The
Jamaican-born poet Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, “House of Lords and
Commons,” - whose title, according to New Yorker reviewer Dan Chiasson - recalls Shelley’s famous assertion that poets are
the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” is described as a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be
called “the grand style”: the timeless, high-literary idiom that nearly
anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as “poetry,”
based on its sound alone, and that nonplussed readers of contemporary
poetry sometimes say they miss.
Of course, the irony is that
timelessness itself can seem dated; modernism emerged in part to change
the acoustics within which lines of poetry were heard. Our ears changed,
and fewer and fewer poets of note wanted to make those old sounds.
There are analogues in nearly every art: modes and vocabularies that we
accept in the work of the past but which seem, in new work, like period
reënactment or, if the seams are exposed, like postmodern bricolage.
Here’s what Hutchinson’s version of timelessness, handed down, to some
extent, from the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, sounds like:
Noon ictus cooling the veranda’sfretwork, the child sits after his harpboning burlesque in the bower, his slitof gulls’ nerves silenced into hydrangea.Violet and roan, the bridal sun isopening and closing a window,filling a clay pot of coins with coins;candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milkboxes with horn petals snappingtheir iceberg-Golgotha crackle.
Hutchinson’s
lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next,
implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are
exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard “c”s, then “b”s and “p”s)
and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial
cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words
(“iceberg-Golgotha”). Occasionally, a severe misstep (“boning burlesque
in the bower”) undermines, by its clumsiness, the classicism that
surrounds it. For better or worse, lines like these, from “Prelude to
the Afternoon of a Faun,” act as though they’d never heard of prose, the
flat-footed bureaucrat trying to tame their airborne acrobatics.
Hutchinson,
who is thirty-three and teaches at Cornell, might be called a
post-post-colonial writer: his art, suspicious of top-down
institutions—including academia—finds in the impasto treatment of
sensory minutiae a protest against abstract authority. These poems might
be shimmed into a syllabus or buried in a casketlike journal article,
if they weren’t so punk-baroque and brat-belletristic. Professional
literary discourse often allegorizes human passion and conflict, in ways
that make the actual human secondary. But poets don’t want to be fodder
for panels and colloquia, and Hutchinson’s poems are oppositional and
disruptive, sometimes tauntingly so. “The Orator,” like Walt Whitman’s
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” is a poem about poetry itself,
its immediate purchase on the sublime, so much more powerful than
classroom circumlocution. A lecture on “Caribbean Culture” is delivered
by a “bore” who “was harping in dead metaphor / the horror of colonial
heritage.” Suddenly, a thunderstorm knocks out the lights, and the
lecturer now stands helpless in the dark:
. . . in the surprised blackness,his soul exposed, the façade recessed,I saw the face that curried Pelopsin the Antilles to straddle the ivory lapsof liberal, money-giving chapswith an itch for the unscripted Folkand Oral Tradition, a hot spokein his spinning radius unveilingthe veil of the shroud of the curtain,and with spectroscopic effect, he has dazzledall and proven to be ebony solid.
In
place of the orator’s “dead metaphor,” Hutchinson offers a handful of
live ones: this “tweeded rodent scholar” is a meretricious pedant who
“curried Pelops / in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps” like an
exotic dancer at a trustees’ meeting, as well as a kind of
Messiah-Wizard of Oz, “unveiling / the veil of the shroud of the
curtain,” and a sham Vegas magician dazzling the crowd with
“spectroscopic effect.” The poem baits us into comparing Hutchinson’s
own performance against this “wine-for-rum, / lectern-for- veranda, brilliant scum,” who’s brought low when the technology falters.
But
the orator is a pretty easy target, and Hutchinson’s vitriol (“scum,”
“rodent”) is comically excessive, his rhymes approaching drawing-room
doggerel
(“laps” and “chaps,” for instance). Not everything here is meant to be
apt, classic, or anthology-ready. The poem is marginal doodling of a
very high order, Miltonic graffiti that asserts its power by being at
once polished and rash. The orator is a sycophant, a parasite; at the
other end of the spectrum is the speaker of these brilliant lines from
“The Ark by ‘Scratch,’ ” a reggae Noah—probably Lee (Scratch) Perry, the
Jamaican performer—implored by a “genie” to “build a studio” from
cultural salvage and scrap:
The genie says build a studio. I builda studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slumthings. I alone when blood and bullet and allChrist-fucking-’Merican-dollar politicians talkthe pressure down to nothing, when the equator’sconfused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath.
The
poem describes its own construction, as one remarkable detail after
another is loaded into the “studio” to be preserved for postdiluvian
use. The speaker is Noah plus “Scratch” plus Hutchinson—which somehow,
by the end, adds up to Whitman, whose broad-chested boasts prefigure
Hutchinson’s: “I Upsetter, I Django / on the black wax, the Super Ape,
E.T., I cleared the wave.”
Hutchinson’s
wildness and his propriety are two sides of the same coin, two
expressions of a fundamentally dynastic sense of poetic tradition that
is passed down from literary father to son, and that arises partly,
these poems suggest, from the void left when Hutchinson’s real father
vanished. He is a poet of ambivalent homage, feinting but never feigned:
this is a form of aesthetic survival in a post-colonial situation,
where literary mastery and subjugation are, uncomfortably, closely
aligned. You can tell how good Hutchinson is because his poems are full
of misfires, phrases chosen by somebody with a hyperkinetic ear and no
off switch. Various famous proverbs of Blake’s come to mind, but here
the road to excess doesn’t, in every case, lead to the palace of wisdom.
Randall Jarrell once said of Hutchinson’s eminent predecessor, “Only a
man with the most extraordinary feel for language, or none whatsoever,
could have cooked up Whitman’s worst messes.” I could make a list of
Hutchinson’s messes: a funny sight “scythes your sides with laughter”;
after a hurricane, “government surveyors” go from shanty to shanty,
“accessing stunned fowls.” Phrases like these can be found on every
page. Hutchinson swings for the seats with every line; it’s only natural
that he sometimes whiffs.
But
there is also a quiet, chastened strain in “Hutchinson’s
language is an assembly of sorts, a parliament that distributes power
among the high and the low. This conscious yoking of “lords” and
“commons” (high and low subjects, high and low diction) is most
impressive when the rhetorical volume is turned down, as in “Girl at
Christmas,” the one flawless poem in this very promising book. Christmas
is a colonial imposition, a cornerstone of the system that made slavery
possible and poverty inevitable; but it is also the highlight of this
little Jamaican kid’s year, and its subjugations have simultaneously
been outed by and sublimated into song:
For all she’s gladdened: milk
dreaming love in one hand;
clefts of clementine stain
the other. They cannot die;
the coral joy and battering
ceramic, the peach bones
and scotch bonnet seeds;
the sorrel, and foil mask she then puts
on to belt her savage choir.
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