Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present, the first serious anthology of law-related poetry in the
United States, has just been published by The University of Iowa Press. Edited by Michael Stanford, a former
literature professor and active public defender, and David Kader, a professor
of law at Arizona State University, the collection surveys six centuries of
poetry related to the law. Kathleen Heil recently exchanged emails with the
editors about the book.
In
preparing this collection did you find yourselves drawn to a particular period
or style of poem as being particularly suited to illuminating aspects of the
law?
David: No. I
believe we were open to every period, over six centuries, and to any style of
poem. Our focus was on the content and
the quality of the poem, whenever it was written and in whatever manner.
Mike: I agree with David, but would point to the
Renaissance as a period in which poets were especially knowledgeable about, and
interested in, the law. Shakespeare, who
had many connections with London’s law schools the Inns of Court; Donne, who
studied law at Lincoln’s Inn; and Sir John Davies, who had a very distinguished
legal career and was set to become England’s top judge at his death — all wrote
poems thoroughly suffused with legal imagery.
David: For sure, the Elizabethan period in
particular was rich with engagement between writers and the Inns of Court, in
no small part due to the growing entertainment demands of the Inns, but also
due to the coming and going of the contagious plague, which shut down theaters
and other entertainment venues, and led the legal community to host events
within the Inns—including the premier, I believe it was, of Twelfth Night, performed
with the queen herself in attendance.
You
mention in the preface that despite the surfeit of law-related work in drama
and fiction, that this is the first time anyone has undertaken to anthologize a
serious collection of poetry related to the law. Do you think that poetry related to the law
has been previously overlooked, and is this anthology an attempt to
rectify the oversight?
David: Poetry has definitely been overlooked in the
law and literature movement, without question.
And one of our primary ambitions was to cure this blind spot.
Mike: I agree, and would only add that the
tradition of writing about law is indeed less readily visible in poetry than in
fiction and drama. So compiling the
anthology took time and detective work.
It helped that we had an obsessive love of poetry and access to good
research libraries.
Poetry
of the Law examines six centuries of legal poetry. Did you observe any major
shifts in the content of the poems in terms of their approach to the Law in
accordance with changes in the Law qua Law?
mid-nineteenth-century poem “The Gallows,” which marks the beginning of a vital
anti-death penalty movement in the U.S., arising in tandem with abolitionism.
Or Edgar Lee Masters’s “Butch Weldy,” which calls attention to the “fellow
servant” doctrine, a Gilded Age legal rule designed to ensure that most workers
could never recover for injuries suffered on the job. Then there’s Brad Leithauser’s “Law Clerk
1979,” which wittily evokes the relatively recent phenomenon of the summer
clerkship — the ritual by which corporate law firms wine and dine students from
top law schools in order to socialize them into the economic elite. For me, one
of the most interesting poetic restatements of a legal idea comes in Robert
Hass’s “The Woods in New Jersey.” Law,
says Hass, “is made,/whatever we like to think, more of interests/than of
reasons, trees reaching their own way/for the light, to make the sort of order
that there is.”
This
striking organic metaphor reflects the view called legal realism — the idea that
judges’ rulings are driven more by their moral and political views than by
reason or respect for precedent. It’s a
view more comfortably held by lawyers and legal theorists on the Left. So it’s significant that the poem is
dedicated to Justice William Brennan — a liberal hero, and conservative target,
for the expansiveness of his opinions on the Supreme Court.
David: A difficult question, actually, that would
require a careful (re)read with the question in mind. Again time does not permit me to tackle that
effort; but it is a splendid question, as a difficult one. My initial take, without doing any rereading
from the book — is that no, no MAJOR shift in content as to approach is readily
seen in these poems over time. Sure, the
substance of the law has changed in six centuries, but the enduring questions
remain — and most of the poems (even those dealing with historical trials) attend
to those questions, not really bound by time and space. Maybe that is why these poems appealed to us — they endure, they are for all time, even if born out of
particulars.
David,
you are a Professor in ASU’s College of Law and also a member of the Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Did preparing this anthology
transform your understanding of the law and/or your approach to teaching it?
understandings of the law or my teaching approach to the law. What my reading
of poetry, including law poems, does accomplish — apart from permitting pleasure
and delight — is to deepen my sensitivity to language and to seeing the world,
including the legal world, in a deeper, even a more oblique way. While I think all of that is
important, I wouldn’t say it has been transformative for me.
Mike,
you are now a public defender in Phoenix, a profession which is ostensibly
worlds apart from your previous work as a literary scholar and academic. Do you find your current work gives insights
into aspects of poetry or the law which you previously conceived of
differently? How did this transition
inform preparation of the anthology?
Mike: My transition from academic to public
defender made less difference than you might think, since it didn’t change my
taste in poetry. Well, maybe in a small
way it did, by making me less susceptible to the charms of anti-lawyer
satire. We do include some vigorously
anti-lawyer poems by e.g. Donne, Swift, and Sandburg, but we could have
included more, and these are balanced by poems in praise of particular lawyers
by e.g. Ben Jonson and Yvor Winters. My
work in the law has led me to think that much anti-lawyer sentiment, old and
new, is shallow, even puerile. I have
tremendous respect for the lawyers I work with, most of whom do a difficult job
with conscientiousness and humanity. Then again, maybe I have a less jaundiced view because I’m working at
one end of the legal spectrum — the one where nobody’s in it for the money.
David: Ah, a favorite!? Impossible. I declare one
as my favorite one day, and another on another day. I think there are many many marvelous poems
among the 100 we include, and sincerely believe on any given day I would
happily claim one of upwards of 75 a favorite above all others.
in praise of a particular defense attorney that I choose to read as a tribute
to defense attorneys in general. James
Wright’s “At the Executed Murderer’s Grave” — for an overwhelmingly powerful take
on an anguished subject. And, for sheer
astringent wit, Glyn Maxwell’s “The Sentence.”
How
did a law professor and a defense attorney come to compile an anthology
of
poetry?
Mike: I wrote poetry as an undergrad at
Duke and as a
grad student at the University of Virginia.
I did workshops with a number of superb poets, including Donald
Justice,
James Applewhite, Marilyn Hacker, and Greg Orr.
I also won a couple of Academy of American Poets Prizes and was
lucky
enough to get published in some good journals, like Beloit and Seneca. But after I got my PhD (with a dissertation
on Yeats) and went on to a career in college teaching, I became more a
scholar
of poetry than a writer of it. Then,
after two decades of teaching, I got restless and went to law school in
my
spare time. It was at ASU’s law school
that I met David, a law professor with a similar background and a
uniquely
intense devotion to poetry. We compared
notes about the surprising fact that there was a poetry anthology about
every
subject under the sun except the law. We
set out to fill the gap, and our collaboration continued after I ditched
teaching to become a public defender.
David:
What a wonderful series of events brought Mike and I together and made
this
book possible. Mike made — from my point of view — the huge
life-changing and
brave decision to come to the law school to pursue a J.D. after many
years as
an English professor; and I made a much smaller for sure, but if I might
say, a
somewhat courageous decision to offer a course on "Shakespeare and the
Law" —
where we met. Soon thereafter, we spoke about our interests and
discovered we
shared a great love of poetry, and also, that though there existed a
fair
number of quality law poems, no adequate capture of these gems existed
despite
the growing important field of Law and Literature. My
own interest in poetry came directly
from my undergraduate study with the marvelous teachers and significant
poets
Philip Levine and Chuck Hanzlicek. In addition, to writing some poems
myself
during those years, I edited the college literary magazine, Backwash,
and most
importantly became a life time reader of poetry. I almost pursued an MFA
following college, but instead went to law school.
–Kathleen Heil
Madrid, 29 March 2010
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