An Important Conversation with Ishion Hutchinson

Photo Credit : Neil Watson

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two books of poetry and the forthcoming collection, School of Instructions. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He directs and teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Cornell University.

I had the pleasure and honor of asking Ishion how vital editing is to his process, what he is currently reading, and his forthcoming book.

UZOMAH: Many enslaved Africans would gather at night to exchange stories and play music in Jamaica. How is poetry a form of storytelling for you?

ISHION:   It is true that the enslaved Africans had these forms of gathering. But it is important to remember that they did so at great risk, hence why under cover of night and usually in locations far away from the plantation. There is poetry in this fact itself, for poetry, at its root, is an act of transgression. I'd agree that stories are transmitted in poems, but poetry for me —if we mean by that something which transcends storytelling or narrative recollection—isn't s a form of storytelling. Poetry is what actualizes those moments when the story, for whatever reason, has exhausted itself and comes to an ending.

U: How important is editing to your process?

I:   Very important. Editing is the whole process. 

U: What are you currently reading?

 I:  I'm reading and rereading a few things simultaneously. I'll mention four: Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to a Native Land, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs's Village. 

U: Do you have any tips for writing poetry?

 I:   Read like mad. 

U: Your use of imagery in your poems is very profound. How do you teach the importance of imagery to your students? What is the hardest thing about teaching such a technique that holds such value in writing?

I:  Thanks for saying that. I think students generally come to a seminar knowing or valuing the importance of imagery. What I do is I amplify their sense of the image as an elemental force, both subjectively and objectively, to the strength of a poem. Because I mainly teach this through the slow, close reading of several poems, the challenge is more of a practical nature: having enough time to seriously dive into the poem at hand. I have my ways, though, luckily.  

U: Nina Simone said, "An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times. That may be true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians." How does that statement reflect your work as a poet in today's society?

 I:  I love that quote. It is an immortal refuge. I’d hope it reflects my work, as you said, as a poet in today’s society. I do think that much as the statement seems to gesture at timeliness and being alive, responsively alive, to the present moment, it stresses time in the plural. It is that simultaneity of multiple times—and though I’d quibble with the word “reflect”—I hope a reader, now and in the future, senses with both a shock of recognition and strangeness when he or she encounters my work.

U: If you could have dinner with any poet or writer, whom would it be and why? What questions would you have for them? 

I:  That would be Robert Louis Stevenson, whom I've loved since I first read his Treasure Island at around age thirteen. I feel I sound too mystical or quasi-mystical whenever I talk about Stevenson. But he is a treasured part of my childhood, and I can't look back without feeling his presence there, benign and avuncular and mischievous like a favorite uncle. My questions would be too many! I can see myself pestering him to collaborate on a piece of writing the way he did with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. 

U: Your forthcoming collection, School of Instructions, is coming out; what inspired this collection?

 I:   School of Instructions centers on the experiences of West Indian volunteers in British regiments during the First World War. Those volunteers are the main inspiration, the attempt to imagine and memorialize their wartime experiences, especially the psychic and physical terrors these Black soldiers faced in the Middle East war theatre is the poem’s driving force. Counterpointing the narratives of the soldiers is that of a young schoolboy named Godspeed who is living in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. He is, if I could put it this way, the more intimate and sensuous inspiration of the collection. I hope that this collision of narratives—of the soldiers and of Godspeed—is an unsettling of both time and event. I hope it is felt as a recompositing of grand gestures of heroism and a ludic confronting of the ongoing legacy of imperial silencing. 

You can find more information about Ishion's new book and other writings on his site. You can also follow him on Instagram.