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.

the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
-Tom Waits

All you ever need to know about contract law. And you knew that already, I'm sure.

Much great literature...achieves an equipoise, rather than a resolution, of opposing forces. ... Statutes may be ambivalent too, through failure of foresight or pressure to compromise. But when a statute is drawn into litigation, the court must adopt a reading that will favour one side of the lawsuit or the other. It cannot revel in statutory ambivalence.
-Richard Posner, Law and Literature

A dread feeling, linked with time, becomes the experience of [quote] the quotidian [endquote], so I'm a fragment reading back to see when I was a whole.
-Jeff Derksen, Dwell

The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour, and the lawyer's question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply.
-Lord Atkin, Donoghue v. Stevenson

The spectre of hopeless indeterminacy, of rampant subjectivity, hovers over the key texts of both fields. (legal documents and imaginative literature)
-Richard Posner, Law and Literature

Both law and poetry are social discourses. While law "brings order into the chaos of social interactions," poetry frustrates direct social interactions, diverting the social into the textual. Law provides structure (scaffolding) for defining relationships. Poetry provides an intermediary, creating communities that define themselves around texts. Writers and readers interact through writing and through the social acts of performance and criticism. Community implies some method of legal organization. What is the legal organization of a poetry community?