Ishion Hutchinson, a Jamaican poet and scholar, was inspired to consider a far-off history after an intensely felt visit to the Imperial War Museum’s archives in London, UK.
Hutchinson, a literature professor at Cornell University in New York, was deeply touched by the accounts of West Indian troops who served in World War I that he discovered at the museum.
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Hutchinson stated regarding his 2018 visit, “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.” He continued, “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.”
The result is Hutchinson’s third collection of poetry, “School of Instructions: A Poem,” which was published by Macmillan Publishers in the US and by Faber & Faber in the UK last month.
The Poet was praised by a famous British paper as, “a visionary work of memory, elegy and loss” “School of Instructions” is one of ten poetry collections nominated for the renowned TS Eliot Prize, which also includes fellow Jamaican poet Jason Allen-“Self Paisant’s Portrait as Othello.” It was named one of The Washington Post’s “best poetry collections of 2023.”
The UK’s Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank Center will host the award presentation on January 15.
Hutchinson recounted the steps involved in turning an idea into a published book, saying: “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.”
He added, “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.”
His discovery through archives of a past he was not familiar with sufficiently captivated him to learn that West Indians had fought in the war as subalterns for the British crown and that they had been assigned to segregated regiments.
Hutchinson shared, “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 tumultuous relationship with England, but going into the archives and ‘hearing the voices’ of these men, I found that I recognized 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 humanize them. Take them out of the archives and into the open air and finding the rhythm to write that took some time.”
This meticulously researched book-length poem by the professor and essayist is based on historical truth, but it also features a fictional figure 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,” he explained.
Following the book releases that his publishers had in London and New York last month, the poet traveled to Jamaica for a recent event that was held at his lifelong friend and lifestyle curator Bianca Bartley’s home in St Matthew.
“I feel thrilled being here,” He exclaimed. Hutchinson expressed, “It’s a special moment and feels like a homecoming because I have been traveling 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,” Hutchinson remarked.
Hutchinson is a native of Portland who graduated from the University of the West Indies in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in literature. He also holds a master’s degree in fine arts from New York University and a dual doctorate (PhD) in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah. In 2011, he started working at Cornell.
Changing the subject, he said how happy he was to be back home.
Hutchinson shared that he visits home (Jamaica) to gain inspiration in creating his idea of literary art which is astounding, “I was here a month ago, 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.”
Hutchinson’s next plans include carrying on with his “School of Instructions” book tour, which includes readings at many US institutions and planned stops in Europe.
He also revealed that his essay collection “FUGITIVE TILTS” and his debut poetry collection “Far District” would be reissued in the US in 2024.
