: I grew up quite on the border of things. Mainly, I grew up kind of, like, Black in a very white school, but my mom is white so I feel like I existed in this space where a lot of my white classmates were like, “Well, you’re not really Black.” And I don’t know, I sometimes had to allow this to fluctuate based on other people’s meanings. I think the same is kind of true with queerness or with a non-binary identity. I think some people will staunchly not consider non-binary people to be truly queer, and think of us as maybe secondary or tertiary members of the community, but then of course there are also a lot of people who don’t think that way at all. I don’t know. I’ve grown up on this weird borderline. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, at least not all the time. I think there’s a certain sight that it allows. Maybe it’s why I like poetry, there’s this ambivalence to the language or the poeticness of double meanings or the ability to exist in this space where you’re engaging with endless problems but don’t need to settle on one thing.
EF: I have an Irish partner and we have a three-year-old, so I notice myself teaching him the American words for things instinctively. But the code-switching for me would be more around these other deeper ways of interaction, of being able to interpret what someone means that would be an American or not very American way of saying something. Like, if someone was upset, traditionally at home they would just say I am mad about this thing. And that just wouldn’t really be how Irish people would operate with it. I notice that with my Irish partner as well. My family is very much like, “Let’s talk about our feelings, let’s get together and bond.” So they’re always trying to bond at him. And he just wants to, like, walk into the sea. The language stuff is easy enough. It’s the rest of it that really trips you up sometimes.
SC: I also wanted to ask about the bigger picture of performance for each of you in your poetry. Erin, performing is very much at the heart of your work—including spoken word and slam, whereas Parker, many of your poems I read as meditations on performance, as a track-and-field athlete of course but then also in terms of your own being, your performance out in the world.
EF: I always think of performance first. It’s where it’s the most fun for me. I’m used to, like, shouting in a field at a festival or in some sort of basement bar. I love the communion that you get with an audience that way, and I like how it keeps it accessible. I think sometimes, especially with the Leaving Cert [secondary school exam] in Ireland, poetry feels like it can cause PTSD, from the way that they teach it or from how poems can start to feel like they’re a riddle and if you can’t solve them, it’s your fault. This causes young people to become resistant to poetry. But when you perform, you can meet people without all of that baggage and have this kind of communion.
GPH: I came into poetry less from the spoken word side or the performance side, but I find the written poem, or the act of writing a poem, is almost part performance. You’re writing in a voice. I think you’re expecting it. Even if you’re not reading it aloud, you’re hearing it in your head. The way that I’m coming to poetry is oddly in a lot of ways a continuation of the relationship I have with the high jump, where there’s a form of creativity but notably, when I was growing up, it was the only space in my life where the pressure of other people’s eyes made me perform better. I did so much better in meets than at practice, but with anything else, I would have sort of frozen on the spot. I think there’s something about that, that I’m hopefully starting to find my footing with poetry and feeling an ease or a flow that allows for performance to be more natural or organic.
SC: Any advice when it comes to performing your poetry?
EF: Somebody once gave me a tip that if you say thank you at the end of the poem, then people will know that the poem is over. [laughs]
SC: Erin, your forthcoming work We Are an Archipelago speaks to time and movement. You write, “Can we no longer imagine a journey with no turning back?” Then a few lines later, “The inland place I fled squeezed me like a tourniquet. And here I can take my past and live in it.” Tell us what you’re doing with this extended poem that’s also written and performed as a play.
EF: We Are an Archipelago is coming out this year with Salmon Poetry. It’s actually a long poem that’s also a play, and I have performed it as a one-woman play. It’s coming out first in Poetry Wales, and then as a book, and it’s based on this true story from North Carolina. There’s this little island off the coast called Ocracoke, and it’s so isolated that people—some of the older people at least—still speak in, like, Shakespearean slang there. I grew up about nine hours inland from the ocean, and there was this guy who lived across the street from my mother who’s from this island. He was 99. This is a totally true story. At 99 years old, his wife’s been dead for a long time, his kids are scattered, and he decides that all he wants is to move back to Ocracoke where he was from for the rest of his life, however long it ends up being. So he packs up his house, and moves back to this island at the age of 99 to live out the rest of his days there. And he lives there until he’s 105 when his son—who frankly I always thought was a bit of a difficult character—says, “Dad, this is ridiculous, I’ve gotten you a spot in a nursing home, I’m coming to get you, I’m going to move you back inland into this nursing home, you can’t do this anymore.” And the dad is, like, “That’s not the plan, dude, like I want to live the rest of my life with the smell of salt in the air. I’m not doing it.” The son drives to the island, forcibly packs up his father, puts him in the car to move him back to the spot in the nursing home, and on the drive off the island, he dies. Totally true story. So I robbed it, and wrote it into this poetic play. And there’s a character in it who is a young 22-year-old woman fleeing a difficult past. I was interested in—especially with Me Too—could you have, or how could you have, a pure friendship between an older man and a younger woman?
SC: Parker, this calls to mind for me that you also have a poem with a title that itself is in many ways a poem—“On learning that my grandmother’s great-grandmother Elmira, emancipated at 35, lived to be 102, to know my grandmother.” Not only may this particular piece make you one of the first contemporary Irish poets to write about baseball, but also you hit with a line that I’d say is resonant in Ireland as well as in the experiences of your own family, albeit in a very different way. You write, “everything I am, I owe to history / our momentum, only an extension.” Could you tell us a little more about this arc in your first collection, High Jump as Icarus Story?
GPH: I have a poem “After Practice, a Black Boy Goes Supernova,” which first appeared in The Adroit Journal. I had a friend in high school—one of the other Black students in my year—but oddly we both did high jump and hurdles in track. We were kind of the two main people who did that, and we didn’t really have a consistent coach for the high jump, so we were kind of coaching ourselves and we had this little unit. And though we never said it explicitly, I think the high jump for both of us was just this magical space where we were in like a flow state, where we could exist in a different way than we were existing in the other spaces we were in. And so this poem is dedicated to that friend Noah, and it has an epigraph by Saidiya Hartman from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: “Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility.” We could also look at any of the high jump poems in the book, like “High Jump as Life Lessons,” where I write about the back-over, which is when we would be practicing and standing with our back to the bar and just jumping backward over it, for timing and form.
SC: You were shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize and your poem “Quickly and Quietly,” from High Jump as Icarus Story, was highly commended in this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry. How has the response to your debut affected you? Any impact on your timing and form?
GPH: It has been tremendous, really. As we talked about, poetry, like high jump, is this weird mix of performance and privacy. With high jump, part of what allowed me to keep cultivating my private personal relationship with the sport was the performance of it, the positive feedback that came from other people’s watching. And it wasn’t like the publicness created or preceded that private relationship, more that there was a healthy interplay between performance and privacy that worked to the benefit of each. I feel a lot more optimistic recently that it’s possible to have gaze and performance and publicness without killing authenticity or privacy or intimacy. With my first collection, I was trying to make a bid for the kind of poetry my body knows how to make, and the positive response has been so affirming. It’s been this beautiful surprise to see friends, writers, and strangers connecting with the book, being not just willing but excited to meet it where it is, to bring themselves to meet it. I’m surer in myself lately, falling into the grooves of what my body knows about timing, about form.
SC: I hoped we might end by jumping back to the beginning of your journeys into poetry.
EF: Oh, my god, my story is not inspiring at all.
SC: All the better, let’s go.
EF: I went to a music festival in Ireland. And I never wrote before I moved here. But I always liked poetry or going to poetry slams at the Green Door in Asheville, but I’d never written anything myself. So I went to the music festival and I saw this guy doing spoken word, and I thought he was really kind of patronizing and misogynistic, and I was like, he got a free ticket; I can probably do that. And that was how it started. It’s so uninspired. I need to come up with a better origin story for it anyway. But then after that, it did become—like, I was very lonely when I first moved here, and poetry is pretty much the reason that I’ve stayed in Ireland. It is where I found a community and a home, and the moment I realized that I acknowledged for myself that I was a writer and allowed myself to have that outlet, I was like 40% happier immediately.
GPH: Mine is also kind of haphazard or not necessarily super-inspiring. At Stanford, there was this fellowship that brought a lot of good writers to campus called the Stegner Fellowship and every year undergraduate students could send applications to do a one-on-one tutorial with them. And I just really wanted to do it. I wanted to write prose at that point, but I also put in a poetry application because I wanted to sort of double the odds. And then this guy, Richie Hofmann, selected mine, and saw something in my poetry and kind of, I guess, coached it out with me. He really framed me as a poet before I understood myself to be one. That was definitely big, but then I was in an MFA program and I ended up dropping out of it. I think I was sort of waiting for the same kind of permission that Richie gave me, and I wasn’t getting it from anywhere. I did get a few sort of, like, outside signs, just writers from outside who were supportive, but I think there was this weird moment when I decided that I was dropping out and if I’m doing this, I need to take it seriously for myself. I need to give myself permission to do it. And I think that was what made me actually go for it. It is so much easier than you expect it to be once you’re doing it. I think the hardest part is the psychological starting points, needing permission or needing to give yourself permission, and once you’re past that, you find your own rhythms, you find your own flow, it becomes yours.
Seán Carlson is working on his first book, a family memoir of migration. His essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, the Irish Times, New England Review, New York Times, Oxford Review of Books, and elsewhere. His poetry has appeared in Dappled Things, the Honest Ulsterman, the Irish Independent’s New Irish Writing, Ninth Letter, Ragaire, Trasna, and elsewhere. Seán and his family currently divide time between Rhode Island and County Kerry, Ireland. He was awarded with a 2024 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry fellowship in Bulgaria.
Erin Fornoff hails from Asheville, North Carolina and has called Ireland home for the past 15 years. Her debut poetry collection Hymn to the Reckless was published by Dedalus Press and her next book We Are an Archipelago, first performed as a play at the Dublin Fringe Festival, will appear in Poetry Wales before its publication by Salmon Poetry in 2025. Erin founded Lingo, Ireland’s first spoken word festival. She has performed her poetry at dozens of festivals and events across Ireland, the U.S., and the U.K., including Glastonbury, Electric Picnic, and Cúirt. She is an Artist in Residence at the Imagine Festival of Politics and Ideas in Belfast and will be embarking on an Ireland-wide tour titled Every Blooming Thing in late May and early June 2025.
Gustav Parker Hibbett’s debut High Jump as Icarus Story was published in 2024 by Banshee Press and shortlisted for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize. Books Ireland Magazine called the collection, “a complex reexamination of myths surrounding Black masculinity, and an attempt to forge a private self-mythology complex enough to contain all kinds of contradictions.” Parker grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and has also lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They’re currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and their poems have appeared in the pages of Poetry Ireland Review, London Magazine, Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.
