The Annotated Nightstand: What Ishion Hutchinson Is Reading Now, and Next

This is the first post I’m writing, late, after the election result. I won’t devote much to how that feels, or what to do. I will say that poems, as Audre Lorde famously wrote, “formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.”

Poetry has undeniable power—it is a means to survive, express, and intervene. There is a reason oppressive governments go after poets. It is our most ancient form of creative expression, and thus allows infinite flexibilities and capacities. For the years to come, I will hold the words of James Baldwin closer than ever: “Artists are here to disturb the peace.” For these reasons, I’m grateful to write about Ishion Hutchinson’s poetry first after the devastating news.

Hutchinson’s recent collection, School of Instructions, was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize this year. Far District is a reprinting of his first collection, which won a Whiting Award when it came out. The volume traces the speaker’s life in St. Thomas, a rural parish in Jamaica, to Portland parish for school on a scholarship—the latter a site of early tourism in Jamaica and more clearly impacted by colonialism.

In an interview with Ashlie Kaufmann, Hutchinson says, “in many of the poems, St. Thomas is represented as sort of benign, what we’d call a bush town. Nothing is there—absolute, this green darkness—and Portland being flooded with light, something that is desired more for relief.” Eventually the speaker heads to New York City, straddling the worlds he comes to know through experience and literature.

Throughout the collection, Hutchinson references to Shakespeare, Homer, Defoe—those who wrote about islands as a site of meaning-making, identity, threat, refuge, exile. There are also nuanced and striking portraits of people as well as persona poems of those in the community (the woman everyone wants, the woodcutter).

The language itself endlessly surprises in imagery and syntax. One person at a go-go club is “in the scent of burnt / butts, processed hair, rummy lipstick.” Or a poem in which Hutchinson considers the bleak realities of Mandelstam, who arguably died for his verse, and how exactly to engage with the art form in the face of suffering (a poignant concern):

My dry lips break and crease
with unfulfilled lines, the copper tongue
stalls shut into its dark hole.
Say anything, and nothing happens.

The Whiting Selection Committee wrote of this collection,

Far District is a reconstruction of history—the poet’s own orphaned past (never sentimentalized) and the indigenous history of Jamaica….The poems are urgent, authentic, deeply felt, and beautifully shaped. It is rare to find such achievement in a first collection, where an author writes from a place of humility in the face of literary tradition.

Hutchinson tells us about his to-read pile, “This is a ziggurat (the neatest pile of several not pictured) of rereads, unfinished reads, and yet-to-be read books. It is an exceeding comfort to spend time, even for a short while, in some of these pages in the midst of the day’s swirling chaos.”

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George Herbert, R. S. Thomas (editor), A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse

How nepo is a baby if both their parents’ names are blue on Wikipedia again? Granted, the late-sixteenth century was a different time—if you were going to be famous, you probably came from serious wealth and privilege.

The Herberts certainly had those: his father was a lord, his eldest brother eventually a baron. His mother Magdalen also raised another poet, Edward, and did a lot of this alone for their ten children, as her husband died when the eldest was a young teen and the youngest still in the womb. Magdalen was a patron of the arts, including for the poet John Donne (Donne was also Herbert’s godfather).

Herbert himself was elected to be the Public Orator at Trinity College, caught the attention of King James I, and became a member of parliament. But he pivoted to a career in the church, eventually becoming a priest of the Church of England. His poetry was published in a single volume called The Temple, due to the efforts of a friend of Herbert.

Herbert had sent this friend poems, saying, “if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor Soul, let it be made publick: if not, let him burn it.” The friend did not burn it. These are religious pieces, but pretty wild, if only typographically which often is concrete poetry. (If you don’t know his work, check out “Easter Wings”—printed sideways to look like angel’s wings.)

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

“The ‘woman question,’ this book asserts, is a Western one,” states the jacket copy for this amazing scholarly text,

and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western construction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Author Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí reveals an ideology of biological determinism at the heart of Western social categories—the idea that biology provides the rationale for organizing the social world.

And yet, she writes, the concept of ‘woman,’ central to this ideology and to Western gender discourses, simply did not exist in Yorubaland, where the body was not the basis of social roles….A meticulous historical and epistemological account of an African culture on its own terms, this book makes a persuasive argument for a cultural, context-dependent interpretation of social reality. It calls for a reconception of gender discourse and the categories on which such study relies. More than that, the book lays bare the hidden assumptions in the ways these different cultures think.

Taban Lo Liyong, after troy

Lo Liyong is a South Sudanese/Ugandan writer, scholar, and critic who has over twenty books to his name. In 1968, he was the first person from the continent of Africa to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Four years later, Lo Liyong, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o collaborated on the powerful 1972 essay, “On the Abolition of the English Department.”

after troy, a recently published volume, is a book-length poem in direct conversation with The Odyssey and Oresteia, ultimately probing the deeper costs of war, as well as the complications of homecoming and heroicism. “After Troy is an advocacy for women’s social consciousness,” writes Nobert Oluoch Ndisio.

It is not by chance Penelope is the first voice the reader encounters in this poem….And of all people, it’s women and children who are most affected in seasons of war. Penelope, Odysseus’ wife has a lot to say. In her poetic monologues, she cries over her wasted youth—the twenty years that have gone by without the company of her husband. She talks of the twenty-year warfare between her flesh and heart in which she has been the moderator.

Susan Stewart, The Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook of Making

Ange Mlinko in Los Angeles Review of Books writes on The Poet’s Freedom:

Susan Stewart may be our best contemporary thinker on poetry. Though not usually mentioned in the same breath as Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, or Marjorie Perloff, this former MacArthur fellow and current Princeton professor holds the distinction of being a prize-winning poet (the National Book Critics Circle Award, for Columbarium) as well as a celebrated scholar—Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), her magnum opus, won two major awards for literary criticism.

Mlkinko goes on to describe “the darkest truth about freedom of making” through a story Stewart shares.

[Stewart] recounts the day she saw an eight- or nine-year-old boy on the beach destroy an elaborate sand castle she had watched him build all afternoon. While the sight of him lustily obliterating his own creation shook her momentarily, she could interpret it through an ancient lens: “Without the freedom of reversibility…we cannot give value to our making.”

Further, if it is true that all art-making is practice, there is no ethical requirement that we keep what we make; indeed, “the boy seemed to be returning the power of the form back into himself, as if what he had been practicing all along was a mode of memorization, or, better, learning.”

Nicolás Guillén, The Great Zoo (trans. Aaron Coleman)

I give public genuflection to the editors who revivified the University of Chicago Press’ Phoenix Poets series, which brings such exciting collections like this work in translation out into the world. Guillén’s translator, Aaron Coleman, wrote in a recent issue of Poetry,

Guillén traveled the island and the world, interweaving his artistic and political commitments to build a body of work admired by readers around the globe. Returning to the island in 1959, after spending much of the fifties in exile, he was hailed as the national poet of revolutionary Cuba.

Coleman goes on, discussing El gran zoo specifically,

[The Great Zoo] explores an uncanny menagerie of ideas and social concerns. Each poem is a cage in this literary exhibit, and the ‘animals’ we encounter include the Mississippi and Amazon Rivers, the North Star, clouds from different countries; they range from a hurricane to the KKK, the police, a guitar, and a dream….

Living between languages myself as a translator, a poet, and a child and student of the African diaspora, I’m astounded by how these poems open new vantage points and possibilities for contemporary audiences. To read Guillén across the diaspora, as he speaks out against colonialism and anti-Black violence, bears witness to Blackness beyond any single language, history, or country.

David Ferry, Some Things I Said

Heather Green writes in Poetry Daily of the eponymous poem from Ferry’s recently published posthumous collection:

In Some Things I Said, David Ferry gathers lines from poems he has written, translated, and read into a unique anthology-poem, a poem of uncanny force. In this synthesis of lines from works across his considerable poetic life, Ferry lays bare the expression of a wide range of human experience, from love and awe to loss, bewilderment, and death, through questions—”I said where are you now”—, observations—”I said the boats on the river are taking it easy”—, and enigmatic instructions—”I said better not know too much too soon all about it”….

In Some Things I Said, Ferry turns [his] reading practice to his own work: both his poems and his translations—and even the work of Wallace Stevens, the one other poet whose original English-language work is included in the poem—, and draws forth a new poem, an assemblage of fragments, a portmanteau, found lines sometimes presented almost as they were in the original and sometimes much-altered.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós, The Illustrious House of Ramires (trans. Anne Stevens)

While this book was reissued in a new translation in the last few years from New Directions, there are few things more fun than digging into the archives of imposing venues to see what they thought of something when it first came out. It got a starred review in Publishers Weekly in 1994 (thirty years ago, be still my beating heart), for the same translation Hutchinson is reading.

They write,

First published in 1900, the year of Quieros’s death, it portrays Goncalo Mendes Ramires, the latest in an aristocratic family that predates even the kings of Portugal. In the isolation of the gloomy ancient tower of Santa Ireneia, Goncalo rehearses the feats of derring-do of an uninterrupted line of ancestors whose most recent contribution is himself, “a graduate who had failed his third year examinations at university.”

Hoping to win some small scholarly reputation and thus secure a political future in the capital, Goncalo sets out to portray (a la Walter Scott), the adventures of one such ancestor. Installments recording the haughty courage and cruelty of his medieval forefather, Tructesindo Ramires, contrast with Goncalo’s rather banausic existence, his cowardice, his small acts of noblesse oblige and his questionable apotheosis.