Ishion Hutchinson, associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program, has an essay on election grief, "Reliving the Funeral," in the New York Review of Books:
"The day after that day, four years ago, was funereal. Most people I spoke to said it was like a funeral, and it was like a funeral too to other people they had spoken to. And so the word 'funeral' became commonplace. It was the word for the day, to the extent that, later, it became a synecdoche for that day and the day before it as well. The synecdoche soon wore down, however, and other words came into view. Some of us said that ever since that day, the day after, we have been living in a long grief or mourning or illness or death. 'We have been living in a long death,' I heard once from a swimming instructor; I told her she sounded like a poet. She said she had never written a poem in her life but that she loved reading poetry, and I was moved each time I recalled her phrase. I would repeat it sometimes to myself, replacing 'death' with 'grief' or 'illness' or even returning to the original marker, 'funeral.'"
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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
