“Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet

Abstract In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way.