Ishion Hutchinson, 40, is an original, innovative and fastidious poet whose third collection, School of Instructions, about West Indian volunteer soldiers fighting in the British army in the Middle East during the first world war, has been nominated for the 2023 TS Eliot prize. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Hutchinson comes across as a high-flying autodidact of exceptional energy, responsiveness and warmth. After attending university in Jamaica, he went on to do a master’s at New York University and now teaches poetry on Cornell University’s creative writing programme.
How did School of Instructions come about?
It was originally commissioned by the British poet Karen McCarthy Woolf in response to the Imperial War Museum archives and in preparation for the 100th anniversary celebratiions of the end of world war one. It was intended to look into the participation of Caribbean soldiers in that war. A practical, direct commission. I’d thought that once I’d gone to the archives, I’d find a document, see what interested me about it and write a poem. But something happened – a whole new world opened up – which has, over subsequent years, become School of Instructions.
What was your most striking discovery at the Imperial War Museum?
A war journal by a white British officer writing about black soldiers in the Middle East. It was dry writing, with plain observations, but each time the diary mentioned by name a black West Indian soldier, it triggered something in me. The fact that the officer was doing his duty, in this very fraught moment, writing out their names was an intimate way of saying: “This man is here” – and that really touched me. It stayed with me for a very long time. A lot of names in the poem came from there.
The book is extraordinarily powerful, partly because of the way you collapse time: a schoolboy growing up in Jamaica in the 1990s merges with the first world war narrative – how did you hit upon the form?
Through my love of modernist poets: TS Eliot, of course, but David Jones was a big influence – In Parenthesis was a collapsing of time, focused on one day on the Somme. It’s a Joycean idea as well – that a single day could contain a life. I didn’t know a lot about the West Indian participation in world war one. It was a hidden history to me. When something comes to you fresh, you want to deal with it freshly. Looking at archival material, I identified with the images of West Indian soldiers in their uniforms; it felt like a shock of recognition, and I’ve been trying to blend my own experience of growing up in Jamaica with those soldiers about whom nothing is known.
I loved the poem’s sound effects (“blinky blink fireflies”) and the playful ambition of the language throughout, including statelier moments such as your wonderful phrase “a red-letter day of sorrow”. Was it a challenge moving between formal and informal registers?
I keep my attention sharply focused on the patternings I’ve created. I follow them almost by instinct. I can hear the poem before it arrives. There is repetition, too, an insistence on hearing and rehearing. I grew up with Jamaican music and wanted to have dub – which is the double layering of a phrase – as part of the texture of the language. Jamaican history is fraught with paradoxes. The present is messy and I felt language had to dive right into that messiness.
Can you describe your upbringing in Port Antonio? Is the book’s diligent schoolboy, “Godspeed”, a self-portrait? And was that your nickname too?
I had a happy boyhood in Port Antonio. I lived with my grandmother in a house by the sea. I spent a lot of time in the library reading encylopedias because, somehow, knowledge and the search for knowledge was important to me from an early age. I was encouraged by people around me, particularly by my grandmother.
The school had a British colonial character and punishment was used to instruct. It’s ironic you should go to school for instruction and be forced into a punitive environment that becomes very difficult to escape, but which is a necessary route towards a better life. Godspeed is a mixture of people, partly based on my personality, but is what Eliot described as a “compound ghost”. And no, I never had a nickname, which is unusual for a Jamaican – I escaped that!
At what age did you write your first poem and what was it about?
The first thing I called a poem was written when I was 15 – about a suicide in my home town: a man who hung himself. I’d never heard of someone taking their own life… It was a teacher who told me it was “a poem”.
Did you ever meet Derek Walcott and was he an influence?
He was very generous to me. When I launched my first book, Far District, in St Lucia, he drove me to the launch and was very worried we were going to be late. He always wanted to be ready, to be prepared.
It was unsettling to stumble on Gaza in your poem. How does it make you feel, that link between then and now, life’s way of following art?
Oh God, it’s heartbreaking what is happening in Gaza – the horror of it, it’s terrifying… In the first world war, West Indian soldiers were seen as cannon fodder in the British armies. They were not treated as equals and not allowed to bear arms, even though they were soldiers. The only place they saw action and fought was the Middle East – in the landscape of Gaza, Palestine, Syria and what is now Israel. They were in combat but also doing what they did in Europe, which was mostly service work, digging trenches, carrying weapons. And, yes, we are all haunted by history…
To what extent is poetry a consciousness raiser?
Poetry sharpens our engagement with language, makes us rethink, rewire our relationship with words. We are animals of language; it is how we are connected and how we communicate.
Which poet has been most important to you and why?
I never travel without Shakespeare. It protects me; it is a shield against the overwhelming pressures of the world.
Which poet would you give to a young person yet to be convinced that poetry was worth reading?
EE Cummings is a great gateway drug because he has a sharp ear for the inner music of language.
What book might people be surprised to see on your shelves?
Robert Louis Stevenson – I have all his work. I loved Treasure Island when I was young, was obsessed with that book to the point where I thought I’d memorised it all. I loved it so much.
What’s the best book you’ve ever been given as a present?
Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch – a book I reread every autumn.
What are you going to read next?
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad is sitting on my desk.
• School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
