Four New York judges read some of their favorite works
ENLARGE
The event didn’t generate the buzz of “Hamilton” on Broadway. It didn’t even provoke the excitement that some future high school production of the musical might. Come to think of it, of all the offerings in cutthroat cultural New York City last Tuesday night, Judges Reading Poetry would probably have ranked near the bottom.
The evening, held at Poets House in Battery Park City, in conjunction with the Federal Bar Council, featured four eminent federal judges reading some of their favorite poems. Not their own poems, but those of famous and not-so-famous poets.
It came about after a conversation at a New Year’s Eve party between Judge Dennis Jacobs, of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals and one of the evening’s readers, and Penny Barr, a member of the Poets House board of directors.
ENLARGE“I got interested in Poets House and did this short article for Poetry Magazine by people who read poems but have nothing to do with it,” Judge Jacobs told me.
He went on, “I know so many of my colleagues are widely read people and you’d never know it from opinions—qualities that don’t manifest themselves in a legal analysis.”
Judge Jacobs invited three judges to join him in the reading: JudgeGerard Lynch of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge William Kuntz of the Eastern District of New York and Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York.
“I’ve heard Bill Kuntz read Shakespeare,” Judge Jacobs explained. “Jerry Lynch is my colleague. We’ve talked literature many times. Colleen McMahon is a talented person.”
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My invitation came courtesy of Howard Levi, a lawyer who had argued before a couple of the judges and a former student of Judge Lynch at Columbia Law School. As we waited for the reading to begin, Mr. Levi didn’t exactly set my expectations on fire.
He explained that federal judges are used to a captive audience. “Everyone laughs at your jokes in the courtroom,” he said. “I do it too, heartily guffawing.”
However, as soon as Judge Kuntz took the podium and started reading Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in a rich baritone it was obvious attention must be paid, and not only by those with business before the court. The audience seemed populated by friends, fellow judges and lawyers, and the judges’ clerks.
The drama arose from the beauty of the poetry, the subdued emotion with which the readers delivered the lines of favorite poems dating back to high school, and the fact the average Joe—that would be me—doesn’t have much occasion to bask in the precise language of great poetry.
Judge Lynch focused on poems addressing infatuation and love, including Richard Wilbur’s “Piazza Di Spagna, Early Morning,” prefacing the poem by explaining “how a vision of a beautiful woman can last a lifetime.”
Judge McMahon read a poem by a United States Poet Laureate from every decade since the 1930s. Among them was Rita Dove’s delicious “Chocolate” and Billy Collins’s comical “Nostalgia.” (“Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult/ You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade…)
ENLARGEJudge Jacobs focused on nature and divinity in his selections, his readings rich with the peculiar communion that arises out of sharing something that touches one deeply, be it the lines of a poem or the lyrics of a favorite song.
His poems included Thom Gunn’s “Considering the Snail”—“He moves in a wood of desire, pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts”—and David Wagoner’s “Staying Alive.”
“You must always be ready for something to come bursting/Through the far edge of a clearing, running toward you/Grinning from ear to ear/And hoarse with welcome.”
“Wagoner is one of my favorites,” Judge Jacobs explained after the reading. “Nobody knows his stuff.”
The Federal Bar Council seems to be on something of a roll. It is also celebrating the publication of the illustrated “Courthouses of the Second Circuit: Their Architecture, History and Stories.” With a blurb from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, no less.
It doesn’t exactly sound like a page-turner. But who knows? If the success of the poetry reading is any indication, it may turn out to be the sleeper coffee-table book of the year.