Too much has been left to unsafe conjecture and frequently that which might have developed into proof has become arrested on the border of suspicion.
-Clarkson Co Ltd. v. Zhelka, Ontario, 1967

Nice. I wonder if there's a course one can take to learn how to write like a judge?

I want to be creative so I bought cheap paint and small canvasses and I paint. But I can’t really draw, so I just paint streaks and swirls of different colours. It’s meant to be relaxing, but it’s actually frustrating, because it doesn’t look good. I’m a perfectionist and I want to make art. It seems silly to spend money on supplies to create something ugly. At least with writing you’ve only wasted time.

I was reluctant to buy the supplies in the first place because I knew I would get upset. At least I understand the problems I make for myself. That’s a start.

If I could turn all that off, I would enjoy just the motion of painting. I like how thick the paint is at first, how it thins out with brushing, then ends up in a nice pattern of back and forth brush strokes with white canvas showing through. It’s pleasing to see the white space of the canvas become red, then blue, then shades of purple. Sort of like a bruise. Maybe that’s what I should do: try to paint a bruise.

The most interesting thing said in class this week was, "A trust is a trust is a trust, as Gertrude Stein might have said if she'd thought about it." My ears perk up at any mention of Stein, especially in settings that are mainstream, not poetic, where people are not in the know, whatever the know is that I think I know.

But it is interesting -- when Stein wrote, A rose is a rose is a rose, it was to disassociate the word rose from the referent rose and make a familiar word uncomfortably unfamiliar for its materiality. A trust is a trust is a trust, however, has nothing to do with the word trust and everything to do with the concept of trusts, which are fundamentally the same whether they are personal or business-related, investment vehicles or tax avoidance strategies.

Stein is one of those writers whose profound statements have become very well-known, even though the significance of her insights have not. Too bad people don't randomly quote Tender Buttons. I'd love to hear everyone saying, Single fish single fish single fish eggplant single fish sight. It's pretty catchy once you get it in your head.

Cows don’t have a quivering ______ .
I had a philosophy of law class yesterday that was so good I forgot to take notes. The only thing I remember is the above phrase, but I forget the end. It came in the middle of something about ontology and the dichotomy of “just being” and constant change and the problems human beings create for themselves by being aware of the quivering something of everything changing and how logos is the root of those problems because it makes us separate ourselves from the fact of our being. But cows don’t have that problem. It is so fantastically awesome to be in a class (in law school, remember) where you can answer the prof’s question of why you’re in the class with, “One thing that I’m interested in is language and how law regulates every aspect of our lives through language but no one ever looks at the language to realize that it’s flawed and impossible” and the prof is like, “Yes! That’s exactly it. Law has always felt to me like a translation.” Then he went off on something else and he lost me a bit after that, but still…. Awesome.

It's bad enough I haven't been able to get a book published; now I have to turn down invitations to read in Canada Council sponsored reading series because I'm not a "professional author." Whatever. My earnings this year alone from writing poetry will amount to well over $500. That's almost a month's rent! Come on.

Why does the Canada Council draw such arbitrary lines? Like it matters if some publisher puts out 700 copies of my manuscript and a few Chapters in urban areas store a couple copies for a year or so before they're remaindered. My readings would not attract any more or less people. Arts communities are not marketplaces. There's no more value in a professional than in an amateur poet; the distinction is absurd.

I'd like to completely reject the Canada Council's bourgeois value system that valorizes capitalist production. But I'm steeped in the same value system. Publication is the only measure of success. Awards confer worth. Reading series are sullied by unpublished amateurs. The suburbs are a great place to grow up.

This blog has been silent all summer, mainly because I’ve tried (half-heartedly) and failed to articulate my experiences throughout the summer in a way that is relevant to the theme of this blog – what law and poetry have in common. I got a summer job at a non-profit organization run by students in the law department. It holds free legal advice clinics for low-income people throughout the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Through the school year, the clinics are held in community centres one night per week or every couple of weeks and staffed by volunteer students. In the summer, certain lucky student who volunteered all year get paid to staff the clinics every day.

So I spent most days this summer at a community centre in East Vancouver talking to low-income people about their problems. My clinic wasn’t particularly busy compared to some of the others, and I didn’t feel like I did a lot of practical or substantial work to actually help anyone. I went to criminal court a couple of times to defend clients, but I really have no interest in criminal law, so while it was satisfying to get the result my clients wanted, I can’t say I really enjoyed that experience. Most of my clients had strange, complicated problems with no obvious legal solution. The lasting impression I got from the experience is that the line between legal work, social work and counselling is a blurry one. Just talking about their problems and articulating the various issues they are dealing with seemed to help some of the clients; receiving acknowledgement from a sympathetic listener seemed to be really important to them. I wrote several letters on behalf of my clients, helped them file small claims in the provincial court system, did one will, and gave out a lot of summary advice and referrals to other organizations that may or may not have been able to provide more help.

Coming from a background of studying experimental poetry and literary theory at the undergrad and graduate levels, this is the most pragmatic, socially-oriented job I’ve ever done, and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity, but I found it frustrating that things were often unresolved and out of my control. It’s very common to lose touch with clients – they are homeless, or their phones are suddenly out of service, or they are too drug-addled to be reliable enough to stay in contact. Often I would do research and prepare a response only to find that the client was inaccessible.

This job has been a novel experience for me, and while I wanted to express something about it, I didn’t want to harp on about the gritty underbelly of society and its lyric charm or its distance from poetry, and lamely tie my day-to-day encounters into the theme of this blog.

Anyway, a couple of things in the past couple of weeks crystallized some ideas I’ve had about community and the value of contributing.

All the work we do at the legal clinics is approved by a supervising lawyer. At the end of the summer, he gave a speech that I’m paraphrasing as, “The thing to remember about the practice of law is that it gets you connected. It gets you connected to the people who need you, it gets you connected to humanity, and it makes you useful. We’re lucky that we can help people, because so many people in our society are so disconnected. Let’s have a toast to our clients, thank god they need us.” So cool. And so apt: that’s why I want to learn a profession; I want to be useful. As much as I love reading, writing, thinking about poetry and language, history and theory, they are very introspective activities. I feel like I live in my head. I’m very involved in my own interaction with language, very self-absorbed as a writer. I don’t necessarily produce any poetry or have any ideas about poetry that, you know, have any use, and they certainly don’t help anyone.

And yet. About a week and a half ago, I attended filling Station’s Calgary Blow-Out, a three-day extravaganza of Calgary writing. Having been involved in the Calgary writing scene, and not having contributed at all yet to the Vancouver writing scene, reading at the Blow-Out was very much a visit home, in a sense one more entry to the list of all the readings I’ve done in Calgary. A lot of the people who have been supporting my writing for as long as I’ve been writing seriously were there, and most of them were also reading, as well as a lot of other writers whom I’ve met over the past six or seven years, and some who I hadn’t met yet. Calgary has an incredibly energetic, tight knit writing scene. It’s a wonderful community, and I realized (well, not for the first time or anything) how lucky I am to have been part of it and to still be a long-distance contributor. My writing is far from accessible, and the difficulty with writing experimental, innovative (I hope) poetry is that there are no reliable arbiters of quality or relevance. The best one can hope for is a receptive audience. The audiences I read to in Calgary have always been not only receptive, but encouraging, enthusiastic and supportive. Then again, the audiences I read to in Calgary are composed of roughly the same people each time. Poetry is an esoteric interest. Like any other city, Calgary has a small community of people who care about poetry, and it’s not likely to grow.

I’m fascinated with the contrast between these two roles I play. On the one hand, I’m involved in a specialized, marginalized art form that appeals to a select number of people who gather in small spaces to share their complicated relationships to the phenomenon the rest of the world takes for granted, i.e. language.

On the other hand, I become involved in the problems of a more or less random selection of people who don’t know who I am and don’t really care beyond the possibility that I can apply some of my knowledge and skills to alleviate their difficulties.

I don’t think one is better method of contributing to community than the other. When I’m right in the thick of either one, for example while I was reading at the Blow-Out, I do wonder why the hell I ever got into the other one. But for the most part, I think they balance one another. It’s good to have a creative, intellectual project, and more importantly to have the support and company of peers involved in similar projects. But it’s also good to be exposed to such a wide range of people I wouldn’t normally meet and to try to empathize with their lives, and to put my education, talents, skills and intelligence to use for them.

So, overall a good summer.

There is no poetry here, no romance, no idealistic satisfaction from helping the poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill. I'm so tired. And it's not from researching cases or writing letters or even my first dismal court appearance. It's just from listening to their stories, the mundane cliches of their neverending stories. Oh my god, how can I tell you if there is a legal solution to your problem, if you won't stop talking?
I've been told my whole life that I have to talk more, speak up more, express more opinions, explain myself. Like there's something wrong with staying quiet.
Especially if the alternative is blathering in endless fucking detail to someone who is trying to tell you why what you're saying is not relevant at this time in this context.

Writing's better anyway.

Some of my study notes for Criminal Law. The idea is to condense a case into one sentence, so that all the details will come rushing back when I read it. These seemed very concise and pretty funny at the time. Now they're neither. Mostly they're morbid.

Criminal law is depressing. The degree of abstraction it takes to study it makes it either more bearable or more depressing. Or both. There are endless inferences.

Accused drove car onto policeman’s foot, either deliberately or accidentally, then refused to move car off foot.

Accused were present at biker gang-bang.

Fervent pro-French activists circulated satirical pamphlet that was interpreted as anti-French propaganda.

Accused shot two ducks near a pile of grain on the road.

Business man accused of raping real estate agent claims honest belief in consent.

Two men acquitted of attempted robbery for knocking on door of closed restaurant while carrying a gun and wearing balaclavas.

Ludicrously drunk accused had no memory of sexual assault on wife’s handicapped hairdresser.

Seeking safety from storm and repairs, ship full of marijuana moored and off-loaded cargo on Canadian shore.

Yugoslavian woman imported narcotics into Canada with false passport, under duress from mob-type character in Belgrade who threatened to kill her mother.

Shot friend of daughter’s druggie boyfriend when he lunged at her.

DJ threatened sound system repair guy, who pushed back, then DJ stabbed him.

Somewhere in Will Self’s Feeding Frenzy, a collection of essays and ludicrously funny restaurant reviews, he writes that nothing is lost in the economy of ideas. Or something to that effect. Sounds aphoristic, or like it comes from some classic source. Google won’t tell me anything. Anybody know?

Either way, I think it's a good philosophy. Whatever you read, watch, contemplate is useful in the end, or not useful, because what is utility in the world of ideas? Valuable, maybe. Is it similar to Steve McCaffrey's general economy of the text? Libidinal excess recuperated? I don't know, I don't think I ever really understood the general economy. Good thing I spent a chapter on it in my thesis.

I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not very good at it. I have five exams worth 100% of the course mark starting in less than a week. I’m thrilled that the procrastination that usually leads to excessive housecleaning is instead leading me to literature. Here I am, writing poem-ish things, blogging, and reading all manner of poetry, fiction, essays. Exactly the kind of life I’ve always wanted. I wish this could last forever. But no. Exams will begin, they’ll be agonizing, and then I’ll be left with nothing to do and doing nothing.

Futile as it may be to scold myself for not reading enough – for every book I have read, there are endless equally pressing books that I haven’t – I’m still very disappointed at how much I’ve overlooked Creeley. And it’s no excuse to say that I went to the library this week and tried to catch up. Luckily for me, I discovered his fascinating Day Book of a Virtual Poet, which collects emails he sent to an online writing program listserv between 1996 and 1998. The book captures the tension between the ephemeral nature of online communications and the much more solid thingness of publication. Or is it the other way around? I’ve read that data on computers is almost impossible to erase completely, while books are relatively easily lost or destroyed. If nothing else, the book shows how much avenues have opened for presenting and talking about poetry in electronic contexts. The tone of the emails suggests that at the time the listserv dedicated to poetry was a new and exciting concept; now it’s hard to imagine being involved in poetry without email, listservs, websites, online mags, blogs and on and on.

My favourite quote so far (only coincidentally the back-cover quote):
Possibly the most apt advice I ever heard from an elder poet to a younger person aspiring to be one was the very genuine advice, “If it isn’t something you have to do, don’t do it.” All the tendentious proposals as to “why write,” in Pound’s useful phrase, finally fade to the one point W.C. Williams made by saying, “Why don’t we just tell them it’s fun” Not just the authority of endless revisions, not just the lists of publications or prizes won, not just the company of poets of public record—just fun. Fun. Fun.

Damn, I must be doing it wrong.

Another wonderful Creeley book I found is His Idea, published by Coach House in 1973. I don’t have it here to quote from, but the poetry is just lovely. Equally lovely are the black and white photographs that illustrate every poem, and the chapbook design. It’s not very many pages, saddle-stitched, but with a cardstock jacket glued on the hide the staples. I love it when book design, illustration and writing converge into a perfect package.

Sometimes judges go on absurd flights of rhetoric. Witness:

“This is the last of the dispensing power.” Maitland could never have thought that in the year 1968, nearly three centuries after the Bill of Rights, a certain departmental official of Manitoba, acting in fact or in law under the authority of his Minister, would purport to grant a dispensation in favour of a certain group, exempting them from obedience to a particular law to which all others remain subject. That sorry episode must now be recounted.

Wow. All that blustering leads up to a decision that Aboriginal people cannot be exempt from a law that regulates hunting of migratory birds. Not only is the decision culturally insensitive and politically obtuse, the style of writing is completely anachronistic. If you were charged with deciding whether the executive branch of the provincial government can legally grant exemptions from federal statutes to a particular group, would you go on like that? The judgment affects real people, with real concerns, in Manitoba, in 1977. Why not state it plainly?

Objective or subjective intention is a very important distinction in the law. No one can be found guilty of a crime without subjectively intending to perform a criminal act. Private law, however, is concerned generally with objective intention. What the parties to a contract actually intended is less important than what it is reasonable that they would have intended. This is because, after the fact, people obviously lie (or they don’t lie, but they remember things wrong, or they delude themselves, etc.), so what they say they intended is never reliable. Also, it doesn’t really matter what they wanted to get out of the contract when they entered into the contract or how they wanted things to turn out. All that matters is what caused the dispute. The courts have to decide between two (or more) competing interests: this one wants one thing, this one wants the other. Those who judge construe reasonable intentions based on the material evidence and the circumstances. [What is “reasonable” and by whose standards is another problem, the essential problem with the whole thing, I think.]

But anyway, what about authorial intention? Should we readers look for subjective or objective intention? I don’t see how it could be anything but the latter. All we have is the text. Whatever the writer intended when they were writing the text is beyond us. We can look at circumstances, we can look for biographical details, we can scour author’s letters and notes for clues and meanings, but these all lead us to our constructions, not to any kind of truth. And we should never rely on what authors say after the fact, because, obviously, authors lie.

Writing may be a communal activity, in the sense that it connects people to one another and allows us access to one another’s perceptions and habits of language. But. All we ever have is the text, the material fact of the words in their order and form. How we understand the text is coloured of course by the circumstances of its writing and our reading, but the bare text can bear any number of reasonable (or unreasonable) interpretations. Writing is ultimately open. Reading determines.

Not that I think any of this is any kind of insight. It’s just interesting to reframe what I already know into new terms. Would it be trite to say that if reading is a hearing, writers are complainants?

[T]he interpreter looks for parallel structures and other patterns, for recurring themes, and for variations in the patterns and themes. Above all, the interpreter asks the question "why": Why this choice of word, this combination of words, this arrangement?
-Ruth Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation

Judicial interpretation of statutes (and other legislation), it turns out, is a lot like close reading, minus aesthetic concerns. The lecture on statutory interpretation was the first time in law school that a professor mentioned the "post-modern literary theory" idea that readers create meaning rather than receive it. I felt briefly at home. Then we moved on.

This quote reminds me of Gertrude Stein's insistence on repetition and variation, although in statutes repetition and variation are intended to create consistent and stable interpretations, so that the law is as transparent as possible. Stein's repetition and variation does the exact opposite, destabilizing linguistic convention as much as possible, but with the ultimate goal of simplicity (clarity, transparency?). I wonder if Stein ever wrote about language and law?

Law and Family have long been engaged in an Escherian dialectic, each shaping the other while at the same time being shaped.
- Madame Justice L'Heureux-Dube, Canada v. Mossop

Escherian dialectic. Yay.

As I've said before, my utopia of poetry is a world where EVERYONE is a poet, in which all voluntarily assume the pains and pleasures that come with the highest possible sensitivity to language. - Josh Corey

There is the odd law professor with some of that sensitivity. My torts professor always stops on peculiar phrases, usually in older cases, and repeats them throughout a lecture. Unfortunately, that's usually all I remember. I'll be going into the exam this spring with a mimimal understanding of torts, but I will remember the case where the lady was "all in a pack of nerves," and the one with the wagon going "at a smartish pace." Not poetic, per se, but you take what you can get.

But if one’s life is one writing – and I really think it is – then the evolution, articulation of that writing has to be capable of incorporating change, growth, even contradiction.
-Ron Silliman

Which is why, perhaps, this searching for a link between law and poetry feels a bit forced. The only link, and the ultimate link, is that my life is a writing life. Wherever I am, and whatever I do, all my experience is a poetic encounter.

This tumult's meant to tilt
All grammar.

-Lisa Robertson, XEclogue

The plaintiff, labouring on behalf of the defendant to obtain pardon from the King for felonious murder, did not receive 100 pounds promised. The plaintiff did nothing to obtain pardon, but merely rode back and forth between London, Roiston and Newmarket.
(Lampleigh v. Brathwait)

I've learned after my first legal writing assignment that "lawyers do not like long sentences" and that I should remove all semi-colons. It's true that short sentences are the norm in most technical writing. But I'm reluctant to give up the semi-colon. It's the most difficult punctuation mark to master, and I like to practice using it. The semi-colon conveys so much subtlety in the rhetorical balancing of tension and resolution; flat declaration seems so blunt.