Photo by Ryan C. on flickr.com
Lawyers can be wonderful poets. If you don't believe me, take a look at Strangers to Us All, a web site dedicated to lawyers who are also published poets.
The site includes chronological, alphabetical and geographical indexes of lawyer-poets; a section on Civil War lawyer-poets; and a list of contemporary lawyer-poets (with biographical information and links to online poetry). The site is constantly updated and alerts us to recently published books of poetry.
An excerpt from the site:
"It seems, on first impression, as if lawyer and poet must surely exist in different universes of thought, feeling, and practice. And for many lawyers and poets,there must be truth embodied in this crude impression–the law leads north and poetry south, to follow one is to give up the other. Yet, lawyers write poetry, and poets practice law. Should we be surprised to learn that lawyers, by training and craft, attuned to the nuance and power of language, and to the clever deployment of language as rhetoric and drama, write poetry? We may have grown accustomed, in this era of John Grisham and Scott Turow, to the idea of the lawyer as novelist, but there is still some mystery, even a sense of wonderment, at the idea of a person both poet and lawyer."
