Thinking about poetry and law and my sense of trying to operate in two vastly different worlds. While the people and to a certain extent the ideologies representative of each world tend to be quite divergent, I think there are overlaps.

I think postmodern poetics and law dovetail quite nicely in the sense that both are concerned primarily with language, not necessarily as subject but as medium, as the only medium within which they can operate.

And the crucial point about both poetry and law is that there is no certainty. Nothing is certain because language fails. Where they differ is in the effect of uncertainty.

Law strives for certainty regardless, or accepts a conditional sense of certainty recognizing the fiction as less than ideal but necessary. And practitioners of law don’t even have to recognize that much. Most law students and, I imagine, lawyers would claim that the law is certain and that any question of uncertainty is merely philosophical or academic. While I think it’s more accurate to say that uncertainty is an undeniable condition of law, as law is an enactment of language, and the sense of certainty with which practitioners arm themselves is a philosophical illusion.

Poetry can run into the same problems as law when poets strive to express in spite of uncertainty. But postmodern poetrics are more likely to thrive on uncertainty, to find its challenges in indeterminacies.