For over six decades, 92Y’s Discovery Poetry Contest has introduced exceptionally gifted young poets to a large audience early in their careers — including John Ashbery, Lucille Clifton, Mark Strand, Larry Levis, and Solmaz Sharif, to name but a few. This year, final contest judges Rick Barot, Mónica de la Torre, and Patricia Spears Jones selected four winning poets — Alexandra Zukerman, Kenzie Allen, Ina Cariño, and Mag Gabbert. Each receives a reading at 92Y, publication in The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan and $500.
We’ve been chatting with each of the four 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest winners ahead of their reading on October 22. This week, Mag Gabbert tells us about first finding poetry through telling stories to her grandmother, the power of literary community, the story behind her poem “Tattoo,” and more.
Where were you when you found out that you were a winner of the 2021 Discovery Poetry Contest? How did you initially react? How did you celebrate?
I was just sitting at my desk at home when I received a text that said Ricky [Maldonado] from 92Y would like give me a call — so smart, because I get too many spam calls to answer unknown numbers, haha — and I knew then that it must be good news. Still, though, I thought he might say I was a finalist. The idea that I could’ve actually won hardly even occurred to me.
At what point in your life did you know that you were poet? Was there a particular moment, an innate experience of language, a slow realization over a long period of time, or something else entirely?
Sometimes I still wonder whether I’m really “a poet.” Sounds too good to be true! But I’ve always enjoyed writing — in fact, before I was even old enough to write myself, I would often tell poem-like stories to my Grammy, and she was kind enough to help me write them down. My favorite title from that era was “Hill Ploppers.”
I would say it wasn’t until I took my first poetry class as an undergraduate with Jenny Browne that I really started to imagine the possibility of “being” a writer. However, that probably wasn’t my most formative experience. The one I always return to happened much earlier, when I was still a kid, after my grandparents woke me up to show me an albino deer grazing in an empty field near their home. That was the first time I remember sitting down to write something “creative” on my own. The result was this piece titled “The Deer”:
I am 9 year’s old. I am visiting my grandparents in fearing ton N.C.. one day my Grandmother menchond to me about an elbino deer liveing in the aria. that night when I went to bed my Grandmother seiad to me that the deer was outside. When I Looked at the deer thoue the closet window I was amased a beutiful wight creacher stood outside. a lovly sight for my eay.
You’ll be reading your poems at 92Y in the fall with this year’s other Discovery winners.
What have you missed most about live poetry readings during the pandemic?
Well, for some unknown reason — maybe hangovers? — when I hit my late 20s I became a bit of a homebody. So, firstly, I’ve missed having something on my calendar that could actually convince me to leave the house! I love going to readings. And actually, prior to the pandemic, I also had the privilege of co-hosting a reading series myself — the Pegasus series in Dallas, where I live, held at Deep Vellum Books — alongside the series’ founder, Sebastián Páramo. I especially loved how that series gave us the opportunity to reach out to poets whose work we admired, even if we didn’t yet know them personally, and often we became friends because of that experience. I really owe whatever place I might have in the literary community — here in Dallas especially, but elsewhere, too — to the connections I’ve forged with other writers when we gathered together and shared our work in spaces like 92Y.
Tell us a bit about “Tattoo,” published in the Paris Review Daily along with poems by this year’s other Discovery winners. When and where did you write it? What inspired it? What went into its composition that might not be apparent to a reader encountering it for the very first time?
I guess the simplest answer here is that my poem “Tattoo” recounts a true story. My uncle, who I was very close to, did in fact have a tattoo of the ocean on his foot. He and I worked with the same artist (I’d just turned 18 and started getting my own work done about six months before he died), so I was able to watch the evolution of the piece from its very first sketches. And then, shortly after his tattoo was completed, my uncle did in fact die on a beach in South Texas, as he was waiting for one of his sons to finish his first surfing lesson.
I’d wanted to write about the strangeness of those convergences for a long time. Of course, I felt a connection between the imagery evoked by my uncle’s story and the metaphorical ways in which we talk about grief — how it comes in waves, how it submerges us, etc. And I was especially struck by the image that’s described in the final few couplets of the poem, which I actually happened across in a photo taken just before my uncle’s funeral. I think a relative took the picture so we could remember his tattoo, because it was so new that we didn’t really have any other record of it.
So, I kept trying to bring these things into a poem. I have drafts dating back to more than 10 years ago, when I was still an undergrad, featuring similar details. Some of those early attempts were very short meditations; at one point I even tried a series of haiku. But something always felt off. In a way, something still feels “imperfect” about this piece, but when I finished revising the most recent version, I knew that was as close as it was going to get. Maybe the poem is meant to be imperfect.
What do you think can happen in a poem that can’t in any other form of literature? What makes poetry special to you?
I’m not sure that I could do this question justice in less than 2,000 words. But I think W.H. Auden sums it up best in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Auden says there: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making […] it survives, / A way of happening.”
Don’t miss Mag Gabbert’s reading with her fellow Discovery Poetry Contest winners from 2021 and 2020 at 92Y on October 22. This contest is endowed by Joan L. and Dr. Julius H. Jacobson, II.