Birthday songs

Changes -- David Bowie
Birthday -- The Sugarcubes
Hold on Hope -- Guided by Voices
This Night Has Opened My Eyes -- The Smiths
Cosmic Dancer -- T. Rex
Milkshake N' Honey -- Sleater Kinney

and, of course,

Fairytale of New York -- The Pogues

A type of fly injects its eggs into a particular species of ant, and the eggs become maggots that burrow through the ant's flesh to its head and through eating tissue hollow out the head. The ant, meanwhile, lives. An ant carries on with a hollowed-out head. Innovation in art is a delicate refusal.

The English language is mine, and not mine. The English language is the shifting ground, the complex mess and soup and great wave over and around. The English language exists solely for my pleasure and my pleasure rests in its complexity. My pleasure grounds the English idioms. My pleasure starts with sound. My pleasure is all of a tongue. And words curling up my throat a growling purring hum. The English words work up through my body. And I take pleasure in resolve as well. A sharp snap in the sentence. A tight turn. Small details, small particular lettered sound. Pattern. Rhyme and rhythm and repeated phrases. Parcels.

The English language languid and honing. The more it bites the more it swallows the more it spits and curves. The English language is nothing if not expanding. Sopping up. All explicit and pinned. The English language has a scientific turn of mind, it pins all specimens right to the quiver, right in the heart. The English language takes aim. The English language is never fraudulent, the English language is always becoming, the English language is always at home. The English language flaunts its history. The English language is an arrogant slag.

check it out check it out check it out

West Coast Line kindly published some of my CHUMP poems in their brand new issue #46. It's not up on the website yet, so you'll have to go find it and look at it because the cover art is A-mazing!

Thanks, West Coast Line!

Here’s a new way to avoid studying. I’ve been updating my curriculum vitae and also my acknowledgments. Back when I was psyched about publishing my as yet unpublishable manuscript, I wrote an acknowledgments page, which was obviously a bit premature, but seemed like an important part of the process. Sucks that it’s not a matter of public record, but hey! I have a blog; anything can be public. So, if you were to read to the end of a book of Natalie Simpson poems, here’s what you would find:

I am indebted to the editors of the magazines that have published versions of some of these poems: West Coast Line, Queen Street Quarterly, dANDelion, filling Station, endnote, phu on line, (orange), in grave ink, sudden magazine; to derek beaulieu’s housepress, ryan fitzpatrick’s MODL press, rob mclennan’s above/ground press, and to No Press for publishing some of these poems as chapbooks; to Jon Paul Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch for publishing “Sentencing” in their Post Prairie anthology and to derek beaulieu, Jason Christie and Angela Rawlings for publishing several poems in their anthology Shift & Switch. I am also grateful to the many event organizers who have allowed me to read to enthusiastic audiences and with distinguished colleagues: the Markin-Flanagan Program, the Alley Alley Home Free Fred Wah symposium organizers, the Bodies and Texts Symposium committee, the 2001 Free Exchange commitee, Jason Christie’s YARD series, past and current editorial collectives of filling Station and dANDelion magazines, the Word on the Street, the Spoken Word Festival, and of course and always the phu collective.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge readings as well as publishings, because getting to do readings is kind of the point of being published. Also, publication can be a somewhat hollow accomplishment, but giving a good reading and seeing how the audience reacts to your work is the best thing in the world. I love that moment of connection, when you feel that you control the energy in the room through nothing more than your voice and your words; it’s a tremendous sense of power and of vulnerability.

Acknowledgments are actually pretty hard to write. I think the best acknowledgments page I’ve read was in Julia Williams’ The Sink House. She strikes the perfect balance between sincerity and dignity; it’s very sweet without gushing. Mine are accurate but somehow incomplete. I should add a thank to you to everyone in the Calgary writing community generally, and maybe more specific thank yous. Hmm, I’ll have to spend more time on this. Screw my civil litigation exam.

Discussing some minutiae involving the difference between a trust and a power:

A layman and, I suspect, also a logician would find it hard to understand what difference there is.
In Re Baden’s Deed Trusts, England, 1972

So that leaves a lawyer to understand the difference? Here’s the secret they don’t want you to know: law does not follow logic. Law does not follow common sense. Law employs its own method of reasoning to protect the status quo.

I guess that explains why I can get an incredibly high score on the LSAT (which measures logical and analytical ability and reading comprehension) but only average grades in law school. Either that or I procrastinate too much then do half-assed work. What’s the logical explanation? What’s the reasonable explanation?

I’m so glad someone found my blog through a search on Barthes and the sentence. Those are two of my favourite things. Sometimes I almost forget that I have a Master’s degree in English, because I rarely mention it, but I do, and my thesis was on the sentence as a unit of poetry in Gertrude Stein’s writing. I talked about Saussure, Jacobson, Barthes, Silliman, and a whole bunch of other linguists, theorists and poets. I still love thinking about sentences. Just the word is exciting. Not all my poetry is about sentences, but all my poetry is sentences. I know a lot of poets get down into words and their randomness or down into letters or even further down in specks and grunts, but I can’t get away from the sentence. I don’t think Barthes has the last word on sentences, but he does have a few things to say, mainly about the authority of the sentence. I think if the sentence is the system, I’d rather mess around inside it than turn away from it.

All of which is why I was so happy to get to write an essay about Saussure, Jacobson and Barthes for my philosophy of law class. I didn’t talk about sentences at all, only more abstractly about language, texts, thought, and law, but still it felt like a return to concerns I’d somewhat abandoned because of what? I don’t know. A sense of failure? Absurdity? Shame?

Least sexy allusion to sex ever:

... these decisions have sometimes turned upon narrow differences in wording, which seem to be the progeny by miscegenation of early technical rules relating to the form of the execution of deeds...

Also, wtf does it mean? Your guess is as good as mine.

Holy crap I'm in a bad mood. My email hasn't worked for the past couple of days, which really shouldn't be such a problem, but it makes me feel like I'm missing a limb. I have my first exam tomorrow, and while that should adrenalinalize me to study like crazy, instead it just bores me. I keep falling asleep.

Corporation is a fascinating concept: the bringing forth out of thin air an incorporeal person that acts only through its agents. Corporations enjoy the same legal personality as natural persons. In most modern jurisdictions, incorporation is granted by statute, but it used to be granted by Royal Charter. The oldest corporation in the world is, of course, The Bay, which was formed in 1670 by these words:

Now know yee that Wee being desirous to promote all Endeavours tending to the publique good of our people and to encourage the said undertaking have of our especiall grace certaine knowledge and meere mocion Given granted ratifyed and confirmed And by these Presentes for us our heires and Successors Doe give grant ratifie and confirme unto our said Cousin Prince Rupert Christopher Duke of Albemarle William Earle of Craven Henry Lord Arlington Anthony Lord Ashley Sir John Robinson Sir Robert Vyner Sir Peter Colleton Sir Edward Hungerford Sir Paul Neile Sir John Griffith and Sir Phillipp Carterett James Hayes John Kirke Francis Millington William Prettyman John Fenn and John Portman That they and such others as shall bee admitted into the said Society as is hereafter expressed shall bee one Body Corporate and Politique in deed and in name by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay and them by the name of the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay one Body Corporate and Politique in deede and in name really and fully for ever for us our heirs and successors doe make ordeyne constitute establish confirme and declare by these Presentes and that by the same name of Governor & Company of Adventurers of England Tradeing into Hudsons Bay they shall have perpetuall succession etc. etc. (it actually goes on for twelve pages).

In return, all King Charles the Second asked for was the

Yeilding and paying yearley to us our heirs and Successors for the same two Elkes and two Black beavers whensoever and as often as Wee our heirs and successors shall happen to enter into the said Countryes Territoryes and Regions hereby granted

Not a bad deal. I think it’s sad that the Bay changed its name on the federal corporate registry from The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay AKA Hudson’s Bay in French Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson to Hudson’s Bay Company in December 2004.

Of course, none of this is on my Corporations exam, but if it were wouldn’t that make it a much more interesting course?

Crazy fog, bright sunny days, now snow – Vancouver is trying to turn itself into Calgary for me!

This has been such a horrible essay-writing month. First I had to do an essay on a topic that seemed so important I was too anxious to start working on it until the last minute. Now I’m trying to write an essay on a topic that's so dull I can’t stand it to think about it, even though it’s well past last minute.

I read my essay out in class last week

There were some objections that my position was not "logical" or "plausible," which yeah, I know, it's not. My response was that it was a position, one which I decided to take, not one that I was claiming as necessarily valid.

It's fun to watch yourself turning into a lawyer, even though an incompetent lawyer.

Above all, law values consistency and tradition. It must look backwards for its validity. The method of law is reduction, which always involves the suppression of multiplicity in the service of authority. Law can never resist closure.

Poetry is exactly what law is not.

I have two new chapbooks out:

Dirty Work from the mysterious NO Press. I haven't seen this one yet, but I'm very excited about it. You can be too.

and

The writing that should enter into conversation from rob mclennan's above/ground press.

Thanks rob and mysterious NO Press person!

Tripped up last night in my corporations law reading by a delightfully odd sentence:

He knew that what he had said would consternate the Keevils.
-Teck Corp. Ltd. v. Millar (B.C. 1973)

It's not just that Keevils is a funny name, or that "consternate the Keevils" sounds like a deviant board game, it's the string of small words delaying content, then crashing into the solid mass of "consternate."

I try to be an obediant law student, but I keep getting snagged on these bits of language.

Why is it that after a BA in English, an MA in English, and half a Law degree, I still have such a hard time writing essays? It’s not just the usual procrastination, worrying about topic and focus, incomplete research, etc. I am terrified of writing. There’s such a breach between the chaos of thought and reduction into words, sentences, paragraphs. So much is lost. Actually, I’m sure nothing is lost: an idea that can’t be articulated was never an idea, probably just the feeling of having an idea hovering just beyond reach. I think I have a lazy mind. I just wish I didn’t keep entering degree programs that involve so much writing. I’m trying to write about indeterminacy, but I keep panicking then giving up…it all seems so… fucking… indeterminate.

Now literature is only a means, devoid of cause and purpose; in fact, that is what defines it. You can of course attempt a sociology of the literary institution; but you can limit to act of writing by neither a why nor a wherefore. ... To ask oneself why one writes is already an advance over the blissful unconsciousness of "inspiration," but it is a despairing advance -- there is no answer. Apart from demand and apart from success, empirical alibis much more than real motives, the literary act is without cause and without goal precisely because it is devoid of sanction: it proposes itself to the world without any praxis establishing or justifying it: it is an absolutely intransitive act, it modifies nothing, nothing reassures it.
-Roland Barthes, "Kafka's Answer," Critical Essays (NWU Press, 1972).

But now in Alberta, we have a government that is unwilling to govern (this whole $400 reward decision was made behind closed caucus doors and announced in front of TV cameras because the legislature has not been opened since its summer break). We also have a government that wishes individuals to make decisions of how to redistribute the communal wealth.

Considering how unemployed and debt-ridden I am, you’d think I’d be happy to get random cheques from the government, but I’m not; I’m livid. I’m tired of Klein declining to fulfill his democratic duties and I’m sick of his cynical maneuvers to buy our complacency. What to do? Refuse to cash the cheque? Take the money and mail 400 postcards of complaint to the legislature? Give 400 loonies to 400 homeless people?

Giving the money to a charity would be a nice gesture, but it would also reinforce the government’s contention that the non-profit/charity sector is better suited to deliver social services that the government is unwilling to concern itself with. I think the government can deliver services more efficiently, and I think that its history of cutbacks combined with its reticence to regulate and/or organize non-profit activity has resulted in an overloaded, inefficient and unsustainable charitable sector that must attempt to fulfill the demands of a society whose needs are not met by the institution charged with the responsibility of meeting those needs.

Any use of the money seems inadequate in comparison to the way in which it should be used: by the Alberta government, for the people of Alberta, through government programs. Health, education, affordable housing, legal aid… any of these could use more funding.

This seems like an opportunity to make some kind of statement, but despite all my ranting, I’ll probably just spend my share on rent or food.

There's a wonderful Barthes essay about the pain of revision called "Flaubert and the Sentence" in his New Critical Essays (Hill and Wang, 1980):

...Flaubert subtracts, erases, constantly returns to zero, begins over again. Flaubertian sequestration has for its center (and its symbol) a piece of furniture which is not the desk but the divan: when the depths of agony are plumbed, Flaubert throws himself on his sofa: this is his "marinade," an ambiguous situation, in fact, for the sign of failure is also the site of fantasy, whence the work will gradually resume, giving Flaubert a new substance which he can erase anew. Flaubert qualifies this Sisyphean circuit by a very strong word, "atrocious," the sole recompense he receives for his life's sacrifice.

Also:

...style for Flaubert is absolute suffering, infinite suffering, useless suffering.

Why writing poetry is hard:

For it is indeed a matter of vertigo: correction is infinite, it has no sure sanction.

Why writing fiction is worse:

I have a narration to compose; now the story is something which is very wearisome for me. I have to send my heroine to a ball.

Man, I love this stuff.

Starting to see a way out of the procrastination-paralysis of the last month and a half. Rather than reading and preparing for exams, I’ve been worrying about what to write for the two papers I have to do this term. My philosophy of law class has been a real worry, because most of what we read and discuss has to do with the question of whether law and morality are separate. I can’t seem to become invested in that question. I just don’t see how it matters. What interests me is the construction of law, how it’s linguistic and textual. The problems of language and the problems of texts (indeterminacy, ambiguity, desire for closure) are the problems of law.

The light for me at the end of this particular tunnel is Barthes. I’m going to try to discuss the genres of legal texts in terms of the readerly/writerly distinction. Maybe I’ll also throw in some Saussure and discuss the difference between speech and writing and try to argue that because writing is inferior so is law...

Hmm. Yeah, this probably won’t work. But whatever, I get to read Barthes again, Yay!

How little thought patterns matter.

A sentence like this is comforting because I feel that its absurd complexity relieves me of any obligation to understand it.

And during the period of twenty-one years from my death if the said Lilian Aspinall shall live so long to accumulate the surplus if any of such income at compound interest by investing the same and the resulting income thereof in any of the investments aforesaid by way of addition to the capital of such fund as aforesaid and so as to be subject to the same trusts as are hereby declared concerning the same and during the remainder of the life of the said Lilian Aspinall in case she shall survive the said period of twenty-one years to pay or apply such surplus income (if any) to the person or persons or for the purposes to whom and for which the same would for the time being be payable or applicable if the said Lilian Aspinall were then dead.
In Re Smith, England, 1928

Slightly shocked today to see the Post-Prairie anthology all spiffy on display at the university book store. I've had the experience a few times of seeing a publication I'm part of in a bookstore before receiving my contributor copy in the mail, and I always have the same reaction. Curiosity, pride, etc. but also a horrible cringing regret, a desperate desire to take the poem back, rewrite it, erase it, burn it. There's such a crushing finality to words on paper. I tend to have to acclimate myself to publication -- leave it around the house for a while, flip through it a bit, read some of the other contributions -- before I can stand to look at my poems in print.

It's an interesting and absurd neurosis: I hate not being published, but whenever I am published, I feel like I've misrepresented myself.

Anyway, the anthology looks amazing, I can't wait to read it, and I am thrilled to be part of it. Go buy.

Law is mind without reason.
-Aristotle

I don't understand this quotation. I find it completely impenetrable. Granted, I read it out of any context, or rather in the random context of a webpage of quotations about law or reason or whatever. But still. What is mind without reason? What is law without reason? Everything in law is reasonable. That's a joke, ha. Well not ha, more blah. The answer to any question anyone can ask in law school is "reasonable." What is the standard of care to which a tortfeasor is held? The standard of the reasonable person. What kind of notice is required to avoid a claim of wrongful dismissal? Reasonable notice. Why can't I think of any better examples? No reason. In fact, I'm doing pro bono research for a civil liberties project looking at tenants' right, focusing on a particular piece of legislation that provides for a reasonable standard. My job is to figure how the standard would be applied were the provision to be adjudicated. My guess is reasonably.

My god. Law is not really this boring, I swear.

With absolute, overwhelming conviction, he didn’t believe it.
- Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

I’m enthralled with the paradox in that sentence, but I’m not sure why. I read it in one of the texts for a Law and Literature mini-course I took last year. I remember at the time I thought the sentence reflected the theme of the story quite powerfully; now I don’t remember the theme of the story anymore and I don’t really care.

I took the course because I figured it would provide me with some familiar ground in an unfamiliar environment, but it was an incredibly disappointing class. The focus was on the themes of law, justice, and criminality within science fiction. Not really my cup of tea, but I’ll read anything with a narrative. The class discussions, however, were mind-numbing. They went from quick plot summaries of the short stories to the question, how does this theme relate to what we already know about law in the world? From there, no-one ever returned to the stories themselves, except to refer to the actions of the characters in a decontextualized way, as though the experience of a character in a short story and one’s own experiences are discursively equivalent.

I guess I shouldn’t criticize too much; there’s no reason why a class of law students should conform to the expectations of a literature class. But it seemed that the course was indicative of the practice of the burgeoning “law and literature” movement. Apparently some legal academics are starting to recognize the relevance of narrative within the law. How facts, evidence, issues are framed by narrative, and how narratives about law (like Dickens’ Bleak House, which seems to be the main object of study) can offer lawyers a way to examine the legal system and its flaws. Fair enough, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I think a law and literature movement should look at not only novelists, but also poets and theorists: writers who recognize the complexity and inadequacy of language; who can shift the question from what does this mean to how can this mean?

I had hoped to make some kind of poem out of phrases from the Magna Carta, but so far it’s just not happening. Maybe it’s better to just enjoy the language for its own absurdity.

There shall be standard measures of wine, ale, and corn (the London quarter), throughout the kingdom. There shall also be a standard width of dyed cloth, russet, and haberject, namely two ells within the selvedges.

All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.

All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters and warreners, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the country, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.

All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.

No town or person shall be forced to build bridges over rivers except those with an ancient obligation to do so.

Style is a very simple matter: all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words.
-Virginia Woolf

Too much has been left to unsafe conjecture and frequently that which might have developed into proof has become arrested on the border of suspicion.
-Clarkson Co Ltd. v. Zhelka, Ontario, 1967

Nice. I wonder if there's a course one can take to learn how to write like a judge?

I want to be creative so I bought cheap paint and small canvasses and I paint. But I can’t really draw, so I just paint streaks and swirls of different colours. It’s meant to be relaxing, but it’s actually frustrating, because it doesn’t look good. I’m a perfectionist and I want to make art. It seems silly to spend money on supplies to create something ugly. At least with writing you’ve only wasted time.

I was reluctant to buy the supplies in the first place because I knew I would get upset. At least I understand the problems I make for myself. That’s a start.

If I could turn all that off, I would enjoy just the motion of painting. I like how thick the paint is at first, how it thins out with brushing, then ends up in a nice pattern of back and forth brush strokes with white canvas showing through. It’s pleasing to see the white space of the canvas become red, then blue, then shades of purple. Sort of like a bruise. Maybe that’s what I should do: try to paint a bruise.

The most interesting thing said in class this week was, "A trust is a trust is a trust, as Gertrude Stein might have said if she'd thought about it." My ears perk up at any mention of Stein, especially in settings that are mainstream, not poetic, where people are not in the know, whatever the know is that I think I know.

But it is interesting -- when Stein wrote, A rose is a rose is a rose, it was to disassociate the word rose from the referent rose and make a familiar word uncomfortably unfamiliar for its materiality. A trust is a trust is a trust, however, has nothing to do with the word trust and everything to do with the concept of trusts, which are fundamentally the same whether they are personal or business-related, investment vehicles or tax avoidance strategies.

Stein is one of those writers whose profound statements have become very well-known, even though the significance of her insights have not. Too bad people don't randomly quote Tender Buttons. I'd love to hear everyone saying, Single fish single fish single fish eggplant single fish sight. It's pretty catchy once you get it in your head.

Cows don’t have a quivering ______ .
I had a philosophy of law class yesterday that was so good I forgot to take notes. The only thing I remember is the above phrase, but I forget the end. It came in the middle of something about ontology and the dichotomy of “just being” and constant change and the problems human beings create for themselves by being aware of the quivering something of everything changing and how logos is the root of those problems because it makes us separate ourselves from the fact of our being. But cows don’t have that problem. It is so fantastically awesome to be in a class (in law school, remember) where you can answer the prof’s question of why you’re in the class with, “One thing that I’m interested in is language and how law regulates every aspect of our lives through language but no one ever looks at the language to realize that it’s flawed and impossible” and the prof is like, “Yes! That’s exactly it. Law has always felt to me like a translation.” Then he went off on something else and he lost me a bit after that, but still…. Awesome.

It's bad enough I haven't been able to get a book published; now I have to turn down invitations to read in Canada Council sponsored reading series because I'm not a "professional author." Whatever. My earnings this year alone from writing poetry will amount to well over $500. That's almost a month's rent! Come on.

Why does the Canada Council draw such arbitrary lines? Like it matters if some publisher puts out 700 copies of my manuscript and a few Chapters in urban areas store a couple copies for a year or so before they're remaindered. My readings would not attract any more or less people. Arts communities are not marketplaces. There's no more value in a professional than in an amateur poet; the distinction is absurd.

I'd like to completely reject the Canada Council's bourgeois value system that valorizes capitalist production. But I'm steeped in the same value system. Publication is the only measure of success. Awards confer worth. Reading series are sullied by unpublished amateurs. The suburbs are a great place to grow up.

This blog has been silent all summer, mainly because I’ve tried (half-heartedly) and failed to articulate my experiences throughout the summer in a way that is relevant to the theme of this blog – what law and poetry have in common. I got a summer job at a non-profit organization run by students in the law department. It holds free legal advice clinics for low-income people throughout the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Through the school year, the clinics are held in community centres one night per week or every couple of weeks and staffed by volunteer students. In the summer, certain lucky student who volunteered all year get paid to staff the clinics every day.

So I spent most days this summer at a community centre in East Vancouver talking to low-income people about their problems. My clinic wasn’t particularly busy compared to some of the others, and I didn’t feel like I did a lot of practical or substantial work to actually help anyone. I went to criminal court a couple of times to defend clients, but I really have no interest in criminal law, so while it was satisfying to get the result my clients wanted, I can’t say I really enjoyed that experience. Most of my clients had strange, complicated problems with no obvious legal solution. The lasting impression I got from the experience is that the line between legal work, social work and counselling is a blurry one. Just talking about their problems and articulating the various issues they are dealing with seemed to help some of the clients; receiving acknowledgement from a sympathetic listener seemed to be really important to them. I wrote several letters on behalf of my clients, helped them file small claims in the provincial court system, did one will, and gave out a lot of summary advice and referrals to other organizations that may or may not have been able to provide more help.

Coming from a background of studying experimental poetry and literary theory at the undergrad and graduate levels, this is the most pragmatic, socially-oriented job I’ve ever done, and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity, but I found it frustrating that things were often unresolved and out of my control. It’s very common to lose touch with clients – they are homeless, or their phones are suddenly out of service, or they are too drug-addled to be reliable enough to stay in contact. Often I would do research and prepare a response only to find that the client was inaccessible.

This job has been a novel experience for me, and while I wanted to express something about it, I didn’t want to harp on about the gritty underbelly of society and its lyric charm or its distance from poetry, and lamely tie my day-to-day encounters into the theme of this blog.

Anyway, a couple of things in the past couple of weeks crystallized some ideas I’ve had about community and the value of contributing.

All the work we do at the legal clinics is approved by a supervising lawyer. At the end of the summer, he gave a speech that I’m paraphrasing as, “The thing to remember about the practice of law is that it gets you connected. It gets you connected to the people who need you, it gets you connected to humanity, and it makes you useful. We’re lucky that we can help people, because so many people in our society are so disconnected. Let’s have a toast to our clients, thank god they need us.” So cool. And so apt: that’s why I want to learn a profession; I want to be useful. As much as I love reading, writing, thinking about poetry and language, history and theory, they are very introspective activities. I feel like I live in my head. I’m very involved in my own interaction with language, very self-absorbed as a writer. I don’t necessarily produce any poetry or have any ideas about poetry that, you know, have any use, and they certainly don’t help anyone.

And yet. About a week and a half ago, I attended filling Station’s Calgary Blow-Out, a three-day extravaganza of Calgary writing. Having been involved in the Calgary writing scene, and not having contributed at all yet to the Vancouver writing scene, reading at the Blow-Out was very much a visit home, in a sense one more entry to the list of all the readings I’ve done in Calgary. A lot of the people who have been supporting my writing for as long as I’ve been writing seriously were there, and most of them were also reading, as well as a lot of other writers whom I’ve met over the past six or seven years, and some who I hadn’t met yet. Calgary has an incredibly energetic, tight knit writing scene. It’s a wonderful community, and I realized (well, not for the first time or anything) how lucky I am to have been part of it and to still be a long-distance contributor. My writing is far from accessible, and the difficulty with writing experimental, innovative (I hope) poetry is that there are no reliable arbiters of quality or relevance. The best one can hope for is a receptive audience. The audiences I read to in Calgary have always been not only receptive, but encouraging, enthusiastic and supportive. Then again, the audiences I read to in Calgary are composed of roughly the same people each time. Poetry is an esoteric interest. Like any other city, Calgary has a small community of people who care about poetry, and it’s not likely to grow.

I’m fascinated with the contrast between these two roles I play. On the one hand, I’m involved in a specialized, marginalized art form that appeals to a select number of people who gather in small spaces to share their complicated relationships to the phenomenon the rest of the world takes for granted, i.e. language.

On the other hand, I become involved in the problems of a more or less random selection of people who don’t know who I am and don’t really care beyond the possibility that I can apply some of my knowledge and skills to alleviate their difficulties.

I don’t think one is better method of contributing to community than the other. When I’m right in the thick of either one, for example while I was reading at the Blow-Out, I do wonder why the hell I ever got into the other one. But for the most part, I think they balance one another. It’s good to have a creative, intellectual project, and more importantly to have the support and company of peers involved in similar projects. But it’s also good to be exposed to such a wide range of people I wouldn’t normally meet and to try to empathize with their lives, and to put my education, talents, skills and intelligence to use for them.

So, overall a good summer.

There is no poetry here, no romance, no idealistic satisfaction from helping the poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill. I'm so tired. And it's not from researching cases or writing letters or even my first dismal court appearance. It's just from listening to their stories, the mundane cliches of their neverending stories. Oh my god, how can I tell you if there is a legal solution to your problem, if you won't stop talking?
I've been told my whole life that I have to talk more, speak up more, express more opinions, explain myself. Like there's something wrong with staying quiet.
Especially if the alternative is blathering in endless fucking detail to someone who is trying to tell you why what you're saying is not relevant at this time in this context.

Writing's better anyway.

Some of my study notes for Criminal Law. The idea is to condense a case into one sentence, so that all the details will come rushing back when I read it. These seemed very concise and pretty funny at the time. Now they're neither. Mostly they're morbid.

Criminal law is depressing. The degree of abstraction it takes to study it makes it either more bearable or more depressing. Or both. There are endless inferences.

Accused drove car onto policeman’s foot, either deliberately or accidentally, then refused to move car off foot.

Accused were present at biker gang-bang.

Fervent pro-French activists circulated satirical pamphlet that was interpreted as anti-French propaganda.

Accused shot two ducks near a pile of grain on the road.

Business man accused of raping real estate agent claims honest belief in consent.

Two men acquitted of attempted robbery for knocking on door of closed restaurant while carrying a gun and wearing balaclavas.

Ludicrously drunk accused had no memory of sexual assault on wife’s handicapped hairdresser.

Seeking safety from storm and repairs, ship full of marijuana moored and off-loaded cargo on Canadian shore.

Yugoslavian woman imported narcotics into Canada with false passport, under duress from mob-type character in Belgrade who threatened to kill her mother.

Shot friend of daughter’s druggie boyfriend when he lunged at her.

DJ threatened sound system repair guy, who pushed back, then DJ stabbed him.

Somewhere in Will Self’s Feeding Frenzy, a collection of essays and ludicrously funny restaurant reviews, he writes that nothing is lost in the economy of ideas. Or something to that effect. Sounds aphoristic, or like it comes from some classic source. Google won’t tell me anything. Anybody know?

Either way, I think it's a good philosophy. Whatever you read, watch, contemplate is useful in the end, or not useful, because what is utility in the world of ideas? Valuable, maybe. Is it similar to Steve McCaffrey's general economy of the text? Libidinal excess recuperated? I don't know, I don't think I ever really understood the general economy. Good thing I spent a chapter on it in my thesis.

I'm a perfectionist, but I'm not very good at it. I have five exams worth 100% of the course mark starting in less than a week. I’m thrilled that the procrastination that usually leads to excessive housecleaning is instead leading me to literature. Here I am, writing poem-ish things, blogging, and reading all manner of poetry, fiction, essays. Exactly the kind of life I’ve always wanted. I wish this could last forever. But no. Exams will begin, they’ll be agonizing, and then I’ll be left with nothing to do and doing nothing.

Futile as it may be to scold myself for not reading enough – for every book I have read, there are endless equally pressing books that I haven’t – I’m still very disappointed at how much I’ve overlooked Creeley. And it’s no excuse to say that I went to the library this week and tried to catch up. Luckily for me, I discovered his fascinating Day Book of a Virtual Poet, which collects emails he sent to an online writing program listserv between 1996 and 1998. The book captures the tension between the ephemeral nature of online communications and the much more solid thingness of publication. Or is it the other way around? I’ve read that data on computers is almost impossible to erase completely, while books are relatively easily lost or destroyed. If nothing else, the book shows how much avenues have opened for presenting and talking about poetry in electronic contexts. The tone of the emails suggests that at the time the listserv dedicated to poetry was a new and exciting concept; now it’s hard to imagine being involved in poetry without email, listservs, websites, online mags, blogs and on and on.

My favourite quote so far (only coincidentally the back-cover quote):
Possibly the most apt advice I ever heard from an elder poet to a younger person aspiring to be one was the very genuine advice, “If it isn’t something you have to do, don’t do it.” All the tendentious proposals as to “why write,” in Pound’s useful phrase, finally fade to the one point W.C. Williams made by saying, “Why don’t we just tell them it’s fun” Not just the authority of endless revisions, not just the lists of publications or prizes won, not just the company of poets of public record—just fun. Fun. Fun.

Damn, I must be doing it wrong.

Another wonderful Creeley book I found is His Idea, published by Coach House in 1973. I don’t have it here to quote from, but the poetry is just lovely. Equally lovely are the black and white photographs that illustrate every poem, and the chapbook design. It’s not very many pages, saddle-stitched, but with a cardstock jacket glued on the hide the staples. I love it when book design, illustration and writing converge into a perfect package.

Sometimes judges go on absurd flights of rhetoric. Witness:

“This is the last of the dispensing power.” Maitland could never have thought that in the year 1968, nearly three centuries after the Bill of Rights, a certain departmental official of Manitoba, acting in fact or in law under the authority of his Minister, would purport to grant a dispensation in favour of a certain group, exempting them from obedience to a particular law to which all others remain subject. That sorry episode must now be recounted.

Wow. All that blustering leads up to a decision that Aboriginal people cannot be exempt from a law that regulates hunting of migratory birds. Not only is the decision culturally insensitive and politically obtuse, the style of writing is completely anachronistic. If you were charged with deciding whether the executive branch of the provincial government can legally grant exemptions from federal statutes to a particular group, would you go on like that? The judgment affects real people, with real concerns, in Manitoba, in 1977. Why not state it plainly?

Objective or subjective intention is a very important distinction in the law. No one can be found guilty of a crime without subjectively intending to perform a criminal act. Private law, however, is concerned generally with objective intention. What the parties to a contract actually intended is less important than what it is reasonable that they would have intended. This is because, after the fact, people obviously lie (or they don’t lie, but they remember things wrong, or they delude themselves, etc.), so what they say they intended is never reliable. Also, it doesn’t really matter what they wanted to get out of the contract when they entered into the contract or how they wanted things to turn out. All that matters is what caused the dispute. The courts have to decide between two (or more) competing interests: this one wants one thing, this one wants the other. Those who judge construe reasonable intentions based on the material evidence and the circumstances. [What is “reasonable” and by whose standards is another problem, the essential problem with the whole thing, I think.]

But anyway, what about authorial intention? Should we readers look for subjective or objective intention? I don’t see how it could be anything but the latter. All we have is the text. Whatever the writer intended when they were writing the text is beyond us. We can look at circumstances, we can look for biographical details, we can scour author’s letters and notes for clues and meanings, but these all lead us to our constructions, not to any kind of truth. And we should never rely on what authors say after the fact, because, obviously, authors lie.

Writing may be a communal activity, in the sense that it connects people to one another and allows us access to one another’s perceptions and habits of language. But. All we ever have is the text, the material fact of the words in their order and form. How we understand the text is coloured of course by the circumstances of its writing and our reading, but the bare text can bear any number of reasonable (or unreasonable) interpretations. Writing is ultimately open. Reading determines.

Not that I think any of this is any kind of insight. It’s just interesting to reframe what I already know into new terms. Would it be trite to say that if reading is a hearing, writers are complainants?

[T]he interpreter looks for parallel structures and other patterns, for recurring themes, and for variations in the patterns and themes. Above all, the interpreter asks the question "why": Why this choice of word, this combination of words, this arrangement?
-Ruth Sullivan, Statutory Interpretation

Judicial interpretation of statutes (and other legislation), it turns out, is a lot like close reading, minus aesthetic concerns. The lecture on statutory interpretation was the first time in law school that a professor mentioned the "post-modern literary theory" idea that readers create meaning rather than receive it. I felt briefly at home. Then we moved on.

This quote reminds me of Gertrude Stein's insistence on repetition and variation, although in statutes repetition and variation are intended to create consistent and stable interpretations, so that the law is as transparent as possible. Stein's repetition and variation does the exact opposite, destabilizing linguistic convention as much as possible, but with the ultimate goal of simplicity (clarity, transparency?). I wonder if Stein ever wrote about language and law?

Law and Family have long been engaged in an Escherian dialectic, each shaping the other while at the same time being shaped.
- Madame Justice L'Heureux-Dube, Canada v. Mossop

Escherian dialectic. Yay.

As I've said before, my utopia of poetry is a world where EVERYONE is a poet, in which all voluntarily assume the pains and pleasures that come with the highest possible sensitivity to language. - Josh Corey

There is the odd law professor with some of that sensitivity. My torts professor always stops on peculiar phrases, usually in older cases, and repeats them throughout a lecture. Unfortunately, that's usually all I remember. I'll be going into the exam this spring with a mimimal understanding of torts, but I will remember the case where the lady was "all in a pack of nerves," and the one with the wagon going "at a smartish pace." Not poetic, per se, but you take what you can get.