On Wednesday, November 12th, Bennington College welcomed poet and essayist Ishion Hutchinson to read for the final installment in the Poetry at Bennington series. He read excerpts from his collection School of Instructions: A Poem.
Hutchinson is the author of three books of poetry: House of Lords and Commons (FSG, 2016), Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2020), and most recently, School of Instructions: A Poem (FSG, 2023). He is a former Guggenheim fellow, and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among other honors. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he currently teaches at Cornell University as a W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities.
His most recent collection, School of Instructions: A Poem, is a narrative account of West Indian soldiers in World War I that overlaps with the experience of Godspeed, a schoolchild in the rural Jamaica of the ‘90s. The poems serve as elegiac, a poetry of lyric precision. Hutchinson cites “In Parenthesis” by David Jones as an inspiration. It is a poetic account of the atrocities of the First World War, and the linguistic texture is informed by biblical themes. During the reading, Hutchinson touched on topics such as the recent Category 5 hurricane in Jamaica. His reading was repetitive, lyrical, loud. He did not take questions.
The next literature evening is a reading by novelist Katie Yee ‘17. The next installment in the Poetry at Bennington series is Wednesday, February 25, with a reading from poet Cathy Linh Che.
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