 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the year's last lunch ponds. It's amazingly, it's flown past. Thank you all for making it. And we hope to preemptively see you in the fall again. But, you know, it's your participation, your attendance has made it a remarkable season. Thank you for your forbearance and being here and supporting us. We're very lucky today to welcome Ishan Hutchinson to close us out. Before we get going, I'll ask you to silence your cell phones if they're not. And I want to extend our thanks, as always, to the Berkeley Library, whose support makes this all possible, especially Amber and our student workers, to Callie from Pegasus Books, who has Ishan's most recent collection for sale over there. Also, thank you Callie, support the poet, support the bookstore. And two poets and writers, who is in part cosponsoring this event today. For me, to read Ishan Hutchinson's poems is to wonder through a text whose intricacies may at first elude me, to snag on an edge of beauty, to read again. It is to let my ear be guided by the rise and fall of meters before the eye catches up, and so to hear the formal dignity of sense made before I am able to quite parse the syntax. Hearing the poems aloud, I seem to enter as an active participant into the sensory welter of Jamaican place, the pain of serious thought, and the shattered forest of elegy. What Hutchinson has said of Milton, Milton's restless, serious grammar, applies beautifully to his own verse. Hutchinson wrote, Instead of finding yourself outside, you find yourself within the language in a rousing wave that riles and delivers on a layered plateau. You're never safely one place or the other. When he speaks about being between places, I hear an echo of what I understand to be Hutchinson's own position. A quote such as this helps me see the instability that backdrops the masterful solidity of Hutchinson's formal music. Both that flux and solidity come through in the title poem of his forthcoming collection, The Mariner's Progress, which stages a journey through the alien grandeur of the English tradition, a journey as charmed and surreal as the ancient mariners to which it eludes. In the poem, bladed lines of Jamaican sugarcane blur into the lines of poetry that define the speaker so entirely that he, quote, seems to himself a broad antelion echo lost in the marrow wings of a pelican or an albatross cloud remnant tassled low flyer beneath the radar of the wind. I hear how the anxiety in echo or remnant, how the bird seen morphs into the literary bird, the albatross, and yet how the speaker's sheer eloquence keeps at once dispelling these concerns, even as each new word remembers other's speech. It may be that in poetry we can, unlike in life, choose to a degree our ancestors. If so, Hutchinson carries forward voices from Homer to Homeros that sing of underworld descents, forsaken armies, homeless mariners. Commanding that deracinated tradition so powerfully, he makes of its weightless materials a sturdy home. But one can't live only among shadows, the opposite. I find Hutchinson's work so powerful because of the webs of literary reference, which lead the poems abroad, are balanced by the deep gravity of the home one can't choose or make, the Jamaican lives and landscape that are his recurrent subjects. And it seems to me that the gap between these culturally disenfranchised subjects and the high style Hutchinson so often elevates them into is the source of much of his poetry's pathos. I hear this in the title, for instance, of House of Lords and Commons, not Houses of Lords and Commons, a singular, which collapses the two distinct hierarchies, Lords, Commons into one. It doesn't refuse the binary, it doesn't deny that Lords and Commons, but rather erasing a single letter, twist the language to bring the two terms into close destabilizing proximity. In Hutchinson's hands, the spirit of inclusion and the ennoblement that comes from intoning common lives in the language of Lords is a twilight gesture. This book is a work of almost universal elegy, and its acts of naming are also acts of interment. Fitzie, J. Maxwell, Beryl Mouth, Aunt May, Pierre Powell, Principal William, Miss Rose, Pete, Mr. Kildear, Leopold Dice, Isabel Garcia, Sweet May. Sometimes we know these people's life stories, but more often we don't. Just as sometimes Hutchinson's winding syntax guides us and sometimes evades. In both cases, the linguistic sharpness and the tonal tenderness reassure us even when we can't follow, and we recognize at the border of sound and sense what we can know and what we don't need to. We mourn these people even as we respect their privacy, their right to opacity. Ishten Hutchinson is the author of four books of poetry and a forthcoming book of prose, all from FSG and Faber. He is the recipient of the Brodsky Rome Prize, of the Wintem Campbell Award, and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Fourth coming most soonest, our School of Instruction this fall, Fugitive Tilts, The Year After, Book of Prose, and Mariners Progress 25, I believe. An honor to welcome Ishten Hutchinson. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Thank you, Noah. It's actually weird to say good afternoon. Now I see it. You do come to a lunchtime to listen to poems. You have to see it to believe it. Thank you for that very generous introduction, Noah. I was listening and sinking more and more into my sofa chair because it sounds like a very grave and serious young man. I'm trying to recognize him, but I believe it is certainly the case that I take this voyage into poetry very seriously and take none of it for granted because of the weight of history, both growing up in Jamaica and knowing the violent history that comes with that, but also the violence too of canon. And seeing that my work as a poet in part is to figure out what sort of emancipatory forces I should summon. Luckily, I stand in great shoulders within the Caribbean tradition of many poets and writers that I admire and envy and wish they hadn't been born. Don't tell them that. This isn't recorded, of course. I will read the title poem of the collection House of Lords in Common. And the poem is titled The Lords and Commons of Summer. I should tell you that a summer here should be a pun on summer, Babylonian city and civilization. When I told a friend of mine that that's where, you know, that's what I was thinking about, he outright laughed at me and we're no longer friends. I thought it was such a nice play on summer, summer. I circled half mad a dead azalea scent that framed my room. I licked anointed oil off a sardine tin, opened bean and thyme, perplexed myself. Then picked up and blew a claybird whistle. Silence came scratching the same way it did at the funeral of Heidegger when no silence came. When my boy self played seance in the Spanish needles, havoc in the bees, their bronze staining my shanks, rain pistils sprung out of the earth and buried glass splinters under my clothed line. Vivaldi and Tangerine below the early winter moon minting its double over the city axled down in the buried seas lilac silver trimming my windows wick with the fierce, fast and low rustle of lions out of a russeted ice flow, a furnace in my father's voice. I prayed for the cold stove's roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle on fire in the harbor we never walked. Father and son, father drifting down the ferned hell is shanty shun, where inside in my head the lamp was the lamp, the market, the park, the library, not a soul but grandmother's morning wash lifting towards heaven, her flapping winding sheets, the barrister son punished my sister. I stared at my hand in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth, a hawk's scream tied all the hills together. My little earth shaker visored in placenta, wonder of wonders, tremulous in aminotic shield and sold already, father in the veritable night without house or harbor, soon see in a voice will harrow a scorpion's blaze in me to the marrow. At night, birds hammered my unborn child's heart. Each strike bringing bones and spine to glow, her lungs pestled loud as the sea I was raised as sea and nominee. Among women who cursed their hearts out, soured themselves, never brides into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy, anvil black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled from colchis, and I rejoiced like a broken asylum to see burning sand grains, skittering ice, shekels clapped in my chest. I smashed my head against a light bulb and light sprinkled my hair. I rejoiced, a poetry hit by the sun in the room. A man, a man, the sky is loaded with ore. The mountains, the mountains are lingering on the threshold, luminous with the valley's pollution. A late transport shimmers and I shimmer too. This is one of the holy cities of America. Holy banks, mortuaries, holy cafes, a golden angel descends in the middle of three javelin spires. Then I see poised, rife-like in the snow on the sifted avenue, muscles released from chair scurril. A herd of darkness gathers the passage onto Shiloh, where the lord of summer lives, kindling a cold fire. And now for something light-hearted. I promise that will never happen. This is called the garden. And in some ways it is an invocation of something that happened in Jamaica in 2008, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, where police forces went down into a community called Tivoli Gardens to extradite a criminal or alleged criminal that the U.S. wanted to have extradited to the States. And for that reason the community was shut down and became, in a sense, a police state within Jamaica. But what the poem is really after is trying to get as much of the names of plants from the botanical garden in Kingston. So one of the things that the colonial forces did when they would come to places and take over, that they would create gardens in cities, botanical gardens. And as if it wasn't enough to settle one place, that they had to bring stuff from other plants from other places and create these gardens. And I think those plants themselves have great significance to understanding the history of colonialism, but also speaks to the present. Whatever that might mean, now or the recent past. The garden. The streetlights shed pearls that night. Stray dogs ran but did not bark at the strange shadows. The minister of all could not sleep. Mosquito swarmed around his net, his portrait, and his pitcher and drinking glass. The flags stiffened on the embassy building, but did not fall when the machine guns flared and reminded that stars were inside the decrypt towns in shanty zinc holes staring at the fixed constellation. Another asthmatic whirl of pistons passed. The chandelier fell. The carpet sparkled. Flames burst into the lantern bushes. The stone horse, winnied by the bank's marble entrance. Three large cranes with search lights lit the poncianas. A quiet flamboyant struck with the fever of children's laughter. Then, all at once, the cabbage palms and the bull hoof trees shot their fans. The harbor grew empty and heavy. The sea was sick and exhausted. The royal palms did not salute when the jeeps roamed up the driveway and circled the fountain. The blue moho did not bow and the lignum vitae shed purple bugles but did not surrender. The homeless did not run, but the dead flew in a silver stream that night. Their silk hair thundered and their heels crushed the busy nuts and ceramic roofs. The night had the scent of cut grass sprayed with poison. The night smelled of bullets. The moon did not hide. The prisoners prayed in their bunkers. The baby drank milk while its mother slept and by the window, its father could not part the curtains. After the hurricane, after the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets of government surveyors looking into ruthless shacks, assessing stunt falls, noting inquiries into the logic of feathers, reversed like gullies still retching. They scribble facts about fallen cedars spread out like dead generals on leaf medallions. They draw tables to show the shore as rearrange its idea of beauty for the resort villas miraculously not rattled by the hurricanes, call it cyclops, passage through the lives of children and pigs. The one eye that unhooked banjos from the hills smashed them in Rio Valley. They record how it howled off to that dark parish St. Thomas, stumping drunk with wire lashes and cramps, paralyzing electric poles and coconut trees, dishing discard among neighbors exposed, standing among their flattened scattered lives for the first time. It passed through Aunt May's head, upsetting the furniture, left her chattering something across between a fowl and a child. They can't say how it tore down her senses, no words packing their instruments, flies returning to genuflect at their knees on Aunt May's face gone soft, no words, except no threat driving off as if they had left better promises to come like most of you, I like to vacation in Italy. The first time I visited Florence, just as a student, I was studying in America and went as a student and just had no money to go into the museums and so on, but just to be outside the building felt like it was enough. And so this poem begins with that sort of meditation, then circles back to Jamaica. And it's called Bicycle Eclog. You know it is in Italy, if you park an old bicycle on a wall, it suddenly becomes art, right? So Bicycle Eclog. That red bicycle left in an alley near the Ponte Vecchio, I claim. I claim it's elongated shadow, ship crested on stacked crates. I claim the sourmouth Arnold and the stone arch bending sunlight on a vanished medieval fares. But mostly, I claim this two-wheel chariot, stretching on the wall. It's sickle fenders reaping dust and pollen off the heat-congested city, coiled to a halt in traffic. And I, without enough for the great museums, I'm struck by the red under-weathered brick, new tires on cobble, the bronze tulip bell smaller than Venus' nose, turned up against the river, completely itself for itself. The scar in my palm throbs, recalling a tiny stone one stuck there after I fell off the district's iron mule, well-dead by the local artisan Beryl Mouth, no relation of butter-chelly. The summer of my first long pants. The doctor's scissors probing my flesh didn't hurt, nor the lifeline bust open when the stone was plucked out. What I wailed for that afternoon was the anger in my mother's face when she found out I had disobeyed her simple wish to remain indoors until she returned from kneeling in the harvested cane, tearing out the charred roots from the earth after cane cutters had slashed the burnt field. It was her first day and her last, bowing so low to pull enough for my school fee. For again, the promised money didn't fall from my father's cold heaven in England. As we walked to the clinic on a rabble of hog plums, her mouth trembled in her soot frock, my palm reddened in her grip, plum scent taking us through the lane. By the time we saw the hospital's rusty gate, her fist was stained to my finger's curl, and when I unfastened my eyes from the ground to her face, gazing ahead, terribly calm in the hail of sunlight, a yellow shawl around her head, something of shame became clear, and if I had more sense as my blood darkened to sorrow at the age of 12 or 13, I would have forgotten the sting and ride it tighter my hold before letting her go. And now, as I raised my camera, bells charged the pigeon's sky braced by the Duomo, a shell falling from the sun. I kneel, snap the cycle, rise, hurry away. Maybe we should stick with Italy. It's very pleasant there. Noah mentioned that I have a book coming out, a book of poems coming out in November. November is the date, you know, put it in your calendar. It's not the mariners' progress. Well, you did say it was a school of instructions. That's the name of that book. And it's a book mostly memorizing West Indian soldiers who fought in British regiments during World War I. They were all volunteers. They went to fight for Mother England in hopes that Mother England would have recognized them as human beings. We know how that turned out. So this poem, the soldiers who went from Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad and so on, they weren't allowed to bear arms. They were mostly there to dig the trenches and to carry the weapons. Though they did briefly see combat in the Middle East. But this section, this is just a section invoking the experience that they underwent in Europe, mostly in France. As we know, one of the tropes of war poetry, particularly British World War I poetry, is mud. The image of mud shows up a lot. So I wanted to sort of bring that trope and somewhat a cliche at this point into this atmosphere of these West Indian soldiers who haven't really had their own cells recognized in British poetry. They shoveled the long trenches day and night. Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud. Venereal mud. Malaria mud. Humbait mud. Maitin mud. 1655 mud. White flashes of sharks. Golgotha mud. Chillblane mud. Caliban mud. Cannibal mud. Ha ha ha ha. Mud. Amnesia mud. Driptomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud. Exposure mud. Aphasia mud. No man's lands, every man's mud. And the smoking flax mud. Decentry mud. Septixore mud. Hogpen mud. Neferitis mud. Constipated mud. Fate mud. Sandfly fever mud. Rat mud. Shell mud. Erha shares mud. Og mud. Asquit mud. Parade mud. Skaibis mud. Mums mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud. Menemenetakelaparsin mud. Civil war mud. And darkness and worms will be their dwelling place mud. Yars mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud. Canondiansine, as promised, saw mud. They shoveled along trenches day and night. They resurrected new counter-kindoms by the arbitrement of the sword mud. How much time do I have? Five minutes? Are you okay? All right. So for something very happy. Here is a poem in the voice of Lee Scratch Perry, who I'm sure most of you might know, one of the great architects of Jamaican music. You know, through all phases of Jamaican popular music, from ska right up to dance hall. But I'm most interested in Lee Scratch Perry's work in the late 60s and up to the mid-70s when this other form of reggae started to emerge called dub, which is a studio music, really. So the musicians would record the rhythm and then the producer Scratch would mix the sounds on the console. And what he had to do, sort of deconstruct the original form and make it into something new, something other. And part of doing that was to take away a lot of the instruments around the bass and drums. So you would remove the horns, remove the piano, and so on. And usually one of the methods is to front load the heavy bass rhythm with a strong drum kick. And he built a studio in Kingston called the Black Ark Studio. And it's a studio with many rooms. Scratch was a, he died last year, was a very enigmatic figure to put it lightly. So he painted the studio with many, you know, just painted it in wild colors. All of the rooms were covered over with collage. And in no way that describes how his music worked. It was a sort of collage music. And so the studio was very successful. It's where Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, some of the great names, recorded some of their most well-known work. Scratch was a mentor of Marley. But one day, all of a sudden Scratch burnt the studio down. Never explained why to anybody. So this poem is sort of engaging with that history. But so he called the studio the Black Ark Studio, the Black Ark. And of course that immediately tells you what he's after, the Ark being a place of refuge. And when you think of that in the context of Jamaican history, or at least how I think of it, it is a sort of space in which he was collecting the remnants of the survival methods of being Jamaican. Going through all of that pain and violence of history, he wanted to harbor it there, both the pain and the joy. So he called the studio the Black Ark by Scratch. The genius says, Biller Studio. I Biller Studio from Ash. I make it out of peril and slum things. I alone, when blood and bullet and all cries, fucking American dollar politicians start the pressure down to nothing. When the equator is confused and coke to cemented wreath, I built it. A conga drum so hollowed through the future, pyramids up long before CDs, spinaway roots man knocking down by the seaside like captives wheeling by the Kaba River. The genius says, Biller Studio. But don't take any foul in it. Just electric. So I make it my echo chamber with shock rooms of rainbow King Arthur's sword keep in and one for the Maccabees alone, for covenant is born between man and worm. Next room is Stone Age after that iron and one I name Freeze for too much ice downtown in the brains of all them crossing Duke Street, holy like Parsons. And in the Circuit Breaker, the red switches for death and the black switches for death and the master switches black and red. So if US, Russia, China, Israel talk, missiles talk, I talk that switch I call Melchizedek. I build a closet for the waterfalls, one for the rivers, another for oceans, next for secrets. The genius says, Biller Studio. I built it without go for wood. Now, consider the nest of bees in the cranium of the gong. Consider the nest of wasps in the heart of the bush doctor. Consider the nest of locusts in the gut of the black heart man. I put them there and the others that vibrate at the feast of the Passover when the Kaliweed is passed over the roast fish and cornbread. I upset her. I jangle on the black wax, the super ape, ET. I cleared the wave. Again, consider the burning bush in the ears of Kalanji and the burning sword in the mouth of the fireman and the burning pillars in the eyes of the gargamel. I put them there to outlast earth as I navigate on one of Saturn's rings. I mitre solid shadow setting fire to snow in my ark. I credit not the genie but the coral rock. I man, I'm stone. I am perfect. Myself is a vanishing conch shell speeding around a discotheque. At the embassy of angels, skeletons ramble to check out my creation dub. And sex is dub stripped to the bone. And dub is the heart breaking the torso to spring olive beaked to be eaten up by sunlight. I think that I will end with one poem from, you know, Noah makes it sound like I've just been in some cave writing poems and no. But I have been busy and I am very grateful for the chance to read from some of these poems to you. Thank you for your attention. I will end with one of the poems from The Mariners Progress which is a series of sonnets. I think eight of them. And I will end with this one. And implicitly, maybe explicitly, it's an allergy for the poem as a whole. The Mariners Progress is a poem of an allergy for the great Saint Lucian poet, Derek Walcott. I don't think he needs any introduction. So to his memory to evening air I add blown cane blown cane blown cane and stepped into outside the library by the pair all is changed blown I am a broad antelion echo lost in the marrow wings of a pelican or an albatross cloud remnant tassled low flyer below the radar of the wind trade winds traveled not traveled shit blooded a million blades choir and collapse on repeat their absolute surgeon pledged picked up by the potholes which I jump to reach home blown canes singed from the African Holocaust dark breaks in me carrying your line lucid sunglass seething uphill mine to keep and give. Thank you. That was a privilege, a lesson. I feel like my ear has been re-arranged. I hope not. And thank you all. As noted, books are for sale with Cali over there. This is our last lunch poems of the season. You can sign up on our mailing list at the counter there. If you have the courage, please we appreciate help with the chairs afterwards but no need. Thank you all for coming.