"…by an Earthquake"

Aha, another poem about law school! This one is about issue-spotting.

I kid, but I do think the fragmented and stirred-up plotpieces will ring a bell for anyone who has ever sat for a law school exam. I am enamored of John Ashbery and recently saw him read in Manhattan, where he was introduced as “the most important living poet in America”; I am inclined to agree. I pieced together the below to post here, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t like breaking up the integrity of a poem to exploit it in that way. I am sure some say the same of the anthology itself, decrying the removal of a single poem from its context because a single-author collection is a work of art arranged in a precisely deliberate way. Of course, any editor of an anthology also makes her own choices about order, font, supplemental materials, and all the other elements that the poet first made when he created the collection in which he first published the piece. I suppose that’s why a second layer of copyright protects the anthologist and the value of her compilation and presentation. It’s also why the first-order copyright requires the poet’s permission. He must consent (I assume) not merely to his poem’s reproduction and distribution, but to the anthology’s specific treatment of the poem: where it fits, how it looks, what criticism or artwork accompanies it. The same poet who grants permission to use his poem in a book called “Political Poems” would likely change his tune upon learning his poem begins the chapter on “Misogynistic and Homophobic Poems.”

I digress. An Ashbery teaser:

A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.
…
A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.
…
A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.
Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.
Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.
A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.
Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.
Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.
Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.
Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.
Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.
…
B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.
B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.

Excerpted from “…by an Earthquake,” by John Ashbery, from Can You Hear, Bird (1995)
Read the poem in its entirety here

"Ignorance"

I knew this endeavor would soon lead me into the fuzzy territory of all those poems that are not explicitly “about” law on their faces, but may resonate with readers/lawyers as relevant to the project. When I described the idea—an anthology of poems about law—to Yale Professor Kenji Yoshino, he promptly retorted, “aren’t they all?”

To me, Larkin’s “Ignorance” is not just a law poem, but a law school poem. As in the Dugan poem I posted yesterday, the unmediated logic of “things” and the natural order seems strange and unattainable to the self, here a more fumbling and noncommittal self that the id-driven self of “Internal Migration.” While Dugan’s speaker is reigned in physically and emotionally by rules and the threat of discipline, Larkin’s speaker is estranged (“strange,” “strange,” “strange”) from an outside world that ticks on (“punctual”) organically, without fear or hesitation. Organs without language function, thrive, adapt, reproduce, and evolve, without the crippling self-doubt that plagues the thinking being.

The speaker sounds a lot like a law student or young lawyer to this law student. We come to the law and it appears to have an authority and a “shape,” one that “works” and “find[s] what it needs” while it nonetheless remains elastic, “willing[] to change.” There purports to be a “way things work” but we are ignorant to it as we are plunged into its unwelcoming depths. Like the speaker, we are fascinated, perhaps jealous, certainly estranged and “[un]sure/ of what is true or right or real”: the Socratic method at its best. I don’t know, but “someone must know”! We live inside the law and “wear” it, it becomes our “flesh,” but law students and young lawyers so often feel like frauds.

Advocacy says: argue that your client must win according to the law, regardless of “what is true or right or real.” Larkin’s speaker is twice ignorant: ignorant of the means by which “things work” and work together in the outside world, and ignorant too to the piece of the self that is the physical body. The poem’s closing two couplets align on the page the “decisions”/”imprecisions” that divide and distinguish flesh from intellect. I have heard many young lawyers speak of pretending to be lawyers, playing a role prescribed by title and trappings (suit, briefcase, shiny new vocabulary) and hoping to grow into it from the outside-in. What does that disconnect suggest about us and the profession—“That when we start to die/ Have no idea why”?

Ignorance
Philip Larkin

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,
…
read the rest of the poem

and find a whole slew of Larkin poems