Unfinished business: Poet Ishion Hutchinson ties up historic loose ends

An emotionally charged visit to the Imperial War Museum’s archives in London gave Jamaican poet and academic Ishion Hutchinson creative fuel to reckon with a distant past.

Hutchinson, a New York state-based Cornell University literature professor, found himself intensely moved by the stories he unearthed in the museum of West Indian soldiers who fought in World War I. “It all started with the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf asking me to come to the museum to see what I could find about these soldiers; it was a commission to just write a single poem for the centenary of the First World War,” Hutchinson shared of his 2018 visit. “I went to the archives and found a lot there that opened a whole universe to me because I didn’t know about West Indian participation in the war, and so one small poem started to grow.”

What eventually manifested is Hutchinson’s critically lauded third poetry collection,
School of Instructions: A Poem, released last year in the United States by Macmillan and by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. Hailed by the British Guardian as “a visionary work of memory, elegy and loss” and listed by The Washington Post among the best poetry collections of 2023, School of Instructions was, too, one of 10 shortlisted nominees for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize for Poetry Award which also included fellow Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self Portrait as Othello, which recently emerged the winner during an award ceremony which took place earlier this year at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall in the United Kingdom.

Recounting the creative process from concept to finished book, Hutchinson shared: “The initial thing of what became School of Instructions was sort of less ambitious in the creation. It took me another six to seven years to craft the book to figure out the scale because in essence it is a single poem in five parts. I had to figure out various thematic and structural patterns to get close to the poem I imagined, so that’s why it took me that length of time. The initial starting place was going to the archive, something I had never done before, to write a poem, so that was new to me,” he explained.

Sufficiently riveted by his archival discoveries of a history he was not readily aware of, he learnt of West Indians’ participation in the war as subalterns and being placed in segregated regiments for the British crown.

“They went as volunteers, and of the 16,500 men who went to fight, 10,000 came from Jamaica so the majority came from here, which was both surprising and not given our long tumultous relationship with England but going into the archives and ‘hearing the voices’ of these men I found that I recognised them. When I found photographs of the soldiers, they were boyish-looking young men wearing their uniform of war, and they looked like my school peers when I went to Titchfield and Happy Grove high schools, posing with big smiles on their faces, happy to be helping in the war effort. So, I wanted to give life and humanise them. Take them out of the archives and into open air and finding the rhythm to write, that took some time,” the poet expounded.

The professor and essayist’s richly textured book-length poem that materialised, while grounded in historical accuracy, features a fictional character named Godspeed. “He’s a young boy who sort of resembled me up to a point — who had his school life in the 1990s in Jamaica — and he’s running throughout the poem. Godspeed is not the central voice of the poem, but his presence is almost everywhere. While the West Indian soldiers didn’t fight or bear arms in Europe as that was illegal at the time, they did see some action in the Middle East and bore arms and fought there. So, much of the book takes place in the Middle East trying to track their movement across the desert and the psychic and physical difficulties of doing so.”

On the heels of respective book launches hosted in London and New York last month by his publishers, the poet jetted into the island for a buzzworthy Jamaican launch hosted during Christmastime 2023 at the St Andrew residence of his long-time friend, lifestyle curator Bianca Bartley. “I feel thrilled being here,” he raved. “It’s a special moment and feels like a homecoming because I have been travelling for the last three weeks doing readings in the UK and the US. I have been reading from it and getting to know the book again. Because once you get some distance from it, after writing it and waiting on publishing, and it’s now in your hands as a real product, you have a different relationship with it, so that I have been getting used to.”

A son of Portland, Hutchinson attained a literature undergraduate degree from The University of the West Indies in 2006, quickly followed by a Master of Fine Arts degree from New York University, and a dual Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah, before securing his now 11-year-long tenure at Cornell. He journeyed home to Portand with Bartley during his recent trip, visiting academic and start-up entrepreneur friends from the United States, Jamaican poet/actor friend Sheldon Shepherd, and longtime supporter, businessman Wayne Chen. Hutchinson acted as tour guide to places in the eastern parish that coloured his published poetry, including the Stony Hill, Port Antonio, home he grew up in with his late grandmother May Hutchinson, a neighbourhood shop, and the monument in the town square dedicated to the memory of Jamaican World War I veterans, the latter of which he paused to read an excerpt from his new work that honours the late war heroes.

Switching gears, he relayed his joy of being back home. “I was here [recently], and typically return sometimes three times a year. I write from home… [fortified by] the experience of having lived here. Being back is a way to reground myself in all that you cannot when you are away, so to have a conversation with a Jamaican at a spot to me is a gift. Plus, I have family that I love to be around particularly certain times of the year.” Amid the current holiday period, he is looking forward to a family beach day. “In Portie we used to head out to have a beach day at Bryan’s Bay which is closest to my grandmother’s house. When I was a kid, I just used to walk down the hill and within 10 minutes, I was right at the beach, and spent the day there, bring a book, and my notebook and pencil… but when we want to celebrate a special occasion, we go to Frenchman’s Cove.” He is momentarily reflective of his beloved grandma who transitioned in 2008, and notes there is a throughline to her impacting his present career. “She was very encouraging in her own way; she didn’t point me to things or tell me what to do, but she was supportive in buying me the hummingbird exercise books in which I wrote things, and when I was at Titchfield, I filled one of these notebooks with what became an essay that was published in a local paper. One day someone at the market bought the paper and said this could be your grandson but my grandmother, who was illiterate, couldn’t make sense of the piece so she brought it home and asked if it was me and I said yes, and I read to her as she listened to me.”

Next up for Hutchinson is the continuation of his School of Instructions book tour with scheduled readings at multiple universities across the United States and booked European reading appearances. Also, on tap for 2024, he divulged, is his book of essays, titled
Fugitive Tilts, as well as the United States reissue of his first poetry collection,
Far District.

School of Instructions: A Poem is available for purchase in Jamaica at Locale on Holborn Road, Kingston 10, and online at any major international book e-retailer.