Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     "The most sublime labor of poetry," says Giambattista Vico, "is to give sense and passion to insensate things." Such labor is driven by what Vico calls "poetic wisdom," "the first wisdom of the gentile world, [which] must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of the learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination." Hence the origin of poetry: "It was deficiency of human reasoning power that gave rise to poetry so sublime that the philosophies which came later, the arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better." Although in The New Science, a founding text for Western modernity, Vico sees rationality as the cornerstone for a better human society, he at least recognizes the extent to which poetic imagination has participated in the institutions of human society, institutions that include religion, philosophy, science, and law. Therefore, "all barbarian histories have fabulous beginnings."
     Hank Lazer's "Law-Poems," however, suggest that what began fabulously continues fabulously. In his poetic investigation of the Alabama Legal Code, Lazer questions the law and its desire for precision and clarity, its pretense to rationality. Vico says that "the true in the laws is a certain light and splendor with which natural reason illuminates them" and that rational wisdom, as opposed to poetic wisdom, is "the science of making use of things as their nature dictates." To see things as they are, as the "Law-Poems" show us, may be a shared desire of law and poetry. In the case of law,

 . . . the legal mind
defends  persists    precision and not artistry is 
the lawmaker's goal    clarity and a sense of fairness
so that the reader of a law shall immediately see
its necessity    the point which was not previously
covered . . .

represents one kind of mainstream Anglo-American poetry, with which Lazer has expressed very strong reservations here in the "Law-Poems" and elsewhere in his extensive critical writings, the idea of precise meaning brings to mind another tradition of Anglo-American poetry, with which he would have been much more sympathetic, that is, the tradition of Imagism.  "Direct treatment of the thing," "the plain sense of words," and Confucian "correct naming," were all Ezra Pound's prescriptions for poetry. The ideological danger for the poetic frenzy over precision is now well-known as in the case of Ezra Pound: precise definition, the same kind as what Lazer quotes from Alabama Legal Code, ultimately requires an authoritarian body, a fascist state, or a paranoid mind that attempts to codify the elusive meanings of words.
     Skeptical of such desire for linguistic precision, Lazer turns to the other modes of language use: the play and playfulness of language, using poetic language as "a vehicle of thought" rather than a container of prefab emotions or thoughts:

the task at hand is not to play a game
of making as real as possible an imagined
situation . . .
a man cuts
his finger beside a river and imagines all
the places his blood will flow    and thus
feels part of the universe    instead a
site a room you may freely enter and in-
habit    not some restrictive gloves or
tight pants that force you to fit into them
only one way . . .  

* Professor of English, University of California-Santa Barbara