HAUS FÜR POESIE

Gustav Parker Hibbett‘s (born in New Mexico) poetry debut High Jump as Icarus Story (Banshee Press 2024) caused quite a stir in the international poetry scene and was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and other prizes. The book is as saturated with myth as it is sensual, with numerous references to high and popular culture—from the Minotaur to Caliban and from Fleabag to Stevie Wonder. In one poem, Othello is reimagined as a singer songwriter. Nevertheless, the central theme is the high jump—a sport that Hibbert practiced and that is superimposed throughout the book with the myth of Icarus. The poet Dylann Brennan wrote that “Hibbert explores the joy and release of athletic endeavour as well as the inevitable anxieties of inhabiting a queer, Black body in the twenty-first century.” There are poems that cast the high jump as a religious vocation and as a form of prophecy. In one three-part text, Hibbert sketches a self-portrait by mirroring themself with famous high jumpers (Ivan Ukhov, Stefan Holm, and Javier Sotomayor). Elsewhere, the development of the “Fosbury-Flops,” a jumping technique where the bar is cleared backwards, is meticulously traced: “blooming / skyward, like a diver in the early stages / of a backflip.” Hibbert sees a close connection between writing and high jumping: both are concerned with subtelties of form, yet equally engaged with inevitable failure. “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.” Or, as it’s suggested in the poem that gives the volume its title: “every step / in service of my flight was / blessed.”

Zoltán Lesi (born 1982 in Gyula, Hungary) looks at sports from a historical perspective, delving deep into the archives and working with documentary materials, including historical photographs and newspaper clippings. The language in his poems is factual and declarative, intentionally lacking in metaphors and similes. In his volume In Frauenkleidung (Edition Mosaik 2019), he engages with the lives of athletes from the 1930s, in particular the fate of Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who was barred from participating in the 1936 Olympic Games by the Nazis. She was replaced by Dora Ratjen, whose “formal legal” gender was changed to “male” three years later. “According to the doctors, the primary / sexual characteristics were not / clear. Nevertheless, Dora was / classified as a man and arrested.” Zoltán Lesi tells the deeply interwoven story of the two high jumpers from multiple perspective. Lesi is currently working on a poetry collection entitled Anyland, which looks at female boxers from the 1920s and 1930s. He drew inspiration from archival materials at the Berlin Sports Museum.

Combo ticket for the afternoon: Combo ticket
The event will be held in English and take place at Clubraum.
Kindly sponsored by: Sportmuseum Berlin