Reconciling a Double Life: Law and Literature

I’m very happy to be spending the month of October as Writer in Residence at Open Book. I’m also happy that it’s a virtual residency as I was able to skip town on the very first day to attend a poetry symposium in Scotland. It may seem natural enough for a newly published poet to attend a poetry symposium, but in fact I’m here in my law professor guise to present a paper on law and poetry.

Most writers, particularly those who write in the not very lucrative genres of short fiction and poetry, need another job, and my other job is teaching law. I went to law school with the idea that it was a field in which my fascination with and facility for words were more likely to earn a reasonable living. Then I opted for a career in academia rather than practice in the hope that the more flexible schedule of the former would allow more room for writing stories and poems. Both proved happy choices for me. Nevertheless, my working life has still sometimes felt like a tug-of-war between law-related and literary pursuits.

For a long time I exacerbated the tension by keeping the two realms determinedly separate. But eventually I realized that I needed to counter my increasing sense of fragmentation, and shifting my academic focus to the field of law and literature was an obvious path. When I was a student, it was known as the law and literature movement, its adherents still fighting to establish space for it in the law school curriculum and in the pages of law journals. Now it’s recognized as a legitimate and ever-expanding field of study. Most law schools offer a course in it; mine does and I teach it.

The field of law and literature is often described as divided into two strands: law in literature and law as literature. The former explores representations of law in literary texts, while the latter analyzes legal texts through the lens of literary theory. My interests generally fall somewhere in between. My current preoccupation is with poems that integrate bits of legal texts—fragments of statutes, judgments, legislative proceedings—and in so doing effectively use law against itself.

This is how I find myself in Glasgow at a symposium on Outside Poetry, poised to present a paper on poetry as a means to critique, challenge, subvert, deconstruct law. My primary focus will be on Muriel Rukeyser’s poem sequence The Book of the Dead, but I’ll also speak a bit about two powerful books by Canadian poets: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Soraya Peerbaye’s Tell. What else will be presented, read, discussed here under the rubric of Outside Poetry? No doubt the unfolding symposium will spark a few more posts about that but, in the meantime, if you're curious, you can have a look at the full schedule here: https://outsidepoetryfestival.wordpress.com/symposium/.