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“No one has said anything mean, so that’s been great,” chuckles poet Ishion Hutchinson, when I ask him how his debut prose collection has been received. Fugitive Tilts features almost 30 essays that began life as book forewords, lectures and magazine pieces and whose subjects range widely in space and time.
From encountering Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island aged 11 while “curled in a chair on the veranda of [his] grandmother’s house” overlooking the Caribbean Sea, to the strategies and influence of Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott and George Seferis, via passages to Senegal and university, Hutchinson’s reflections on art and life are at once sharp and soft, and feel driven by a sense of openness to the world and how it might enrich us.
Hutchinson is the author of three poetry books — Far District (2010), House of Lords and Commons (2016) and School of Instructions (2023) — that have won him a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Windham-Campbell Prize. But Fugitive Tilts is “not a move from poetry to prose”, he says. “I’ve always written some prose . . . This is an experiment in testing out a form that I have long admired, and wanting to try it in different ways . . . Shaping the book was in some sense a return to the earliest form of writing that I ever did.”
Such experimentation demands a different approach, Hutchinson believes, contrasting the “external” pressure of prose with the “added, inward” pressure of verse and the different sorts of logic that emerge from both. “The poem takes shape simultaneously vertically and horizontally, and it is lines that propel the poem in most cases,” he says. “But in prose, the sentence demands a kind of cohesiveness that sometimes lyric poets simply don’t have.”
“The poem is a structure and an ordering of sounds. I don’t ever know where it’s going to go, and while poets can be a little too emphatic about this, where the poem ends on the page isn’t the end of the poem,” he adds. “In prose there has to be a greater sense-making . . . there are things I want to say, and there’s a finishedness in terms of coming to understand a subject that you’ve explored.”
Born in Port Antonio in north-east Jamaica in 1983, Hutchinson picked up books (which came close to “sacred objects” because of their scarcity, he says) “to shield [himself] from chores at home” and was “fortunate to grow up not only with writing out of England but also the Caribbean”. Walcott, who evoked the Antilles as “fragments of epic memory”, recurs in Fugitive Tilts, while other essays broach the Trinidad-born (and Walcott antagonist) VS Naipaul, Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris and the Jamaican Claude McKay, who shuttled between poetry and prose as well as Europe and the US.
Yet it is Treasure Island, published 100 years before his birth, that is cast as foundational: in the book Hutchinson terms it “a three-dimensional map, simultaneously pointing me to myself, by taking me out of myself and literally toward the landscape I knew”. Three decades on and living in New York, he is fully aware of its imperially inflected worldview. But as a child, he says, “there was never any question about my identity as a Black person or as a Jamaican, or even more emphatically as a person of African descent, so that kind of security in reading meant I could read anything and absorb it and not feel that I was less than”. Although texts of yore might be considered “problematic” nowadays, “in the English canon what would I read, if I were to start there?” he adds. “Reading will always be a grappling with history.”
As the WEB Du Bois professor in the humanities at Cornell University, Hutchinson has witnessed fighting of an unprecedented kind in recent months with the assault by the Trump administration on higher education and international students. Cornell was hit with a more than $1bn federal funding freeze in March, and on campus “everybody is trying to figure out what the future will be like,” says Hutchinson, noting that he has “become much more vigilant in [his] teaching” by encouraging “fearless learning”. In response to the “erosion [that] is coming from all sides,” he adds, “you do what you’ve always done, but there is an extra push to make it clear to students that this moment is extremely precious.”
As for what lies in store for literature and the humanities, Hutchinson — who is keen to “escape this weird world of prose” so that he can finish The Mariner’s Progress, a new poetry book — jokes that how he feels “depends on what side of the bed I wake up on in the morning”. But he adds: “Poetry is still a very alive art form in our world. It could have gone away at any point in the long history of our world, but yet here it is. It will outlast this moment.”
‘Fugitive Tilts: Essays’ is published by Mack Books/FSG. Franklin Nelson is an FT writer and editor
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