#gibson
~
April 2026
HP Poet: William A. Gibson
Country: USA
Question 1: We warmly welcome you to the HP Spotlight, William. Please tell us about your background?
William A. Gibson: "Boyhood was completed in the pine belt of southern Mississippi. Seed, cattle, and Baptist churches set the terms. I was replanted in Midtown Atlanta in the 80s, retooling myself into a punk-rock poser. I’ve worked every job that leaves a smell on your clothes. What may be most salient here -- I was a traveling store-opener for a booming bookstore chain that exploded in the 90s and now sits shuttered. I built out and managed the in-store cafés and shelved the poetry section, then chased the next opening across another strip of sprawl. You can trace Interstate 10 and I-5 for where I lived after that."
Question 2: How long have you been writing poetry, and for how long have you been a member of Hello Poetry?
William A. Gibson: "An enthusiastic HP member since 2018, but I was writing, mostly prose, long before. Wherever I lived, I drifted toward the booky-artsy crowd, the ones arguing about line breaks or pulling apart David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy at a diner at 2 a.m., as if it were more important than sleep. In college towns and warehouse districts, we stapled together ’zines at kitchen tables and hosted readings/slams in spaces never meant for poetry, with frayed cables and bad sound. Those were good years. Fiction or verse, we treated it like it could tilt the world. We were young, art was absolute. HP carries a little of that same restless energy for me now."
Question 3: What inspires you? (In other words, how does poetry happen for you).
William A. Gibson: "Poems aren’t inspiration for me. They’re an intrusion. Something breaks through: a memory with teeth in it, a smell in a bar that pulls me back twenty years, someone’s casual cruelty, a surprising moment of tenderness. I don’t sit down planning to write one. A poem corners me. I write it to get free.
With fiction, sometimes the story gets too hot. A character starts to crystallize, becomes too intense for the page I’m building around it, so I bleed that pressure off into a poem. The same thing happens with settings. A room, a street, a piece of weather can take on a charge the story can’t hold yet. The poem becomes a pressure valve, letting me keep the raw voltage without forcing it into plot.
Most of the time poetry starts there, with something that refuses to stay quiet."
Question 4: What does poetry mean to you?
William A. Gibson: "Poems are a recurring condition in my life. I’ve unboxed thousands as pulpy objects, sliding slim volumes onto bookstore shelves city to city. When you spend that much time with poetry in your hands, it stops feeling abstract. It becomes part of the atmosphere you live in.
Poetry is present in the messier, uncontrolled parts of life. Love letters that were really poems, and poems that were really arguments. Lines meant for the person I’d just left behind, or for the person I was already aching to see. Sometimes it’s the only language that can carry that kind of tension without collapsing.
What poetry means to me now is simple. It’s a way of holding moments as they are. A poem does not resolve them. It does not explain experience. It recreates the moment of encountering it."
Question 5: Who are your favorite poets?
William A. Gibson: "My favorite poets aren’t really a fixed list. They’re the ones who showed up at the right moment and changed the weather in my head for a while. Right now I’m crushing hard on Ada Limón, and I reach for Seamus Heaney after a glass of wine. They’re both poets who write as if the land itself still has something to say.
As a teen I wallowed in Byron, Shelley, Poe. Then the Beat writers, whose sentences felt like highways at night.
Burroughs showed up that way. An older, wiser punk rocker said, “You have to read this,” and suddenly language could fracture and rearrange itself.
Bukowski arrived in a back kitchen in a sticky, dangerous book -Love Is a Dog from Hell.
Anne Sexton and Rilke came from a girlfriend who handed me Letters to a Young Poet like it was a quiet instruction manual for surviving art, and her.
That’s how poetry travels—carried by unexpected soothsayers disguised as line-cooks, punks, lovers, and drag queens, making sure the right book finds your hands at the right time."
Question 6: What other interests do you have?
William A. Gibson: "Outside of writing, I’m an older man in a forgiving climate, so I garden obsessively. Maybe it’s regression to my farm beginnings, or maybe it’s the need to touch something that isn’t processed or generated. Soil doesn’t simulate. Plants don’t autocomplete. They grow or they don’t. That feels like truth.
Otherwise I’m a cliché: I work in tech. I founded a Burning Man festival theme camp and still wander back most years. I’m raising a kid, spare time is spent in his orbit volunteering. I judge speech and debate tournaments, run fundraisers, and sit on hot concrete in stadiums during long track meets.
Most evenings end in the garden, dirt under my nails, when an old pine-belt memory rises in the dark and the lines begin their slow pursuit again."
Carlo C. Gomez: “We would like to thank you William, we really appreciate you giving us the opportunity to get to know the person behind the poet! It is our pleasure to include you in the Spotlight series!”
William A. Gibson: "Carlo-Thank you again. I’m genuinely honored you thought to include me. I had a great time reflecting on the questions and putting the answers together. It’s exciting to be part of this. Part of something that highlights the voices and stories behind the poems on the site.
I really appreciate the work you’re doing to keep this series going and to celebrate the community here. Looking forward to seeing the next Spotlight and continuing to read everyone’s work.
Thanks again for the invitation and for the care you both put into this project."
Thank you everyone here at HP for taking the time to read this. We hope you enjoyed coming to know William better. We most certainly did. It is our wish that these spotlights are helping everyone to further discover and appreciate their fellow poets. – Carlo C. Gomez
We will post Spotlight #39 in May!
~
Mar 31
Mar 31, 2026 at 11:23 PM UTC
Andrea Gibson is onstage
telling us about the tumor
and the calendar
the doctor slipped into their chest
like a final love letter:
two years.
Two.
Years.
I call it
a kind of gift.
not the cancer,
never the cancer,
but the clock you can finally hear
ticking loud enough
to drown out
every stupid apology
you were making for your own life.
What a gift.
If we could all be so
lucky.
Not lucky
to have our cells rebel,
our bodies burn,
but to be handed the map
with the edge of the world
circled in red ink.
To know
with a kind of burning certainty
that our days are numbered
and the counting has already begun.
What a gift.
Because all of us
have an ending drafted in the dark.
We know this,
but we keep stacking boxes in the basement
to store our fear in,
keep erecting excuses
between ourselves
and the truth.
When does time become sharp enough
to cut through the denial?
A month?
You’d feel that blade.
A year?
You’d start carving your name
into every sunrise.
Five years? Ten?
At what distance
do you stop believing
the train is really coming?
Our time here is limited.
Still, we scroll,
we postpone,
we let the edge of loss
skim past our skin
a missing, like a hawk above
we refuse to look up at,
circling the prairie of our days,
waiting
to be noticed.
The gift is not the sickness.
The gift is the knowing.
Sensing.
Feeling the countdown
in your bones.
Living with the coming end
until every ordinary moment
turns sharp enough
to cut open into joy.
So let me ask you:
What would you do
if you knew,
absolutely knew
that your time on earth
was ending in five years?
Who would you love?
What would you throw away?
What would you finally say
out loud?
What a gift.
Here it is,
in your hands.
Open it.
Accept it.
It was always yours.
Nov 23, 2025
Nov 23, 2025 at 1:16 PM UTC
They told Andrea Gibson
she had cancer,
two years.
it was in one of those rooms,
the charts,
the too straight smiles,
the cheap ceiling tiles
yellowing like old teeth,
the stink of bleach and plastic
trying to wipe the whole thing clean.
everybody calls it tragedy.
sure.
they are not wrong.
but there is another word for it.
a gift.
numbers burning on the wall
like a motel sign
you finally notice
at four in the morning.
most people go their whole lives
pretending the clock
is just a rumor.
they drink at it,
work at it,
scroll at it,
**** at it,
but they never look.
if we were lucky,
we would not get the cancer.
no.
we would just get the truth.
a voice that does not
sugar anything:
listen,
this is all you have
and it is not much.
it is leaking away
right now
while you stand there
lying to yourself
about how later
will be different.
you know you are dying.
of course you do.
you are not stupid.
you just haul that fact
up the ladder
into the attic
with the Christmas junk
and the jeans from ten years ago
you swear you will fit again.
when does time
finally get under your skin?
a month left?
fine, you shake and scream.
a year?
you write a list,
lose it in a drawer.
five years, ten?
you shrug,
crack another beer,
tell the kid inside your head
we start tomorrow.
out the window
there is always a hawk
or something like it,
sharp-eyed,
circling,
patient as a landlord.
call it loss.
call it the end.
call it the thing
that has been waiting
since you were born.
you stare at the floor,
the fridge light,
your phone.
you look everywhere but up.
the real gift is ugly
and it is simple:
you remember
you are temporary.
you feel it in your back teeth.
you wake up
and the coffee hits harder,
the air has a bite to it,
the grocery store aisle
looks like holy ground
for half a second.
then the question walks in,
sits across from you
like an old dog
that knows your name:
what would you do
if you knew
you were gone in five years?
no angels show up.
no preacher.
no soft piano.
all you get
is a calendar,
cheap paper,
a pen that skips,
and the guts
to look straight at it.
that is the gift.
they hand it to you,
wrapped in bad news.
tear the paper off.
take it.
try, for once,
to live like you know
you do not stay.
live like the hawk
already has your name.
Nov 23, 2025
Nov 23, 2025 at 1:32 PM UTC
semiotics ~ relating to signs and symbols
"*playful semiotics that makes this digital (poem) feel
weirdly tender*"^
(W.A. Gibson)
dear friend,
will always take tender
even weirdly, perhaps especially,
when so rendered,
and so sweetly tendered
but here's the rub,
try the onomatopoeia of
tender
say it slow
the tongue reaches up to touch the roof of the mouth,
twice,
ending in an smoothly soft exhaling,
(go ahead, divert, try it, then return)
here,
but I do not search for a semiotic,
for there can be none,
(and there is indeed, none)
plain or weirdly,
that captures the incredible elegance
this royalty of word,
so nuanced,
so wildly variegated,
a thousand shades of existential coloration,
far exceeding the rainbow's basic monochromatic monoply,
but I know my.reader,
many of whom at this exact moment
(are taking a pausal break)
are taking forefinger to stroke a sleeping cheek,
a hand to rub and trace a comforting
reassurance to a distempered child,
so I need not supply even one more,
or than to mention in passing
my tenderest adoration to
all of you
who foolishly read my dabbling,
and within them find
nuggets I did not even contemplate,
and bring me,
eyes wetted.
to this moment,
(9:00am Thu Sep 18),
yes, eyes wet,
this silly old man,
whose heart may be yet healed,
with
the
weirdly wildly
tenderest of
gratitude
nml
Sep 18, 2025
Sep 18, 2025 at 11:50 AM UTC
Mr. Gibson penetrates my poem, my paining senses,
"When raw grief turns into aching music" by witch,
he notates my inundation (1), a summary succinct,
essencing my poem to its bare ***** cri de cœur,
it's comforting to be gotten, grasped, felt & taken,
for ten out of nine, times, when I compose there
is music aching in my muscles and in my perused
words, begging to be read in a thorough, careful way,
and he honors them thusly, and I am deeply touched,
at our conjuring conjunction of connection, a phrase
worthy of a poem in and of itself, but
let someone else,
perhaps him, perhaps you, write it, I am contented:
*to be heard,
to be believed,
to be by, relieved,
to being understood
to be felt, given and +
taken, and given a great
musical measure of comforting…
in summary too,
here is where*,
I thank you.
nml
9/12/25
5:15am
Sep 12, 2025
Sep 12, 2025 at 5:14 AM UTC
Once, you leave again
Are my wounds bigger than me
An outline contains
Dec 25, 2024
Dec 25, 2024 at 4:21 PM UTC