Incarceration, Invisibility, & Poetry: An Interview w/ Leigh Sugar
Leigh Sugar is a writer, editor, poet, and dancer who has worked as a teaching artist in carceral institutions. She is editor of That’s A Pretty Thing To Call It, an anthology of prose and poetry by artists who teach inside U.S. prisons. Her debut collection of poems, FREELAND, is a powerful indictment of our failure of imagination in dealing with criminal offenders. Sugar is articulate about many things—chronic and inexplicable medical disorders, prison history, poetics, and much more. This conversation was conducted in early autumn as the collection had been named a finalist for the Alice James Award and the Jake Adam York Prize.
SCOTT: Your debut collection, FREELAND, centers on experiences inside prisons, relationships with those incarcerated there, and carceral themes in general. What’s the context for how FREELAND is entering the conversation about incarceration now?
LEIGH: When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, an English professor named Buzz Alexander had founded an organization called the Prison Creative Arts Project, or PCAP. It was an organization that involved both students as well as community members and would train folks to go to the more than 30 prisons throughout the state of Michigan to facilitate arts workshops.
I had some friends who told me, “Hey, you have to take this class.” That was literally all it was. And so, as you know, at 20, you know, maybe 21, I take this class.
The class was partly training in order to facilitate workshops inside prisons, but also provided my introduction to theories about non-hierarchical education and facilitation versus teaching. As college students, clearly we were facilitators. We were not coming into a prison bestowing information upon anyone. We were people, we were peers with the incarcerated folks in our group.
The kinds of texts we were reading were Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augustus Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. It was an education in radical politics and the U.S. history of incarceration and political oppression. We didn’t know a lot about this then. I mean, you’re sending like 20 and 21 year olds into a maximum security facility, which is pretty wild to think about it now. It takes a lot of… I’m looking for a word…
Courage?
Well, courage, yes, and also on the part of the administration for a program like that, a lot of patience to deal with potential nightmares. I can’t even imagine it happening again today. But Buzz had tenure and it was a little bit of a cult of personality. He got his way. Many of us who took his classes would filter into his organization as PCAP volunteers after we took the class. So that’s what I did. I first started by facilitating a theater workshop in a men’s state prison in Michigan about an hour drive from Ann Arbor. Theater was not my medium and so I eventually switched over to creative writing with a co-facilitator.
I started thinking about the way that prisons are structured. Many people don’t have direct experience with the prison system. But, on the other hand, I realized I should be asking the questions, “For whom is this experience common?” and, “Why aren’t the rest of us exposed to those stories?” So I got it. Then it became an obsession and a confusion about this parallel universe that I was in a position to stumble into.
I realized how this parallel universe—the carceral system— is deliberately invisibilized, especially from people who are outside the demographic most often caught in the system. This is by design because our carceral population is primarily black and brown people. Poor people, mostly. This real, very troubling awareness came to me—the reality of a false invisibility, a false rarity of the carceral world.
You made this point in your introduction—how our language reflects that we’ve moved unconsciously toward that invisibility as well as the ubiquity of the prison systems. Could you talk more about the dehumanizing strategies we invent for the prison population and world?
Absolutely. The word for all these strategies is the word you used—dehumanization. And objectification. Objectification is a word that’s not uncommon for poets. Literally the objectification of a person is what allows for treatment of the person as an object or as a statistic or a number to play with.
I’m thinking of the great theorist of oppression and oppressive systems, Franz Fanon, especially, and the concept that the chain that binds the slave also binds the master. Both parties in an injustice are often frozen into these positions when really what we need is a world totally reimagined for those harmed as well as for those who want to transform and need a transformed experience of the world in order to return to their best selves. I love how your poems make such transformations visible and beautiful, even if reading about them is not easy.
One adage that I very much resonate with, attributed to Fannie Lou Hamer, is that none of us are free until all of us are free. I fully, fully believe that and I try to put an emphasis on the interconnectedness of different oppressive systems. So for me, the question becomes, how and why are you connected to this? It’s kind of weird. I’m just like a random white gal who was raised upper-middle class with access to education and so on. But to think that I am disconnected only allows for the continuation of a system that benefits from my ignorance. Prison, in all its shapes, depends on the assumption that people who are not directly affected don’t think about it. If we all fully understood what was going on, there’d be much more opposition. The way prison labor exists as an extension of slavery is deliberately invisibilized to most consumers. The repercussions are vast and innumerable, and woven into the very core of how the United States operates.
Is this how you came to poetry?
I grew up in a house just filled top to bottom with books, which at the time I didn’t realize was special. Now I’m so grateful for that.
I always liked writing as a kid, but PCAP was the first place where I interacted with poetry in a regular, meaningful way. And what’s interesting about that is that we had no idea what we were doing. I was teaching in the prison with another peer in college and she had taken a couple poetry classes.
We would just bring in the packets that she had been given in her poetry classes. Then I took a poetry class with Ken Mikolowski. He and his wife founded Alternative Press in Detroit. They published a lot of the folks of the New York school era—Waldman and others in the early days. So I took his class on the New York School and then I took maybe one or two other poetry classes, with the intention of like, oh, I wanna have something of merit to bring into the prisons. I vividly remember the first time that I, of my own volition without having an assignment, went to get a poetry book. It was Marie Howe’s What the Living Do. I couldn't have picked a better book! I was blown away by Howe’s poetry.
Can you tell me a little more about your work in prisons? This would ground the poems for me, I think.
Something I was—and still am—very conscious of is the way that programs such as this, where college students are facilitating workshops in prisons, can sometimes yield more growth/learning for the college student, who is already in a position of greater privilege, than for the incarcerated person, who is ostensibly an "equal" in the classroom. The same framework applies to many other situations—mission trips, etc. So I felt this pull to bring substantive material to the prisons, or at least try. This urge was occurring alongside my own more personal growth with poetry.
Your collection has so many poems I’d like to talk about more specifically. Could you discuss the poetics of “Security” and how it helps your readers enter the carceral world that for many of us is largely, if not completely, unfamiliar?
There are several poems in FREELAND in which I attempted to capture a very specific reality of visiting an incarcerated person. With “Security,” I ended up with a more sprawling indictment of not only one particular moment but all the powers that brought such a moment to fruition. For those of us who’ve gotten “used to the warehouse,” as I say in another poem (“FREELAND: An Erasure”), certain processes that might seem absurd to someone unfamiliar, become boring, banal. The transformation of an absurd, oppressive action to one that is received as “regular” is a very common one, and a very dangerous one, as it normalizes violence. From this perspective, I wanted to both defamiliarize the security process for myself, while introducing it to those to whom it is unknown.
Did any particular poets influence “Security” in its style or approach?
C.D. Wright and Claudia Rankine are masters of using overheard language to help locate the poem in space-time. Here, I tried to transcribe, as directly as possible, an exchange I had with a corrections officer (CO) on a very specific day (the weekend before Thanksgiving). The transcript, I soon found, would have to include not only the CO’s words to me, but also the multiple exchanges happening around us simultaneously. While it differs everywhere, in the prisons I was visiting, once one is administratively cleared to visit, you wait in a common area with other visitors until an officer calls your name. Once called, anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours later, you, along with several others, move through the first security room (often called “the bubble”), beginning with a metal detector, and then are ushered into another, smaller room, for a more intimate pat-down, shoe-check, etc. Imagine the most invasive TSA check you can, then add instructions like “open your mouth and show me your tongue” and “lift up your hair.” Once everyone’s been checked, you are ushered back into the first security bubble before being led to the actual visiting room where your incarcerated loved one has already been through their (even more invasive) security check.
In “Security,” I happened to be the only visitor in the bubble that day, so I was alone with the CO. It behooves a visitor to be at least cordial to a CO, as they have total power to deny a visit at any time for any reason. So, despite my disdain for their role, I made a practice of being friendly to them, so as not to jeopardize my opportunity to see my then partner. Our interaction that day perfectly encapsulated the confounding mash-up of institutional code, rote instruction, body searching, personal anecdote, polite chatter, and unconcealed judgment so integral to the visiting process. While we were chatting, me wishing this CO a happy holiday, she was simultaneously shouting orders to her fellow COs regarding security doors, telling me about her Thanksgiving plans, searching my body, “warning” me about the “smell in there,” and unflinchingly asking why the hell I would bother coming to such a place.
The CO’s stream of words highlighted for me the oppression affecting all of us in that moment. I don’t mean to infantilize the COs, or suggest they don’t understand their fascist role in the “machine,” or forgive their choices and behavior, their complicity. It also is true that in many “prison towns,” the job of CO is a relatively lucrative position for folks with and without college degrees, where few other industries are hiring. Often, COs come from the same communities as the incarcerated individuals they “oversee.” So here, someone is telling me intimate details about their life while wielding great power over me, both of us knowing that in the “outside world” I have greater privilege than them (as a person who’s attained higher education and worked more “skilled” jobs). And, all the while, we’re both playing a game created to subdue/imbue order on us both, not to mention the absent beloved who is the pawn most oppressed by absurd order.
Could you also talk a moment about why it’s so important for readers to understand how the carceral world’s approach to personal intimacy is at the heart of the dehumanization and objectification of the incarcerated? Do you consider this collection to be a lament for the loss of the deepest things that make us most fully human—touch, privacy, intimacy, sex and love?
I think you answered the question better than I have—“a lament for the loss of the deepest things that make us most fully human.” While writing the poems that would become FREELAND, I’m not sure I could’ve put into words my need to include so much sex and intimacy, beyond the fact that sex and intimacy (in all their iterations) are aspects of most romantic relationships, and in my pursuit to write this relationship, the details of such aspects necessarily look/read different than those from a more familiar relationship not dictated by the prison’s rule of law. Another very important, and devastating, reality, is that the sexuality and physical expression of incarcerated folks—especially men—especiallymen of color—is perceived as extremely taboo. This topic is beyond the scope of the collection, but I hope is present at least as a ghost of a question to consider. I wasn’t intending to generate a “shock” factor, or make something crude for the sake of crudeness; really, I just wanted to tell the truth.
That’s very interesting, Leigh. Could we contextualize this with a taste via a poem or some lines from the poems? A specific illumination would be wonderful.
One moment where this is evident is in the poem "Visiting Standards," when the speaker relates, "Your body unfit for a mattress/My body accustomed to coming up a hard edge." Here, the speaker is acknowledging both the extreme discomfort the beloved must face every day, in terms of his literal living arrangement, and a double-entendre'd reflection on her own position—the sexy "hard edge," and also, the hard edge of institutional boundary.
