The Best American Poetry: "Poetry of the Law" [by Kathleen Heil]

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?

Mike: Well, I think of Whittier’s 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?

David: The anthology did neither — transform 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.

Mike: May I mention three favorites? Yvor Winters’ “To Edwin V. McKenzie” — a poem 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.