Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, among other honours.
School of Instructions 2024 Shortlist
Judges’ Citation
School of Instructions is a transcendent hybridic feast of a book, an innovative condensed epic comprising startling poetry, primary sources, Biblical naming and mapping, and a haunting trajectory of the British Empire’s Middle Eastern campaigns of WWI juxtaposed with 20th century Jamaica.
Primordial elementals are here: we are by the sea, in the desert, in the trenches, in the mind of a schoolchild discovering ‘natural’ history, in vibrant daily life, in anabasis of war, and studying the innocent volunteers going to disease and slaughter. School of Instructions is a transcendent hybridic feast of a book, an innovative condensed epic comprising startling poetry, primary sources, Biblical naming and mapping, and a haunting trajectory of the British Empire’s Middle Eastern campaigns of WWI juxtaposed with 20th century Jamaica. Hutchinson’s brilliant transmission is deeply intuitive and profound as scholarly and poetic gnosis—you feel instructed by the ongoing koan, coil, knot of colonialism ingrained with civilization.
Selected poems
by Ishion Hutchinson
They shovelled the long trenches day and night.
Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.
Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Hun bait mud. Mating mud.
1655 mud: white flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chilblain mud.
Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha mud. Amnesia mud.
Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud.
No-man’s-land’s-Everyman’s mud. And the smoking flax mud.
Dysentery mud. Septic sore mud. Hogpen mud. Nephritis mud.
Constipated mud. Faith mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud.
Sheol mud. Ir-ha-cheres mud. Ague mud. Asquith mud. Parade mud.
Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.
Mene mene tekel upharsin mud. Civil war mud.
And darkness and worms will be their dwelling place mud.
Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.
Canaan the unseen, as promised, saw mud.
They resurrected new counterkingdoms,
by the arbitrament of the sword mud.
Copyright © 2023 by Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions, Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus & Giroux
“They shovelled the long trenches day and night.”
The battalion proceeded to MILLO to fortify the old city
walls. In the middle of a marl road snaking between
tall canes Godspeed met Pipecock Jackxon wearing a
necklace of two flattened Coca-Cola corks sweat stuck
to his chest. Urim and Thummim he called them. Seven
John crows flagged out of SOKHO when he strung the
corks around the boy’s neck.
Then to the clashing silver green sound of the canes he said:
“I Pipecock Jackxon Jack Lightning Jesse the Hammer
Lee Scratch Perry Daniel Dandelion the Lion I am the
flying fish. I boom Death and I boom debts and I bust
bets and I win bets and I sin Death and I kill Death with
my fate lock. Behold! I conquer Hell with my Merry
Christmas bells. I am a walking talking time boom.
Dandelion the King of ZION.”
Copyright © 2023 by Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions, Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus & Giroux
LI
The sun smote him by night. He was writing a letter to his
father in ENGLAND: “Dear . . .” the stars mirrored what
he wrote but kept their distance. He shook his jam jar
of fireflies blinky blinks and heard heavy cannonade
blasting from the direction of HEREIRA. Bursting shells
danced on the ridges behind ATAWINEH REDOUBT. He
remembered that BELLAM was BETHLEHEM pitching
between alms and lust. But he couldn’t remember if Jesus
was of NAZARETH or of BETHLEHEM or of GALILEE.
A lateral skanking natty dread at the bus depot in
GOLDEN GROVE told the boy that Jesus was of no
place but here and touched his chest.
It was around this time No. 2292 Pte. Herbert Morris aged
17 was executed for desertion by firing squad composed
of 7 WEST INDIAN soldiers and 3 white soldiers. His
soul fled to MIDIAN accordingly.
Copyright © 2023 by Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions, Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus & Giroux
XXXVI
- Ishion Hutchinson’s Website
- “I can hear a poem before it arrives”: Interview The Guardian
- Ishion Hutchinson speaks about School of Instructions T. S. Eliot Prize