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WORK TITLE: House of Lords and Commons: Poems
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/22/1983
WEBSITE: http://www.ishionhutchinson.com/
CITY: Ithaca
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Jamaican
http://english.cornell.edu/ishion-hutchinson * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ishion-hutchinson * https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/ishion-hutchinson * http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/ishion-hutchinson-post-postcolonial-poet
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 22, 1983, in Port Antonio, Jamaica.
EDUCATION:University of the West Indies, B.A.; New York University, M.F.A.; University of Utah, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor of English, 2012–, Pirogue Fellow, Meringoff Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow.
AWARDS:PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, 2010, for Far District; National Book Critics Circle Award, 2016, for House of Lords and Commons; also received Guggenheim fellowship, Whiting Writers Award, Glenna Luschei Award, Prairie Schooner, and Larry Levis Prize, Academy of American Poets.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Common, Granta, Gulf Coast, Huffington Post, Narrative, New Letters, Ploughshares, Poetry Review (UK), and Poetry. Contributing editor, Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
SIDELIGHTS
Cornell University English professor Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry: Far District: Poems, which received the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award in 2010, and House of Lords and Commons: Poems, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2016. “Hutchinson … might be called a post-post-colonial writer,” declared Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker: “his art, suspicious of top-down institutions—including academia—finds in the impasto treatment of sensory minutiae a protest against abstract authority. These poems might be shimmed into a syllabus or buried in a casket-like journal article, if they weren’t so punk-baroque and brat-belletristic. Professional literary discourse often allegorizes human passion and conflict, in ways that make the actual human secondary. But poets don’t want to be fodder for panels and colloquia, and Hutchinson’s poems are oppositional and disruptive, sometimes tauntingly so.”
Critics recognize the power of Hutchinson’s work to create a highly evocative sense of place—usually drawn from his native Caribbean home. The contributor of a biographical and critical blurb appearing on the Poetry Foundation’s Web site wrote that Hutchinson’s “narrative poems interrogate landscape, measuring the elusive weight of colonial history.”Writing in the Cornell Chronicle, Daniel Aloi stated: “House of Lords and Commons explores the landscape of Jamaica and Hutchinson’s memories of growing up there in Port Antonio.” “The landscapes . . . are less autobiographical, less from the backhand of retrospect, I guess,” Hutchinson told Sarah Sansolo on the Web site Café Americain, “and more a shifting concatenation of landscapes not yet arrived at. I think this is a result of reading rather than actual travel; I have been crisscrossing centuries, different existences, the rhythm and mode of other places and now it is has woven a basket in my head. I am pulling the straws from that.”
Reviewers recognized Hutchinson as a major voice in modern poetry with the publication of his initial collection. “It seems impossible to capture in words the nature of a collection as richly drawn as Ishion Hutchinson’s Far District,” enthused Ashlie Kauffman in the JMWW Journal. “An homage to rural Jamaican culture and history, written largely from the perspective of looking back or having left, it is multilayered in its explorations and refreshingly lacking in any definitive conclusions—instead, aiming to recognize and preference what is, in life, deeply and devastatingly complex. . . . [He] awakens and incites the realms of lore and myth—the speaker of these poems seeming at a type of crossroads between past and future, culture and individuality.” Hutchinson “is inspired by his own prodigious literary imagination and also influenced by the great Derek Walcott, whose shadow lingers on these pages,” declared Carol Muske-Dukes on the Huffington Post Web site. “It is not an obliterating shadow, but a tantalizing shade (`the luminous sea of myth’), drawing the reader deeper into Ishion Hutchinson’s home country—and deeper into a vision of what `home’ is. . . . A young poet, filled with the music of his starting-place, moves on into the endless possibilities of poetry—and what results is brilliant and unforgettable.”
Hutchinson’s second collection, House of Lords and Commons, was an even greater success than his debut volume. Booklist reviewer Diego Baez observed: “For his second full-length book of poetry, . . . Hutchinson has crafted a tightly knit, deeply resonant collection.” Reviewing the work for All Things Considered, Tess Taylor related: “These poems are lighthouse beams that concentrate equal parts fervor and anger. It’s a kind of concentration we might all wish for.” Chiasson called the collection “a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be called `the grand style:’ the timeless, high-literary idiom that nearly anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as `poetry,’ based on its sound alone.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer reported: “Hutchinson melds Jamaica’s history of political strife and the lives of its citizens into sensuous evocations of landscape.” “No screeds,” concluded Barbara Hoffert in Library Journal, “. . . just true, vital stories, charged with emotion and a stunningly beautiful complexity of the language.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Diego Baez, review of House of Lords and Commons: Poems, p. 33.
Library Journal, July 1, 2016, Barbara Hoffert, review of House of Lords and Commons, p. 88.
New Yorker, November 21, 2016, Dan Chiasson, review of House of Lords and Commons.
Publishers Weekly. September 19, 2016, review of House of Lords and Commons, p. 46.
ONLINE
All Things Considered Web site, http://www.npr.org/ (December 21, 2016), Tess Taylor, review of House of Lords and Commons.
Café Americain, http://cafemfa.com/ (February 26, 2013), Sarah Sansolo, “An Interview with Poet Ishion Hutchinson.”
Cornell Chronicle, http://news.cornell.edu/ (March 20, 2017), Daniel Aloi, “Hutchinson Wins National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.”
Cornell University Department of English, http://english.cornell.edu/ (July 21, 2017), author profile.
Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (November 24, 2010), Carol Muske-Dukes, “Thanksgiving Book Reviews.”
Ishion Hutchinson Home Page, http://www.ishionhutchinson.com (July 21, 2017), author profile.
JMWW Journal, http://jmwwblog.wordpress.com/ (July 21, 2017), Ashlie Kauffman, author interview.
Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (July 21, 2017), author profile.
Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/ (July 21, 2017), author profile.*
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the Larry Levis Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among others. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Ishion Hutchinson
Assistant Professor
Goldwin Smith Hall, Room 173
iih2@cornell.edu
607-255-6792
Overview
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection, Far District: Poems (2010), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. His works have appeared in several anthologies and journals such as Poetry, The Common, Poetry Review (UK), Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, The Huffington Post, and New Letters. He is a contributing editor to the literary journal, Tongue: A Journal of Writing Art.
DEPARTMENTS/PROGRAMS
English
GRADUATE FIELDS
Creative Writing
English Language and Literature
Research
Poetry in translation
American and British poetry
Creative writing and creative reading
The long poem and the epic
Ishion Hutchinson
Poet Details
Rachel Elisa Griffiths
Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, poet Ishion Hutchinson earned a BA at the University of the West Indies, an MFA at New York University, and a PhD at the University of Utah.
Hutchinson’s narrative poems interrogate landscape, measuring the elusive weight of colonial history. Reviewing Far District for the Huffington Post in 2010, poet Carol Muske-Dukes notes that as readers of the collection “[w]e are here to reinvestigate origins,” observing that “Ishion Hutchinson moves in and out of 'borders,' geographical and emotional - and in and out of traditions (singing to Claude McKay) so gracefully that at times the reader has to remind herself of dark intent, which is undeniably here.” In a 2013 interview with Sarah Sansolo for American University’s Creative Writing Program’s blog Café Americain, Hutchinson discussed the concerns of his newer work, stating, “The landscapes in some of the newer poems are less autobiographical, less from the backhand of retrospect, I guess, and more a shifting concatenation of landscapes not yet arrived at. I think this is a result of reading rather than actual travel; I have been crisscrossing centuries, different existences, the rhythm and mode of other places and now it is has woven a basket in my head. I am pulling the straws from that.”
He is the author of two collections of poetry: Far District (2010), winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons (2016), winner of the National Books Critics Circle award. Hutchinson’s additional honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. Most recently, in 2017, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Pirogue Fellow, Hutchinson teaches at Cornell University.
poet
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson
Texts by this Poet:
Yusef Komunyakaa and Ishion Hutchinson: What Is It to Be an American?
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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He received a BA from the University of the West Indies, an MFA from New York University, and, in 2012, a PhD from the University of Utah. Hutchinson is the author of House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. The recipient of a Whiting Award, he teaches at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, New York.
March 20, 2017
Hutchinson wins National Book Critics Circle poetry award
ByDaniel Aloi
Ishion Hutchinson
Beowulf Sheehan/Provided
Assistant professor of English Ishion Hutchinson.
Assistant professor of English Ishion Hutchinson has won the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award for poetry for his 2016 collection, “House of Lords and Commons.”
The annual awards for fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, poetry and criticism were announced March 16. “House of Lords and Commons” explores the landscape of Jamaica and Hutchinson’s memories of growing up there in Port Antonio.
“I think about the landscape of my childhood, the variety and exquisite complexity of living in a place that offers so much,” Hutchinson said in a December interview. “I appreciate the richness of home, and I am still a part of it.”
In a review as part of a series on all 30 NBCC finalists leading up to the awards ceremony, critic Tess Taylor called the book “ragged and fiercely beautiful. Its double-edged language is inviting and unsettling. … Hutchinson’s poems are the skeins a thinker makes of trouble, inequality, global travel, lost time.”
“House of Lords and Commons” also received glowing reviews in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The New Yorker and other publications. It is Hutchinson’s second book of poetry; his previous collection, “Far District: Poems,” was published in 2010. He won a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2013.
Hutchinson, the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences, joined the Cornell faculty in 2012. He teaches poetry in the Department of English and mentors young writers in the Creative Writing Program.
His poetry was set to music by Cornell graduate student composers for “Song of the Land: Poems of Ishion Hutchinson,” a concert March 18 in Barnes Hall, performed by pianist Xak Bjerken, mezzo-soprano Rachel Calloway and Ensemble X.
The NBCC awards are open to any book published in English in the United States, and the six winners were selected by the NBCC board of directors. Founded in 1974, the organization is made up of more than 700 literary critics and editors.
The award winners for 2016 also include sociologist Matthew Desmond (who spoke on campus in November about “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” which earned him the nonfiction award); Native American novelist Louise Erdrich (for “LaRose”) and Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who was given the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
House of Lords and Commons: Poems
Publishers Weekly. 263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p46.
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* House of Lords and Commons: Poems
Ishion Hutchinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (96p) ISBN 978-0-374-17302-9
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"History is dismantled music; slant,/bleak on gravel," Hutchinson (Far District) writes in a second collection that sees him profiting highly from Emily Dickinson's dictum to tell the truth but tell it slant. In poetic suites more narrative and seamlessly associative than his previous work, Hutchinson melds Jamaica's history of political strife and the lives of its citizens into sensuous evocations of landscape: "After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets of government surveyors looking into roofless/shacks." Hutchinson finds a dexterous register in which high and low diction strike sparks: "I mitre solid shadow, setting fire to snow in my ark./ I credit not the genie but the coral rock." His eye for local color elevates neighbors and relatives into figures of archetypal resonance, and his biting precision captures "Pure echo in the train's/ beam arriving on its cold nerve of iron." Informed both by sonorous biblical cadence and a fibrous Saxon lexicon of canonical Western references, Hutchinson's majestic lines snap like starched laundry in coastal wind: "drift-pocked, solitary/ ducks across the bay's industrial/ ruts." Yet this jaunty "ice-pick raconteur" is capable of stunning moments of visionary lyricism: "A soft light, God's idleness/ warms the skin of the lake." These poems herald the maturity of a major poetic voice. (Oct.)
House of Lords and Commons
Diego Baez
Booklist. 113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
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House of Lords and Commons. By Ishion Hutchinson. Sept. 2016. 96p. Farrar, $23 (97803741730291; e book, $10.99 (97803747145431.811.
For his second full-length book of poetry, after the award-winning Far District (2010), Hutchinson has crafted a tightly knit, deeply resonant collection. Hutchinson's formal verse and measured lyrics disguise a frenetic energy by burning slowly to a sudden boil. "The Small Dark Interior" opens with a young child gazing longingly at a newly, delicately frozen pond but closes when the speaker's thoughts turn abruptly to forgiveness for his father. "A Burnt Ship" catalogs the spilled belongings from a ship's hold ("sunken masks, / god's horn, perfume, ivory tusks, / market dust"), before erupting in the expected, yet still unsettling conclusion that "all were lost, all were destroyed." Other poems maintain a serene inner stillness, an even calm that complements the charged tension. "Moved by the Beauty of Trees" simply repeats phrases of "beauty," "green," and "leaves," mimicking the natural sound of rolling foliage in soft breeze. The only downside is Hutchinson's affinity for short lines and short poems; readers will finish the collection longing for more. Fans of Yusef Komunyakaa, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Camille Rankine will especially enjoy Hutchinson's latest.--Diego Baez
Hutchinson, Ishion. House of Lords and Commons
Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal. 141.12 (July 1, 2016): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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* Hutchinson, Ishion. House of Lords and Commons. St. Martin's. Sept. 2016.256p. ISBN 9780374173029. $23; ebk. ISBN 9781250096944. poetry
Whiting Award winner Hutchinson here intensifies the promise of his debut, Far District, broadening his vision beyond the history and geography of his homeland, Jamaica, to encompass today's fraught world in visceral and richly compacted off-kilter lyric. Gold jingles in exploitation as "they talk Texas and the north cold,// but mostly oil and Obama," and a genie asks the speaker to build an ark "out of peril and slum/ things" where "I alone when blood and bullet and all Christ-fucking-'Merican-dollar politicians talk/ the pressure down to nothing." Even a poem that opens jauntily with the sighting of a red bicycle near the Ponte Vecchio moves quickly to recalling a mother's fury at her son's disobedience, as "the promised money/ didn't fall from my father's cold heaven in England." Yet there's also the desolate tenderness of seemingly spotting that father while "picking faces in the thick nest of morning's hard light" and a woman has a quiet moment as "the beauty of the trees stills her." No screeds, then, just true, vital stories, charged with emotion and a stunningly beautiful complexity of the language. VERDICT A challenging collection requiring careful reading to pick out the poet's full intent but definitely worth the effort. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Review: 'House Of Lords And Commons,' Ishion Hutchinson
All Things Considered. 2016.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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BYLINE: TESS TAYLOR
HOST: ARI SHAPIRO
ARI SHAPIRO: As 2016 comes to a close, poetry reviewer Tess Taylor has been thinking about one book that's held her imagination this year, a collection by poet Ishion Hutchinson.
TESS TAYLOR: "House Of Lords And Commons" was one of my favorite books this year. It is ragged and fiercely beautiful. Its double-edged language is both inviting and unsettling. Tracing the landscapes of memory, childhood and his native Jamaica, Hutchinson's poems are the skeins a thinker makes of trouble, of inequality, of global travel, of lost time. Hutchinson's got a gift for syntax. Many of his poems string a single, side-winding sentence into a shimmering thread that shuttles between the present and the past, the haves and the have nots, outrage and beauty.
In a poem about cane workers called "Fitzy And The Revolution," Hutchinson writes, (reading)
Cane cutters who filed their spines against the sun bringing down great walls of cane. Every year the same men, different cane. And when different men, the same cane.
Poetry compresses witness, and soon Hutchinson turns his razor-sharp gaze on a nearby fortress where a character called the Minister of All cannot sleep.
(Reading) The flag stiffened on the embassy building but did not fall when the machine guns flared and reminded that stars were inside the decrepit towns, in shanty zinc holes, staring at the fixed constellation.
These poems are lighthouse beams that concentrate equal parts fervor and anger. It's a kind of concentration we might all wish for as we each try to name the world we come from and look for the world we want to see next.
I became a thicket of ears, Hutchinson writes. And listening to him, we do, too.
SHAPIRO: That was poetry reviewer Tess Taylor on the book "House Of Lords And Commons."
BOOKS NOVEMBER 21, 2016 ISSUE
ISHION HUTCHINSON, POST-POSTCOLONIAL POET
His punk-baroque verse is a brilliant protest of abstract authority.
By Dan Chiasson
Hutchinson is a poet of ambivalent homage; his brash, brilliant verse is both wrought and rooted in contradiction.
Hutchinson is a poet of ambivalent homage; his brash, brilliant verse is both wrought and rooted in contradiction.
Photograph by Pari Dukovic
The Jamaican-born poet Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, “House of Lords and Commons,” is a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be called “the grand style”: the timeless, high-literary idiom that nearly anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as “poetry,” based on its sound alone, and that nonplussed readers of contemporary poetry sometimes say they miss. Of course, the irony is that timelessness itself can seem dated; modernism emerged in part to change the acoustics within which lines of poetry were heard. Our ears changed, and fewer and fewer poets of note wanted to make those old sounds. There are analogues in nearly every art: modes and vocabularies that we accept in the work of the past but which seem, in new work, like period reënactment or, if the seams are exposed, like postmodern bricolage. Here’s what Hutchinson’s version of timelessness, handed down, to some extent, from the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, sounds like:
Noon ictus cooling the veranda’s
fretwork, the child sits after his harp
boning burlesque in the bower, his slit
of gulls’ nerves silenced into hydrangea.
Violet and roan, the bridal sun is
opening and closing a window,
filling a clay pot of coins with coins;
candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milk
boxes with horn petals snapping
their iceberg-Golgotha crackle.
Hutchinson’s lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next, implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard “c”s, then “b”s and “p”s) and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words (“iceberg-Golgotha”). Occasionally, a severe misstep (“boning burlesque in the bower”) undermines, by its clumsiness, the classicism that surrounds it. For better or worse, lines like these, from “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” act as though they’d never heard of prose, the flat-footed bureaucrat trying to tame their airborne acrobatics.
Hutchinson, who is thirty-three and teaches at Cornell, might be called a post-post-colonial writer: his art, suspicious of top-down institutions—including academia—finds in the impasto treatment of sensory minutiae a protest against abstract authority. These poems might be shimmed into a syllabus or buried in a casketlike journal article, if they weren’t so punk-baroque and brat-belletristic. Professional literary discourse often allegorizes human passion and conflict, in ways that make the actual human secondary. But poets don’t want to be fodder for panels and colloquia, and Hutchinson’s poems are oppositional and disruptive, sometimes tauntingly so. “The Orator,” like Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” is a poem about poetry itself, its immediate purchase on the sublime, so much more powerful than classroom circumlocution. A lecture on “Caribbean Culture” is delivered by a “bore” who “was harping in dead metaphor / the horror of colonial heritage.” Suddenly, a thunderstorm knocks out the lights, and the lecturer now stands helpless in the dark:
. . . in the surprised blackness,
his soul exposed, the façade recessed,
I saw the face that curried Pelops
in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps
of liberal, money-giving chaps
with an itch for the unscripted Folk
and Oral Tradition, a hot spoke
in his spinning radius unveiling
the veil of the shroud of the curtain,
and with spectroscopic effect, he has dazzled
all and proven to be ebony solid.
In place of the orator’s “dead metaphor,” Hutchinson offers a handful of live ones: this “tweeded rodent scholar” is a meretricious pedant who “curried Pelops / in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps” like an exotic dancer at a trustees’ meeting, as well as a kind of Messiah-Wizard of Oz, “unveiling / the veil of the shroud of the curtain,” and a sham Vegas magician dazzling the crowd with “spectroscopic effect.” The poem baits us into comparing Hutchinson’s own performance against this “wine-for-rum, / lectern-for-veranda, brilliant scum,” who’s brought low when the technology falters.
But the orator is a pretty easy target, and Hutchinson’s vitriol (“scum,” “rodent”) is comically excessive, his rhymes approaching drawing-room
doggerel (“laps” and “chaps,” for instance). Not everything here is meant to be apt, classic, or anthology-ready. The poem is marginal doodling of a very high order, Miltonic graffiti that asserts its power by being at once polished and rash. The orator is a sycophant, a parasite; at the other end of the spectrum is the speaker of these brilliant lines from “The Ark by ‘Scratch,’ ” a reggae Noah—probably Lee (Scratch) Perry, the Jamaican performer—implored by a “genie” to “build a studio” from cultural salvage and scrap:
The genie says build a studio. I build
a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum
things. I alone when blood and bullet and all
Christ-fucking-’Merican-dollar politicians talk
the pressure down to nothing, when the equator’s
confused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath.
The poem describes its own construction, as one remarkable detail after another is loaded into the “studio” to be preserved for postdiluvian use. The speaker is Noah plus “Scratch” plus Hutchinson—which somehow, by the end, adds up to Whitman, whose broad-chested boasts prefigure Hutchinson’s: “I Upsetter, I Django / on the black wax, the Super Ape, E.T., I cleared the wave.”
Hutchinson’s wildness and his propriety are two sides of the same coin, two expressions of a fundamentally dynastic sense of poetic tradition that is passed down from literary father to son, and that arises partly, these poems suggest, from the void left when Hutchinson’s real father vanished. He is a poet of ambivalent homage, feinting but never feigned: this is a form of aesthetic survival in a post-colonial situation, where literary mastery and subjugation are, uncomfortably, closely aligned. You can tell how good Hutchinson is because his poems are full of misfires, phrases chosen by somebody with a hyperkinetic ear and no off switch. Various famous proverbs of Blake’s come to mind, but here the road to excess doesn’t, in every case, lead to the palace of wisdom. Randall Jarrell once said of Hutchinson’s eminent predecessor, “Only a man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever, could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” I could make a list of Hutchinson’s messes: a funny sight “scythes your sides with laughter”; after a hurricane, “government surveyors” go from shanty to shanty, “accessing stunned fowls.” Phrases like these can be found on every page. Hutchinson swings for the seats with every line; it’s only natural that he sometimes whiffs.
But there is also a quiet, chastened strain in “House of Lords and Commons,” whose title recalls Shelley’s famous assertion that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” while also suggesting, I think, the influence (at times faintly damaging) of William Butler Yeats, who served in the Irish senate for two terms. Hutchinson’s language is an assembly of sorts, a parliament that distributes power among the high and the low. This conscious yoking of “lords” and “commons” (high and low subjects, high and low diction) is most impressive when the rhetorical volume is turned down, as in “Girl at Christmas,” the one flawless poem in this very promising book. Christmas is a colonial imposition, a cornerstone of the system that made slavery possible and poverty inevitable; but it is also the highlight of this little Jamaican kid’s year, and its subjugations have simultaneously been outed by and sublimated into song:
For all she’s gladdened: milk
dreaming love in one hand;
clefts of clementine stain
the other. They cannot die;
the coral joy and battering
ceramic, the peach bones
and scotch bonnet seeds;
the sorrel, and foil mask she then puts
on to belt her savage choir. ♦
Dan Chiasson has been contributing poems to the magazine since 2000 and reviews since 2007. He teaches at Wellesley College. His poetry collections include “Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon” and, most recently, “Bicentennial.” More
This article appears in other versions of the November 21, 2016, issue, with the headline “Cross Talk.”
Far District
by Ishion Hutchinson
Peepal Tree Press, 2010
http://www.peepaltreepress.com/single_book_display.asp?isbn=9781845231576&au_id=208
ISBN: 9781845231576
It seems impossible to capture in words the nature of a collection as richly drawn as Ishion Hutchinson's Far District. An homage to rural Jamaican culture and history, written largely from the perspective of looking back or having left, it is multilayered in its explorations and refreshingly lacking in any definitive conclusions—instead, aiming to recognize and preference what is, in life, deeply and devastatingly complex.
From the first poem of the collection, "The Turning Road," Hutchinson awakens and incites the realms of lore and myth—the speaker of these poems seeming at a type of crossroads between past and future, culture and individuality. The rites of passage he faces—such as fetching a stray ball from the necromancer's yard; "go[ing] river" in a boat one night although forbidden to; conversing with a long-absent father; or leaving the district of his home for University—do not always have clear ends. This openness seems won from an adherence to observation, rather than resolution or figuring out. In "Errant," for instance, Hutchinson's description of the speaker fetching the stray ball ends before he reaches it: "The evening too early/to declare 'bad light,' I push my head between/the barbwire, crossing over, laughter like goats." In the poem "Bam-Bam," in which the speaker comes face to face with the local madman at whom he and his friends hurl stones, he ends the poem capturing a visual and emotional fading, through an observation of the fading scenery: "I felt the light going out of the day, and a grey,/lowering itself, covered all as far as I could see." In these and other poems, Hutchinson seems concerned with what occurs at the threshold, achieving a kind of dreamlike psychology—the Jamaica of Far District appearing veiled or shrouded as if from deep in one's memory.
Hutchinson's use of language is remarkably generous, his lines turning and expanding in a way that both creates anticipation and delivers richness. In "The Turning Road," in which the speaker sees an animal carcass on the bridge he crosses while journeying to school, the poem seems to be leading both the poet and the reader increasingly deeper—the lines, "warm pubescent blood/beat in my ears along the road/snaking through cane flags that cowered/their yearly death in the reaping/fire," pushing one step farther than expected, and offering, with this, a resonance that is felt in the body. Rhythms and sounds that appear almost languid in the way these lines do can also have a powerful intensity, as in the poem "Anthropology": "The houses are shut, the neighbours gone/to the burning field at the mangrove's edge,/where the heatstruck anthropologist writes/his prophecy in a wretched tense."
With repeated images like john crows, prophet men and women, the moon, yams, and the Tropicana Sugar Estate and factory, and terms such as rass, coolie duppy, and obeah, Hutchinson introduces the reader to the culture with endemic detail and language. He moves in and out of the poet's voice and the distinctive speech patterns of the locals with fluidity, such as in the title poem when he writes of an American film crew who visits: "We swarmed the camera crew,/jaundiced jesuses/giving us candies on cue./We'd never seen white/skin this close/and could smell it right—/it smell full of money,/sweet Yankee dollars." Similarly, in "Requiem For Aunt May," in which an aunt's death is also marked by a father's return, the lines "seaweeds streak/his beard, salt rimmed his apologies," not only evoke an image of tears, but conjure place through images that are a crucial marker of it—the sea being dominant.
Although in the title poem of the collection, Hutchinson writes of home as "a place/forgotten by the cartographer,/but buried inside me to decompose"—a place that he has no choice but to explore—these poems go far beyond being depictions of Jamaican culture. When he comments in the same poem on factory-worker life, writing, "We slinked back to work—/donkeys to cane fields,/jackasses in factory shirts/to the mill," his critique is translatable to other scenarios and representative of larger, global issues of poverty and exploitation. The sugar estate workers whose perspective he writes from grind "crystallized/sugar—that we never tasted—too dear/for our pockets, so we drank our tea bitter,/to purge our blood, to not murder the boss/each fortnight when the pay came up short/after carrying the sack of sun on our backs." Family and characters of situations such as these are interspersed, moreover, not only with references to well-known Jamaican-born figures, such as Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay and reggae artists Peter Tosh and Jimmy Cliff, but with Shakespearian characters and references to the Bible as well as Greek and Roman mythology—Hutchinson's use of myth, history, and the struggles of the present in a traditionally-rhymed poem such as "New World Frescoes" admirably reminiscent of Hart Crane's epic modernist poem, The Bridge. In "Undergod," in which the speaker pays for passage at the subway turnstile the way he would to Charon, ferryman of Hades, he yokes his experience as a black man confronted by policemen in the New York City subway with the African slave experience, evoking the names of African tribes and writing, "Keys rattled like manacles, the train pulled in./They ringed my wrists with steely bracelets again." These various aspects, as carefully and gracefully worked as they are by Hutchinson, together make this collection resound powerfully.
I would say, in fact, that the book is well-poised to be something poured over in a literature class. Both the collection and its long title poem have a novel-esque unfolding in how they move forward and back in time and offer information in layers—characters and places revisited along with themes. A few poems toward the end of the collection seem to break the narrative somewhat, although in its overall effect, the book is extremely well-unified—a "sibyl [singing]/at the hemline a welcome" in the beginning poem turned into a kind of incantation in the ending poem for "a slave sibyl...[to] unbind her chords/and strike a welcome song"—in a way taking the reader back to the beginning. It is a fitting ending for a book that rejects easy resolutions—and for one whose speaker, in its title poem, when he leaves the district and sees, "for the first time.../...the open sea,/crossed and recrossed by sunbeams," wonders if he can return home, "look[ing] in the rearview for a flaming sword" like that at the entrance to the Garden of Eden preventing man's return. Although there is no indication of what is seen, the complexities that Hutchinson explores in the limbo of neither passage nor return seem enough of a thing of beauty.—Ashlie Kauffman
THE BLOG 11/24/2010 12:52 am ET | Updated May 25, 2011
Thanksgiving Book Reviews
By Carol Muske-Dukes
Here is a Thanksgiving cornucopia of significant new books of poetry — each one worthy of our attention as it spins out a new and challenging perspective. Again, these are endorsements — not complete reviews — though each book here deserves a full critical examination and inquiry.
First, a formal nod to this year’s National Book Award judges — who chose Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead (Penguin Poets’ Series, 2010) for the prize. A wise acknowledgement of a poet who is enlightening poetic history. Terrance Hayes’ “Lighthead” persona is a figure as resounding and reverberative as John Berryman’s “Mr. Bones.” But perhaps Hayes’ persona is closer to Wallace Stevens - in this collection of poems as “light longing for lightness”. Wherever the mind travels in these poems — we find the embodiment of lyric and political power - whether we encounter Stevens or Harriet Tubman or Fela Kuti. Many criticize poetry for not being “essential” or “political”. Read Lighthead and see that a great lyric poet can be political - and also aesthetically inventive - bigtime.
Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010) is a nearly-indescribable collection of poems. It is the second book from a very visible presence in American poetry. Tim Donnelly is poetry editor for Boston Review and professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
But The Cloud Corporation
In our digitally-soaked age, an overly-inclusive consciousness is hard to dignify. Yet Donnelly dignifies it: “The world tries hard to bore me to death, but not hard enough.” He is nimble in eluding the “canker anchored/at the root of everything.” (Notice the slam-rhyme and play on “canker”, “cancer”, “root” — even as the line echoes Shelley’s “Wail, for the World’s wrong!”) And notice also the sheer power of lyrical music in the following:
After the first weeks after, I lost myself remembering
the worth of what was lost , the cost of which was nothing.
Between myself and where I stood, there fell a distance
only loss could fill, an empty world, a simpleness, its shadows
thrown across my window. Often the mind would try
to stay itself by imagining...
“Chapter for Being Transformed into a Sparrow”
Dramatic tension, humor, lyrical profundity. This is an utterly ingenious and proudly inclusive voice, incorporating clouds — you cannot turn away from it, just as you cannot turn away from “a stage in wakefulness” beyond “a door without mystery.” You are riveted - in the presence of the altered and yet absolutely accurate indication of a sensibility so urgent we find ourselves momentarily re-inventing the term Poet.
Deborah Allbery’s Fimbul-Winter has been called a “verbal Vermeer” — yet the reader would make a mistake in assuming that these poems concern themselves only with surfaces. Like the raging fire underground in mining country - “A mine fire burned beneath my mother’s/southern Ohio town for a hundred years”, baking potatoes in the garden, heating the bricks - the Fire beneath the surface burning for a century singes what is seen, shifts it into a strange familiarity.
After the Native American, after meditations on Old English — and on into the contemporary — Allbery describes her gaze as “on the field’s new blank lines, the slow settle/of twilight over the combines’ undoing”. This is Midwestern Wordsworthian alertness to joy and desperation - this is “...what’s near now/what’s newly distant.”
As in an ancient Anglo-Saxon riddle - “the wave over the wave... water became bone” (The Exeter Book, Riddle 68) - these utterly still and deep poems take flight, take intense power from what is perceived - leading us to what seems, on the surface, alien - but is kin to us, alive.
Far District is a first book by the Jamaican poet, Ishion Hutchinson — and it is a powerful debut. This young poet is inspired by his own prodigious literary imagination and also influenced by the great Derek Walcott, whose shadow lingers on these pages. It is not an obliterating shadow, but a tantalizing shade (“the luminous sea of myth”), drawing the reader deeper into Ishion Hutchinson’s home country - and deeper into vision of what “home” is.
Ishion Hutchinson moves in and out of “borders”, geographical and emotional - and in and out of traditions (singing to Claude McKay) so gracefully that at times the reader has to remind herself of dark intent, which is undeniably here. We are here to reinvestigate origins, (as in a poem called “Anthropology”): “The houses are shut, the neighbors gone/to the burning fields at the mangrove’s edge, /where the heatstruck anthropologist writes/his prophecy in a wrenched tense:/ Their Gods... they’ve drowned.”
This is, finally, a deeply affecting literary journey. A young poet, filled with the music of his starting-place, moves on into the endless possibilities of poetry — and what results is brilliant and unforgettable, “between the barracks and the rum bars”. Illuminations!
From his haunting poem, “Icarus After” — “When grief strikes in the house/ open the sea Ariel protects /stitch glowworms in book spines,/give an ear to Thelonius, a sparrow/in your lap.”
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An Interview with Poet Ishion Hutchinson
February 26, 2013 - No Comments
Ishion Hutchinson
Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson is the author of Far District, a debut collection that received the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. Of Far District, Yusef Komunyakaa writes: “Not only does this collection travel through an abiding language and far reaching imagery, but it also transports the reader to a complex psychological terrain through a basic honesty and truthfulness.” Hutchinson, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Utah, teaches at Cornell University. He will read at American University on February 27, 2013 as part of the Visiting Writers Series.
CA: Your poetry is very grounded in location. Where do you like to write? What landscapes do you draw from in your current writing?
IH: My primary writing place now is my office below the house. I feel fortunate for that space, the sense of enclosure there. But I miss the exhilaration of writing on the veranda of my childhood home in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Everything is opened there, the sea, the peninsula, an entire lush accompaniment that makes the effort of writing a kind of enduring childlike delight. Now things are a bit more sombre, especially given it is winter, but I am comfortable.
The landscapes in some of the newer poems are less autobiographical, less from the backhand of retrospect, I guess, and more a shifting concatenation of landscapes not yet arrived at. I think this is a result of reading rather than actual travel; I have been crisscrossing centuries, different existences, the rhythm and mode of other places and now it is has woven a basket in my head. I am pulling the straws from that.
CA: In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned the lack of literature available to you as a child. Now that you have a Ph.D. in literature, how has your writing changed? What writers inspire you?
IH: I don’t think I said a lack of literature, a lack of books, yes, which was terrible but was also a sort of blessing, a blessing because it meant I lived closer to the presences around me, and I was, thank God, literate so when more books became available, in high school, I read those children’s books with this adolescent skepticism—very thrilling to do. But to the Ph.D.: it afforded me a kind of monkish love-affair with books, for it was during the doctorate I started to believe more in the notion that the poet should be a servant of language, rather than master of it. It would be accurate to say that I am changed by the experience, the supreme gravitas of it; how my writing has changed is a matter I cannot really answer, but reading someone like Robert Burton, for instance, whom I had never read and I doubt I would have if it wasn’t for the doctorate, I was moved by him, and I desired that power, desired to learn from him. Burton wasn’t assigned, but discovered along the way while reading other writers of his period. Writing is a timely evolution; we will see.
I turn to different poets’ work for different things. The list is big. I think Walcott once made this very funny pun: “I always read Ovidly”—me too; some books I gouge, some I only Pynchon. This week, for instance, I have been reading and loving Robert Bringhurst’s poetry, there is a music there like air blown into rocks, it’s light and heavy at the same time. I am almost done with Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman. I am always surprised how these books come into my world and mysteriously help with what I am attempting; for instance, the ritual, energetic chorus of Soyinka is, I realized, what a certain poem I thought hopeless could benefit from. The word inspire means to breathe life or soul into something, and that is what literature does, it breathes life and soul into our own.
CA: What are your feelings on the way poets are labeled? Your work is almost always tagged as Caribbean; is this limiting at all?
IH: The word label makes me think in terms of value, a sign that fixes the value of a work, and in that I see no complexity but reduction, nothing a work of literature could benefit from, so my personal instinct therefore is to reject anything that demeans the work, which is my life. That said, I think a poet who spends too much time fighting off labels could be charged with what Camus calls the wish for “simultaneous applause and hisses,” an attention mercenary.
My work is Caribbean much the same way I believe some of Hart Crane’s poetry is Caribbean, in that when I read a line like “Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon,” I am home, home. But I understand the political element of the tag Caribbean, and it should not be avoided. Caribbean literature, so young and so worldly, is astounding—is that limiting? No. One must have a place, a tribe, the dark embryo out of which the work springs and to which it returns. The limiting thing is really in the utilitarian stuff—a greater surge in the literature culture in the Caribbean (regular reading series, prizes, residencies, publishers, and the likes) where Caribbean writers can be visible and active at home.
CA: Are you still working on a book-length poem? Many reviewers have spoken to the narrative quality of Far District. Is your long work structured as a narrative?
IH: I am, but just like before, shorter poems are accruing. There is a fractured sense of narrative unity. That is inescapable.
CA: What do you find particularly challenging or exciting about writing a long poem?
IH: You get lost differently in making a long poem than in a lyric; I love the agility it requires to add lines to lines so there is a tapestry of “Here I am, there I was, there I hope to be.”
Sarah Sansolo