ABOUT ME

Welcome. Here, I publish short essays, longer essays divided into shorter parts, and poetry. My posts are rooted in my skills and experience as a trial lawyer, author of a well-respected book of history, and an award-winning poet.  These essays explore current questions or issues relating to history, literature, philosophy, law and rhetoric, hopefully with rigour, but without academic jargon, drawing on legal practice, intellectual history, and close reading. My aim is to write seriously about the humanities for attentive general readers. 

 

My poems engage our times and emphasize musical form—meter, rhyme, and structure—while remaining clear and accessible. Today, we often have poetry so simple it has ceased to be poetry and poetry that can be forbiddingly complex without at times having the payoff of insight or sheer pleasure of reading worth all the effort. So, it is perhaps no surprise that many intelligent readers strongly dislike poetry. In his fine anthology The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, editor Robert Chandler notes that poetry thrives in a "magical" or "religious" context. These are periods in which a supreme and at times crushing faith in logical analysis to unriddle the meaning of existence either has not arrived, or doubts have emerged that logical analysis can present the essence or heart of life.

 

Finally, Chandler notes that in an age when it was dangerous to write poems down, their formal power -  rhyme, meter, and other formal properties - was critically important to allow readers to memorize poems. I believe that such formal properties - the "music" of a poem, allowing it to ring like a bell or anthem in one's mind or spirit remain important for us today. This may allow poetry to have a role in shaping our understanding as it once did, and preserving our humanity in an age of vicious polemics and war. And, even if such grand dreams cannot be realized now, such poetry can be a musical testament, and a place to stand and hope.

​