"Internal Migration: On Being on Tour"

Internal Migration: On Being on Tour
by Alan Dugan

As an American traveler I have
to remember not to get actionably mad
about the way things are around here.
Tomorrow I’ll be a thousand miles away
from the way it is around here. I will
keep my temper, I will not kill the dog
next door, nor will I kill the next-door wife,
both of whom are crazy and aggressive
and think they live at the center of culture
like everyone else in this college town.
This is because I’m leaving, I’m taking off
by car, by light plane, by jet, by taxicab,
for some place else a thousand miles away,
so I caution myself: control your rage,
even if it causes a slight heart attack.
Stay out of jail tonight before you leave,
and don’t get obstreperous in transit tomorrow
so as to stay out of jail on arrival tomorrow night.
Think: the new handcuffs are sharp inside
and meant to cut the wrists. …

read the rest


i found this poem last night and i couldn’t resist dugan’s “actionably mad.” plenty of dictionaries assign “actionable” only a legal definition and no explicit secondary meaning; something actionable gives rise to a cause of legal action or provides grounds for a lawsuit (thomson gale). synonyms are litigable, prosecutable, triable (houghton mifflin). american heritage offers “relating to or being information that allows a decision to be made or action to be taken,” which amuses the lawyer in me and gives the poet more than a touch of vertigo. borrowing is what poetry’s all about, but the spurts of legalese (“actionably mad,” “obstreperous in transit”) sharply contrast with the far-from-formal language that flank them, making the words sound foreign and stilted.

that small point is just a microcosm for a bigger point, and the reason we’re here. What makes a poem a poem about law? it’s not just the semantic trappings of law and order here, the handcuffs and jails and rape and murder, but the layers of law the poem imposes upon the speaker and the speaker imposes upon himself. the internal/emotional order— “i caution myself: control your rage” mirrors the external/physical order— “the new handcuffs are sharp inside/and meant to cut the wrists.”

every time the speaker begins to speak freely of his impulses, he is rebuked: by himself, by verse, by law, by the policemen whose imagined justice is swift, and by the physical limitations of glasses, false teeth, a frail body, and a fragile heart. “as an american traveler i have” opens wide with a statement of possession and empowerment, promptly undermined when it becomes “have/to remember” to follow the rules. that first resolution of self-control echoes through the poem’s early lines: “I have to,” “I will,” “I will not,” until inner monologue becomes dialogue: “control your rage,” “stay out of jail,” “don’t get obstreperous,” “you must travel.” the caesurae of the colons that break lines 14 and 19 stand in for the threat of imprisonment, serving as stop-sign or jail-bars to the forward momentum of the speaker who wants to “tak[e] off/by car, by light plane, by jet, by taxicab.”

if the speaker’s internal and external orders mirror one another, what do we make of the titular “internal migration” and the poem’s nomadic closing lines? surely there is a pushing out of all other people, a total folding-inward reinforced by both sets of laws and lending irony to the speaker’s disdain for townies who “think they live at the center” (“of culture,” but substitute any number of nouns for “culture”). the idea that his migration or movement is purely internal not only places the speaker at the center of everything, but it relies on inner and outer law to perpetually push him inward. the emotional rules and societal rules all conspire to prevent not only violence but touch, contact, conversation, even empathy—even with the dog! of course, dugan’s most widely anthologized piece (in my experience; i have no data on that) is the unforgettable “love song: i and thou,” where the stubborn protagonist announces, “this is hell,/but i planned it, i sawed it,/i nailed it, and i/will live in it until it kills me.”

read the rest of "Love Song: I and Thou" in the valentine’s day pinsky piece at slate

"the nail"

when we talk about the internet and the unmediated, sped-up access to information it enables, people mention the images from abu ghraib almost without fail. those pictures generated such a visceral response that when we remember them, we remember not just the images but the way we processed them simultaneously with our minds and guts. i think they come up too as emblematic of state secrets in an age where the state has a harder and harder time keeping secrets... but because they are gruesome and primal, they can never be "just" metaphor.

in "the nail," watch the deliberate pronoun drift (drift in a cultivated way and not a casual way). the first few lines seem to pointedly elide any "you" or "me" ("what [...] mind does after horror," "how [...] not be annihilated?" "feels it in the tendons of the hand"), and then a "you" sneaks in and becomes the active and emphatic "your." the speaker backs away again in the second stanza and then takes/assigns sweeping ownership with the "us," "us," "us," "us," "us," and then "we," "we," "we" that broadens out again to encompass the "brutal human world."

The Nail
by C. K. Williams

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand...

read the rest of the poem, excerpted from: C. K. Williams' “The Nail” in Repair. Copyright © 1999

"what happened this week"

here's a little denise duhamel i know i can reprint since she's fabulous enough to e-publish herself.

i read "smile!" for the first time in 2003 and this was one of the poems from the collection that stayed with me; it's got plenty to say about not only law enforcement and lawyers, but about race/class and access. i won't say more for now-- reading someone's commentary right before a piece always shapes my experience of it far too much.

What Happened This Week

(May 1, 1992)

David didn't come to school Tuesday,
the day his essay was due.
Instead the police showed up --
a Dragnet team -- asking if anyone
had seen him since Friday.
The class huddled at the implications
of the words: missing person.
David, eighteen, too old for milk cartons,
but just ripe for the morgue
and a numbered tag around his bare toe.
...
read the rest!

fumbling toward anthology

in the couple of hours since i set up this blog, i have been asking myself why i wanted it and what makes it anything but a waste of (cyber)space (even if the latter is, yes, nonrivalrous and thus unwastable). mostly, who cares? if it isn't a voyeuristic peek into my underwear drawer, and it isn't a direct link to the newest music/tech/gossip/etc., and it isn't a droll snarky hipster journal and it definitely isn't a profound theoretical exploration of anything hyperacademic, so what?

i think the answer lies in the aspiration of this project, collecting poems that cluster around ideas about what law is and what lawyers do. bookstores are full of anthologies, poems by african-american women or poems by san franciscans or poems about fathers or poems about dogs. the internet lends itself to all those thematic and textual connections, and amazon users post booklists and pandora users create songlists and blogs boast sometimes exhaustively specific blogrolls. poetry is harder to round up without either massive concordances or interactive indexing or until googleprint follows through with its fantastic/sinister plans (depending on whom you ask, and more on that later). unless i'm missing something rather basic, the ways to find all the poems about chocolate are basically to a)read all the poems you can get your hands on and/or b) ask all the readers and poets you know where the chocopoetry they know can be found. several years ago i tried to compile a chunk of poems about sleep and sleeplessness, of which there are plenty. too shy to survey the nation, i paged through a whole lot of collections and found a handful and drew a few (to me) intriguing lines connecting them, but i was acutely aware of just how many poems i was missing. i had barely barely barely scratched the surface of insomniac poems, and so i was disappointed.

lawyerverse is fumbling toward anthology, with apologies to sarah maclachlan. look at what you've got on your shelf and post what you find. the more pieces we track down, the sooner we can talk about what they're saying to one another and to law.

now there's just the pesky problem of copyright...

blogroll, please

i don't know what a blogroll is or where it goes, but here are

a few friends who care about poetry:

http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/
http://trulyoutrageous.wordpress.com/
http://raptor.slc.edu/blogs/tomemos/

and a few who care about feminism:
http://ms-jd.org/
http://www.bitchmagazine.com/blog/
http://naww.blogspot.com/

and a few ruminating on intellectual property & media policy:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/
http://uchicagolaw.typepad.com/faculty/copyright_technology/index.html
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
http://www.copybites.com/
http://www.nologo.org/

(hi.)

i'm brand new to this end of the blog baton, so forgive me while i futz around and get oriented.

to start: a law review article on the relationship between law and poetry
http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/eberle.html

most of what i've found googling is poetry by, rather than about, lawyers. i'm not really feelin' it so far but maybe some lines somewhere will pleasantly surprise. my reaction may reveal my own biases as well-- i'm totally mired in what lawyers and legal academics have to say about law right now, so i'm gravitating toward listening to those who are writing from the outside-in.