KARAN

Ishion, reading these poems feels like standing before an altar, and I love them — they’re intense, polyphonic, ceremonial, and unafraid of sonic and syntactic difficulty. These are works of architecture, built from sonic ritual, from invocation and denunciation, from music and its aftermath. They contain an archive of violence, yes, but also beauty, witness, and rebuke. I want to begin at the level of sound. These poems are scored — almost symphonic in their layering. What is your relationship to music as a compositional force? Does sound lead the sense, or the other way around?

ISHION

Music is important to me. I have an intense, intimate relationship with many different types — ever since I was very young.  I’m alert to its compositional force, as you put it, and I can describe what that force is fairly well and very much hope that the expressive vigour of that force is alive in the semantic energy of what I write. Even so, the poem isn’t a kind of transposition of music into words or supplementing of verbal signs to fit scales or something of that simple mimesis or representation. Though one can argue the differences between sound and sense, I’m not sure that to the poet those differences are stabilized and held at bay, so you can’t say with certainty which is leading which. What is apparent is a kind of mutual contamination, a blur or synesthesia which gives language the dynamic, strange and surprising freshness. I’m always trying to hold together in each poem. 

KARAN

Do you have a writing routine, Ishion? What does your writing process look like?

ISHION

It used to be that I would wake up at around 5 in the morning and write for a few hours. That’s less the case in the last two years or so; now I find that I work more in fits and starts whenever I have time during the day. The mechanical part, if you will, of the writing process is that I write in longhand, mainly in notebooks or on scraps of paper, before the piece is typed up and goes through a couple of rounds of revision.

KARAN

In “The Mud Sermon,” you write: “Drapetomania mud. Lice mud. Pyrexia mud... / No-man’s-land’s-Everyman’s mud.” The rhythm here is biblical, incantatory — but also diagnostic, deeply political. The catalogue doesn’t resolve — it accrues. How do you think about repetition as a formal and moral strategy? What does it allow that linear progression does not?

ISHION

Well, for one, repetition heightens and deepens the texture of sensuousness in the poem. As a rhetorical device, it helps to insist, unremittingly, on the physicality of what’s being evoked, and so that hearing a thing several times at varying registers raises the possibility of that thing becoming vivid, real, present. I don’t think or relate that technique to moral strategy. I am, however, conscious that repetition is an empathic way of pushing on the limitation of language in a bid to inscribe a plea or—to use a slightly archaic word—adjuration. It is a kind of hotwiring of urgency with dramatic elevation or tension, which makes unrelenting demands on a reader’s attention to simultaneously remember and repeat. It all depends on the type of repetition, but at the most basic level, repetition halts time, or rather pushes time into a sort of whirlpooling stillness in which an image or a moment or a sound is so charged it starts to detonate into its own poem within a poem.

KARAN

There’s an epic undercurrent to “The Anabasis of Godspeed” — and of course, in title and ambition, it nods to Xenophon. But this isn’t a colonial retelling. It’s something more ruptured, more hallucinatory, more vernacular — like a soldier’s song rearranged by a child prophet. What led you to write a long poem for West Indian soldiers in WWI? What work can poetry do in the absence of formal national memory?

ISHION

The starting point of the poem was a commission I got in 2018 to visit the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London to look at material having to do with WWI West Indian soldiers, with the intention to write a short poem. Prior to this, I knew very little about the involvement of WWI soldiers in the war. Being in the archive was an overwhelming experience.  Many things I found there—photographs of young soldiers and field journals—stayed in my imagination for a very long time, and the short poem grew into a long, fractal march conjugating different times simultaneously, including the period of the First World War, 1990s Jamaica, and the centuries of the transatlantic slavery. Your second question is complicated. It depends on what ‘work’ means and what constitutes ‘formal national memory.’ Poetry is work. The fact of its existence, when good, means that it has overcome something very difficult. What it has overcome can be summed up as a transition of silence into language, and that transformative act, when a poem is read right in turns, transforms whoever encounters the poem. That then is the work of poetry, to change your life, and that happens despite any absence of formal national memory or a need to fill some other cultural void. 

KARAN

Beautiful, beautiful! In “Little Music”, you give us Ashurbanipal, Cre-Cre, and Night Hawk — each figure a node in a spiritual topography that feels both ancient and entirely local. I’m thinking of Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation,” and Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language.” Of late, I’m thinking more and more about the plurality and the fragmentation of identities of people with a colonized past. Would you speak to how the Caribbean imagination and the colonial inheritance shape your sense of poetic lineage and form?

ISHION

So much of it is sublimated in my creative consciousness, if you will, and so it is hard to anatomize and say how these things make you the kind of poet you are. Coming from this background, I learned early not to take anything for granted, that part of my duty as a poet is to honour the long turmoil of survival that has made my even being a poet possible, that, in the end, whatever I’m writing is a poetics under pressure to figure out a language that can hold together the fraught ambiguities and contradictions of this background and to celebrate it against all odds.

KARAN

Your work is ablaze with myth, military history, biblical inversion, Caribbean memory, and spiritual dread. There’s a lot of spiritual imagery in these poems — the Ark, the burning bush, the Sermon, the Feast of the Passover — but the register is never doctrinal. It feels destabilized, as if your speakers are always resisting inherited structures, even as they search for prophecy within them. What is your relationship to scripture — to the biblical, the liturgical — in your work?

ISHION

The Jamaican speaking cadence, to say nothing of biblical idioms, is saturated in scripture, and so my ear grew up with its music long before I could distinguish its roots. One of the first books I read when I was young was the Bible, especially from the Old Testament in the King James Version. I didn’t grow up in a churchgoing household, so I read the Bible for myself and occasionally to my grandmother, who knew a good portion of the Bible by heart. In fact, it is because she had so many passages memorised that I started to make a conscious effort to memorise passages of scripture and later other texts on my own. It is that intimate relationship that moves in my work, more a personal engagement rather than anything strictly spiritual in a religious sense, which you’d find, as you put it, ‘biblical inversion’ in the work. 

KARAN

I was particularly moved by “Spring” — I, too love Zagajewski. “Your death is only two weeks old, sudden / and tender as the buds on the firethorn.” Do you find poetry can hold grief in ways other forms of writing cannot? Tell us about your relationship with Adam Zagajeski’s work.

ISHION

Yes, poetry holds grief in ways other forms of writing cannot. There are multiple reasons for that, but chiefly because of the ways poetry finds, somehow, the exact and exacting language to make that incomprehensible grief bearable. I didn’t know Adam closely but I was lucky to spend a bit of time with him in the States and one memorable occasion in Krakow towards the end of his life. Almost every semester, I teach a handful of his poems, especially the masterpiece “To Go to Lvov.” I love the propulsive force of that poem, how it makes mystery graspable yet not reductive, and that it’s done with a kind of sad elation that refuses to be taken over by sentimental pathos. I aspire to that kind of doing in my own work. 

KARAN

In “At nights birds hammered my unborn” (love that title — so haunting!), there’s a moment of pure apocalyptic joy: “I smashed my head against a lightbulb / and light sprinkled my hair.” This line refuses metaphor — it glows in its own broken logic (my favorite kind of surrealist flavor). How do you think about ecstasy in your work — the ecstatic moment that ruptures understanding?

ISHION

Well, to be honest, I don’t think of ecstasy in my work in the moment of making or retrospectively. I think, if anything, that it’s a gift to find words or words finding me at this creative moment. Every poem is a miracle, and as it comes together, even if it fails, you have this sense of not being alone.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it’s moved over time?

ISHION

I would imagine that a poet’s work, the best work, melds all four major axes and leave little trace of distinction in between them. But I would place my work on the axes it belongs, a poetry of the island and that to me is a small utterance of defiance and beauty. 

KARAN

We recently made a point of asking seasoned poets for advice for young writers. Of course, you’re not “old” in the scheme of things, but you’ve had books published that are so well-acclaimed and won many coveted awards, and you’re also a wonderful teacher. What is something you’d like to say to young writers, by way of advice or caveats?

ISHION

I like to emphasize what young writers are always told: to read widely. To young poets in particular, I always encourage them to study a couple of poetry anthologies. 

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt — something strange or rigorous or impossible — to help them begin a new poem?

ISHION

A strange, rigorous, impossible poem I like very much is Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography.” It plays deftly with refrain or repetition, as we discussed at the beginning. Read it a few times and write your own modelled on its structure.

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art — any art form, any era (just something other than a poem) — that’s haunted you lately or that has long sustained you.

ISHION

I return often to Géricault's “The Raft of the Medusa.”

KARAN

And of course, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, I’d love to know which poets have shaped your sense of the possible. Who is always within reach, whether on the shelf or in the blood?

ISHION

There are so many poets that have shaped my sense of the possible, but since I was reading him just this morning, I’ll mention Jay Wright.