Poetry by Proxy: A Conversation with Jennifer Sutherland
“Words smoothly figure an exchange even when the trade is made at gunpoint or by the small print no one reads.”
Jennifer Sutherland is a poet, essayist, and attorney from Baltimore, Maryland. Her writing is elegant, poignant, and marked by her discernment of law and language. You can find out more about Sutherland and her work on her website jenniferasutherland.com.
Sutherland’s book, bullet points, was written after her experience as witness to a courthouse shooting and explores concepts like power and violence, from the personal to the global, from her distinct and intersecting perspectives as lawyer, writer, woman, human. It is a powerful read, especially considering the current political landscape. The unlabeled quotes within this blog are from bullet points.
Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, and Sutherland engaged in conversation over Zoom where they discussed the evolution of identity and language and the power of poetic voice.
Can you share some women-identified writers who inspire you?
Linda Hull and Louise Gluck are writers I go to again and again. Robin Schiff, Carol Moldaw, Linda Gregerson are also writers I admire. And, of course, I must mention Anne Carson.
Can you talk about the transition from law to writing, to poetry?
I’m not sure I fully transitioned. I still pay the bills practicing law, but not in the same way. I don’t go to court anymore; I'm more of an office person now. I mostly write things for other lawyers, which just works better for me now. I was a writer before I ever thought about going to law school. My parents were both teachers. My dad taught English in Baltimore, so I grew up around his books and around literature. I was drawn to poetry before anything else. I was writing poetry before law school. I went to law school for reasons tied to wanting control over my life after some difficult experiences and because people told me I’d be a good lawyer due to my debating and communication skills. I love the intellectual exercise of the law, but I don’t enjoy the confrontational aspects anymore. I’m more interested in talking about how the law works and why it works a certain way than I am in fighting with somebody over who did what. I stopped writing a lot once I got into law school. I think there’s something that changes in your brain when you start thinking from a lawyer’s perspective. Lawyering is very much about shaving things down into small pieces that you can then do away with, and poetry is much more about expansive thinking and considering what I can bring into a topic or subject. I would write little pieces here and there for years when I was practicing actively, but it was after the [courthouse] shooting that I truly came back to poetry in a devoted kind of way. I think it saved me.
What is the process of writing something like bullet points? What was the process of creating the lyric which reads more linear as compared to a collection of shorter stand-alone pieces?
In 2018, I walked away from practice almost entirely and did an MFA in Roanoke, Virginia, at Hollins University. While there, I kept getting close to writing about the shooting, but I couldn’t find the right words or approach. I wrote a lot of poems about other things, and then the pandemic happened during my last semester of my MFA. I think it was the first pandemic winter, so probably February of 2021. I had read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets recently, which is also an important book to me. There was something about the way that she organized that book. It’s written in these little chunks of text, one to a page, and that container was very appealing to me. I digested that book a little bit, and I woke up one weekend morning and had the first line for bullet points. I grabbed a notebook and started writing and most of the book came out basically over that weekend. I wrote it in one extended session. Then I spent months and months after that working with what I had, taking things out, reshaping things, figuring out what the stanzas were going to look like. But substantively, it came out in one chunk, and I think that’s because I had just been cooking it for so long that once it was ready, once I had the shape for the stanzas, it was there.
“Verse lets me throw my voice in a way that prose does not, and I cannot stand too near or my voice will scream at me.”
You make an interesting statement in this lyric about only being able to write poetry. What is the difference between the truth of a story or essay and the truth of a poem for you?
That line is still very true for me. I would love to be someone who can write fiction. I read a lot of fiction, but my brain just doesn’t seem to work that way. Voice is very important to me in my work. Voice is an important aspect of the work of a lot of the poets that I read. I think that has something to do with how lyric works in general. Lyric poetry is like a voice suspended in space without the passage of time. Something about that position, that suspension, allows me to speak. It feels safer.
You also make interesting use of language (legal language and definitions) and commentary about language in cyberspace. How does this new medium of communication/expression impact language for you?
Thank you for picking up on that. I don’t think a lot of people have picked up on this sort of second body/proxy body idea that is in the book. As a lawyer, I’m used to working with abstract entities that are not necessarily people, whether that’s a corporation, a trust, or intellectual property. When situating this piece in historical context, which I tried to do, it was important to me to think about the ways that human beings have been figured or proxied in history. Oftentimes that’s been done to reduce risks of various kinds in business. People want to be able to make investments without necessarily losing their personal assets, which is a way for them to do things that are otherwise very harmful. If you think about the Middle Passage and the business in the trafficking of human beings, that business was possible because people could effectively work behind these corporate proxy bodies and protect themselves. That was an idea that I wanted to bring into the book, the idea that we are doing some of these same kinds of things in the virtual world of social media and the Internet. We are allowing ourselves to create these personas, these people in a literal sense. People have alt or fake accounts, and they can post anything they want as harmful as it might be, as awful as it might be without fear of personal repercussions. But we also have these personas, even if we’re writing underneath our own names and our own photos, that we are projecting into cyberspace that don’t necessarily represent who we are in reality. What is that allowing us to do? Why are we doing that? For most of us, it’s not necessarily intentional or with bad motives, but for some of us I think it is. In the book, I’m working through some of that. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there were people who were coming at me on social media because I had posted about it. A lot of these were accounts that were just the bird accounts or fake photos and stuff like that who were coming and saying the most awful kinds of things to me. Someone logged on and told me that I was fat. We are able to do that because we can cultivate these second bodies where we give in to and display our worst impulses while in disguise. I wanted to consider that in the book.
“This space makes a whole new country, a world, a fleet of ships with fictitious names and faces, and they swarm the shoreline with their eely words.”
I admire your honesty and bravery in the way you process these experiences. How are you doing with the concept of feeling stuck in that moment or being separate people? Is it still impacting your daily life?
It will always affect my daily life in some way. I’ve learned coping mechanisms and changed my life significantly. Pulling back from practicing law was part of that. My first marriage was also volatile and not healthy for me. My life changed a lot, partly before the book. I met a supportive person who helped me through this process. But I think there will always be that person in the stairwell representing that awful moment. It changes you; it doesn’t stop.
What would you want readers to take away from this book?
The takeaway for bullet points for me would be nuance. Be open to the possibility of many ideas, many meanings, many contributing factors. The title, the stanzas, a lot of the components of this book have to do with our tendency to want to focus on tiny things and the necessity of expanding past that.
I love your range, from lyric and prosey poetry to pieces more succinct. Talk to me about numbers, which I believe is alluded to in your lyric. “8bsolute” is such a compelling poem visually and otherwise.
I have a couple of pieces with numbers. There’s a couple of pieces in a manuscript that I’m working on now that’s about a Greek mythological character named Alcestis. I think math is an easy stand in for something that’s objectively truthful (although I don’t know that even math is necessarily objective.) A lot of what I’m doing in my work is figuring my way through objective and subjective, which are ideas that are very important in postmodernism and they’re important in law. I think numbers for me are kind of a stand in for objective truth and the likelihood that even objective truth is subject to interpretation.
“You permit me
2 locate myself in your midst, and you in mine, and 2 complete
7he necessary calculations. Through you 1 acquire —
6ravity. A density 1 can’t aspire to when 1 am more obviously
3yself. No one suspects. They only see what 1 project.”
Do you have any advice you can share with fellow women writers?
Women and women-identified people are very often the people who are doing the work that keeps homes going. For that reason, they often don’t have access to the time and the spaces that are necessary to write in the way that we have often been told that we should. We have all these very impressive novelists from the 60s and 70s who talk about shutting themselves away in attic rooms and writing for six hours a day and all this stuff and claim that is what writers should do. For many of us that doesn’t work in our daily lives. It didn’t work for me in my daily life. I think that the tiny moments when you write down a line or a thought in a notebook—it may take you two minutes—those count. Those minutes can be productive. You might come back to those moments, to those lines a year or five years from now. It may become something that is valuable to you. MY advice is not to think that because you only have five minutes to write something down or an hour to work on something that you shouldn’t bother. You should.
Do you have any new projects in the works you’d like to share with our readers?
I’m still working on that manuscript about Alcestis, a character in Greek mythology, who was given the choice to die instead of her husband. He found out about it, because this is Greek mythology, and you get to find out about things ahead of time. She chose to die instead of him and went down to Hades and then Hercules showed up at the house and sort of had this wild party and went down to hell and brought her back. It’s a very odd story, which I think is what interested me. It’s not completely a tragedy, it’s not a comedy. It’s a weird story that felt like a way for me to start thinking through my experience of domestic violence. I am also working on a collection of poems called Errors and Omissions that is still about this issue of risk and of our wish to avoid it by creating proxies to stand in for us. Both projects are more traditionally-lined individual pieces of poetry.
Melissa Nunez makes her home in the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, where she enjoys exploring and photographing the local wild with her homeschooling family. She writes an anime column at The Daily Drunk Mag and is a prose reader for Moss Puppy Mag. She is also a staff writer for Alebrijes Review and interviewer for Yellow Arrow Publishing. You can find her work on her website melissaknunez.com/publications and follow her on Instagram @melissa.king.nunez or Twitter @MelissaKNunez.
Jennifer A. Sutherland is the author of Bullet Points: A Lyric, from River River Books, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur and Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year. Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, EPOCH, Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at Hollins University, and she lives and works in Baltimore.
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