"Inquiry is a Kind of Love": An Interview with Jennifer A Sutherland

Editor’s note: We were thrilled to ask Jennifer A Sutherland a few questions about her forthcoming book-length, hybrid poem BULLET POINTS. Jennifer is also an upcoming guest on Of Poetry Podcast, and as a teaser we can tell you that the conversation involves long poems, octopuses, and Keats!

Did you know that BULLET POINTS would be a book-length poem from the very beginning?

Yes and no. I had been trying to write something about the shooting for several years and I kept making false starts. I hadn’t found the right form for it yet and I think I was still processing what I wanted to say. Then the pandemic happened, and to me suddenly there was this huge difference between exteriors and interiors, what was happening outside my home and inside it, outside my body and inside it. I think that flipped a switch for me. I was sitting in bed on a February morning drinking a cup of coffee and I got the first line. I grabbed the first notebook I could find, a marble notebook, I don’t even know why I had it honestly, and I started writing. I had the first draft within one or two days I think. Once I started it I knew it was going to be book-length, but the writing process was more organic than usual for me. I think the material had been percolating for a long time and just needed the right form.  

How does the title BULLET POINTS interplay with the text? 

The book proceeds via short, indented paragraphs, like the bullet points you would encounter in an outline or a summary of something. Outlines and summaries are helpful but also dangerous; a lot gets left out. Obviously there’s a correlation with the subject matter, a shooting. I think the text is also modeling something about attention and attention spans, the demands on our attention, our tendencies to be distracted. Certainly there’s my preference for distracting myself from traumatic experiences in my personal life, even as the reminders of the experiences are kind of relentless. The text is working with two kinds of history as well, the received history we learn about in school or read about as supposedly universal, even though it isn’t, and the personal; in both cases context tends to be lost, and then we’ve just got these discrete facts or events. I was trying to build a sense of connection and context underneath the text, ideas that would only reveal themselves from the background or underneath the water.

Who is your ideal reader?

Someone who asks questions, not because they expect answers but because they know that inquiry is a kind of love. 

How did you choose your book’s long line length? What drives that form in your narratives?

The form itself I sort of lifted from an earlier poem of mine, except in that piece the “chunks” of text are bigger. I think the line length is mostly driven by breath, by the number of words a speaker can say before stopping to rest. Or before changing the subject, or looking away. 

Trauma fractures memory—sometimes erases a person’s memory entirely. Do you think poetry is especially able to handle traumatic narratives, more than other genres?

I think there are a lot of ways to do it. Octavia Butler’s fiction carries and transforms the traumas of whole generations. Poetry to me comes down to a relationship with language made explicit, with language not just a way of communicating but of experiencing and perceiving. Language as a sixth sense. Language as a lens. I approached my experience through my language for the experience. Poetry does that better than the other genres, I think.  

What colors do you imagine your book to be?

Blue, for the suit I was wearing that day and for the ocean where the book ends. The first is navy blue, the last is murky, gray-blue, sandy. 

Jennifer A Sutherland is a poet, essayist, attorney and educator from Baltimore, Maryland. She is a graduate of Hollins University (M.F.A.), where she was a teaching fellow; the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law (J.D.), where she served as Notes and Comments Editor for the CUA Law Review; and Stevenson University (B.S.). She is an alumna of workshops at Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Kenyon Review. Her creative work has appeared or will appear in Best New Poets, Hopkins Review, Appalachian Review, Denver Quarterly, Hollins Critic, I-70 Review, Parhelion, and elsewhere. She is also the author of “Auden and the Unfaltering Hidden Law” and “A Real Danger of Speech in the Social Media Era: Employment Termination,” both of which appeared in the Maryland Bar Journal, and “The Work for Hire Doctrine Under Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid: An Artist’s Fair-Weather Friend,” which appeared in the Catholic University Law Review.