What’s in a Name?: An Interview with Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson is the winner of the 2025 Rilke Prize for his book-length poem, School of Instructions. His other collections include House of Lords and Commons from 2016 and Far District from 2010, as well as a recent essay collection, Fugitive Tilts. His awards and honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica he is currently the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.
Interview conducted by Danny Daw
This interview took place over Zoom on November 5th, 2025.
Danny Daw: I wanted to start by following up with something you said during the Rilke Prize Q&A at UNT. You mentioned there that you want your poems to stand on their own without the need for context or over explanation, that the lines should carry their own “magic” through their language. Do you have an “Ishion Hutchinson litmus test” for magic in a poem? Or perhaps, what are the ways you most try to capture that sensation in your own work?
Ishion Hutchinson: As readers of poetry, I think we all have that moment when the fine hairs on the back of our necks stand up reading a certain line or phrase. There are those moments in a poem when sometimes you encounter something so fantastic that you do then believe in what Emily Dickinson says about knowing something is poetry when it takes the top of your head off. I’ve experienced that. And as poets—meaning as students and practitioners of poetry who are hopefully humble vessels to carry this massive, elusive yet ineluctable thing into the world—we can’t always know what exactly to do to be the bearers of it. It’s a matter of experiment and trying, trying, and trying.
DD: That certainly rings true to my experience, that necessity of continuing and rearranging and just seeing what will eventually feel right.
IH: Yes. When you are someone who has borne witness to the effects of poetry, who reads it closely and is a student of it, you figure out different ways to create the poem, different ways to work on it and inhabit a language that hopefully brings forth the thing that you experience when you read the poems that most disturb you or help you to live your life. I consider too that sort of Rilkean value that the end of poetry is to praise, to be able to say “this thing is beautiful,” that kind of simplicity and it being true and irreducible, unable to be put any other way. Essentially this is what life is: there are so many things about being alive that makes it truly the most amazing experience; you feel so lucky to be the person you are because of the things in life that anchor you to a certain happiness. And one wants to celebrate that. In the end, I try to be a good student of language and hope that results in the poem I write becoming its own intrinsic existence that doesn’t even need me. That somehow, by it becoming a thing that is realized and fully itself, it contains the creator—if I could call myself that; it contains the person who put the language together, but it’s also completely independent of them.
DD: That’s a lovely idea, especially that invocation of Rilke. And it’s not lost on me that School of Instructions also ends with the directive to praise, so I can definitely see that idea working through you.
IH: Yes; I think so. I hope so.
DD: In the spirit of self-reflection, and for someone like myself who is still relatively early on in my own poetic life, I’m always interested in the evolution of a poet. How do you think your own poetry has evolved from your first book of poems until now in terms of music, artfulness, and thrust? Another question I would pair with that: do you even conceive of your artistic evolution this way, or is it more: “I do what’s right for the book and the poems within it?”
IH: It’s equally both. First, if we’re to take a book literally as a text that moves forward from page 1 to page 80, it’s a bit of a given that it has to be constructed along a perhaps superficial continuum, considering the physical object of the book itself and how it works in that sense. But there’s also what a book signifies: the concept or conceit of a book is that it is something where you turn the page and you experience what’s on that page and this happens for a certain number of pages, so the poet is curating towards the singularity of that experience. That means making a lot of decisions and being very conscious about making them towards that end. Sometimes when you’ve made those decisions, you immediately want to correct them, and other times you don’t quite get it out as you have it in your mind or imagination, but it’ll have to do for that moment. When making a book, there is that kind of external pressure to curate it, realizing that it is now an object that will be read or experienced by others, so it has to be shaped at least somewhat with an audience in mind. An individual poem for me, though, does not emerge with some sort of idea of a particular audience or the thought of the whole book, even, in mind. I’m much more at that point invested in seeing what I’m capable of with language and what this thing is when it’s in that stage of becoming, in being as alive and receptive as I can be to its journey into the world.
DD: I’m with you so far, and I’m very drawn to the idea of approaching the writing of a poem as a test of a poet’s abilities with language. A way to gauge where you are as an artist at that moment.
IH: When a poet talks this way though, it’s easy to sound very mystical about these sorts of processes of writing, but in some ways it’s unavoidable when talking about the making of poetry not to become a bit mystical about that process because there are things one trusts: the evidence of language being one, how to make a good image, how to make the music memorable, the work that you pour into the shaping of the poem…but all of that can be undone by the simple question: where does this poem come from? There’s a literalizing way to answer that where one could simply say “it came from me, from my experience of life” or others might say “it was given by some higher spirit” and that ends the argument. But I sometimes feel very skeptical about those responses because being a poet myself, being around many poets, and reading closely the poetry that I’ve read my entire life, I’m more convinced that poets aren’t always conscious about this evolution of their own poetics. Yes, you might consciously identify what you’ve done in one book and decide that you’re going to do something else because you’re bored with what you’ve been doing, for instance, or you just know as a poet you want to be continuously experimenting with the material at hand: language. The material that matters most. But that has to then be put into the crucible of poetics and different traditions or conventions, which are many!
DD: Right, and that’s when things can certainly get tricky or require immense patience and discipline.
IH: Yes. Many poets have said over the last two centuries that there’s nothing free about free verse. There’s absolutely a commitment that the poet makes with language and craft and technique. Whether those techniques and so on reflect the traditions in which the poet is writing out of may not always be the case though; the poet is trying to become an individual, but not an isolated individual. We all share the same language. The only thing absolutely special about the poet is, of course, the way in which the poet writes: the inspired type of making of their own poetry that gives the poem a kind of singularity. So, I can see the differences across the books that I’ve written, but even so my approach to writing has been the same since I was a young teenager. Luckily—or perhaps unluckily—I was introduced to poetry in a certain way, to cherish it as something sacred. So, when I’m working on a poem, there is a feeling of giving myself over to a kind of worship. That’s the best way to explain that feeling I have in the act of writing, and I’ve had that feeling ever since I started to seriously treat poetry as a vocation. Even now, it’s very much the core feeling I carry. There’s a sort of difference in temperament across the work because of the different ways in how I’ve changed in my life as a person, but as far as a certain way of returning to the blank page, it’s been the same since I started.
DD: As you spoke, I was struck by how you started moving towards the idea of “making.” I love the idea of poetry as something built, made with your hands, your mind, your mouth…
IH: Oh, everything!
DD: Yes, it can be a kind of full-body experience, I think! But there were a couple elements that went into the making of the book that I felt really fascinated by, and one of those things was the book’s preoccupation with names and naming. I love what you said at the Rilke Q&A: that when you were doing your archival research for the book, you found a kind of power in the matter-of-fact way that the officers’ reports and other official materials you engaged with would name the fallen as a way to acknowledge that these soldiers did really exist. But there’s this terrific energy too in the names of the “modern-day” characters: Godspeed, Horace, Pipecock Jackxon, Count Lasher—and I especially love Count Lasher’s name for how instructive it is in teaching us how to understand him through Godspeed’s eyes. Could you say more about what your preoccupation with naming was in the book, and what do you see as the primary artistic or even rhetorical function that it serves in this poem?
IH: With School of Instructions, the obsession with naming is certainly more charged than in my other books, but naming and calling things by their names is perhaps one of the most consistent things in the wheelhouse of my poetry. There are different ways to account for that. One is that I first encountered poetry as an act or art of naming; the way in which names of things and people were used in the poems I was introduced to as a young reader surprised me. At first, I thought, “this shouldn’t be!” I thought poetry was some sort of thing on high, where if a name was used, it probably could only be the name of God. So, seeing names used in poems—and especially people’s names—just struck a chord of great humility in me. Without anybody telling me, I recognized that if a poem is some sort of tool for language to be elevated, then names being used means that the poem is striving to elevate them. I was fascinated seeing the name of a person in a poem because it said to me that a person is worthy of being memorialized or commemorated in this way.
DD: That’s a really beautiful notion, and certainly rings true. Not just what you say about names themselves, but a poem’s relationship to them.
IH: A poem—as I learned and still do think—is a sort of memory system, and a profound one at that. That form of memorializing is a form of insisting on the sanctity and holiness of life and of having lived a life as an individual. So, calling attention to a name is to summon the individual or to give credence to that individual’s life. When you put this in the context of a colonial background where names like those of my ancestors who were trafficked from Africa were erased and new names were imposed upon them—upon my ancestors and subsequently myself—it leaves one with a certain sense that naming is crucial to an entire emancipatory politics or practice. In the case of School of Instructions, so many of the names belong to people I didn’t know, of course, but I felt that including the names in the way that I did throughout the book was a kind of emancipatory act itself too.
DD: That’s very illuminating, even as a reading tool for the book itself. It makes me want to go back and look at those names once more. But I enjoyed hearing you discuss your experience engaging with the work of other poets and seeing how they used naming in their poems. That actually brings me back to another element of making that I noticed throughout the book, and that’s all the intertextual elements that seem to constantly pop up throughout the book. Certainly, David Jones’ In Parenthesis is a crucial one, but there’s also Horace, Wilfred Owen, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Homer, let alone the Bible! The book feels very deliberate in its construction all the way through, and I’m curious what drew you to the intertextual elements in particular and how you envision these as key building materials for your poem?
IH: One response is clearly that these are some of the poets and that this is the kind of poetry I’m most drawn to. You mentioned David Jones, and my book pays a lot of homage to Jones in particular both stylistically and because his work across the board, even when it doesn’t explicitly have to do with the Great War, always has it looming in the background. My predilection for these types of poets is also to be blamed on my educational background. They were introduced early and I just absolutely fell in love with their work. I started to revisit many of these poets because of the particular project of School of Instructions: a book that deals with West Indian soldiers in war. I’m careful not to say “a war book” myself the way that David Jones would have; people who have experienced war and made their account of it in poetry certainly are war poets, and I wouldn’t dare to say the same about myself. If anything, I am a belated, belated witness to this history which has such a great effect on our contemporary world, and I mean that too in regards to Jamaica, which I hadn’t realized before. But I felt a certain duty to revisit and reread those poets, and they actually pointed me towards new poets! There are many, many poets here that I’m alluding to where the allusions are completely lost and tangled in this dense web that’s difficult to unravel. But that’s something allusion does: once you start to allude, it’s a way of trying to enter into a conversation with these long-dead but nonetheless very present writers.
DD: What about the influence of Jamaican music and the country’s musicians? References to these are also permeating throughout the book. How did they help give your poem its shape?
IH: It’s very difficult to explain or pinpoint everything that explains my prosody because some of it I’m not always privy to myself. But if I had to identify one of the conceptual prosodies that dominate School of Instructions, it would be the form of Jamaican music called “Dub,” which is instrumental music heavy on drum and bass. So, there’s a thickness with the sort of wide emptiness that is fused into this type of music. It’s like hearing the sea, hearing its expanse and depth, hearing what you cannot see when you look out at the Caribbean Sea. When you look out on it, you’re witnessing this incredible, mighty environment that’s overwhelming in its beauty on a clear day, but even overwhelming in its beauty on an unclear day: the mighty churning of waves on a rainy day where you can hear the crash of the waters. Derek Walcott has a very simple phrase that expresses what Caribbean people feel from the sea: “The sea is history.” And the sea moves in different tones: sometimes it’s dramatic and chaotic and violent, but other times it’s very quiet and gentle. Especially in the context of colonial history, I think many Caribbean people feel affected by the sea in a “primal” way because it’s a source and site of one’s origin with a lot of unresolved tensions around that origin. It’s very difficult to express why and what it is that one experiences when in front of the sea—or even when not in front of it! It feels always there. It can be benign and comforting or haunting and terrifying. That is the music I try to flood School of Instructions with: the music of the sea at different pitches.
DD: That explanation in itself is beautiful and quite haunting, but feels very fitting. I found myself entranced by the book’s music over and over, and even now almost a month after reading the book, so many of the sonic elements—sounds, lines, and phrases—are still turning themselves around in my mind and ear. I’ll ask one final question: when we last spoke, you said to me “I will never write another book like this again.” Could you just elaborate a little more on that feeling? And where do you feel yourself being pulled lately now that you’re a little further away from this book?
IH: Well, poets like to say things like “I’ll never do this or that…” It may have been a bit of an overstatement or said too quickly! In saying “a book like this,” I mainly mean that I don’t see myself reengaging with the tropes of this book. I suppose I feel that now that the book is done, I’m pleased enough to walk away from it and feel I have no need to return to the character of Godspeed and certain other concerns of the book. Would I write another book dealing with West Indian soldiers in World War I? No. But if the chance came, maybe via commission like it did for this book, that required me to engage with something I didn’t know much about, that could be exciting and I would be very open to it.
DD: That makes sense to me. Well, whatever comes next for you, I’ll be excitedly reading it! Thank you again so much for our time, and congratulations once again on winning the Rilke Prize for your wonderful book!
Danny Daw is the Interviews & Reviews Editor for American Literary Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review, Inscape Journal and elsewhere. Originally from Idaho Falls, Idaho, he lives in Denton, Texas with his spouse and fellow writer, Alexandra Malouf, where he is a PhD candidate and Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas.