Tim Nolan
Past Alumni News Stories
The Closer
For Tim Nolan (B.A. 1978), joy in poetry and the law is all about paying attention to what seems insignificant
At an S.A.S.E. reading, at the University Club in St. Paul, Tim Nolan (B.A. 1978) stands at the podium, smooth in a suit, tie, and reading glasses, pitching a poem to a jury of peers. “I’m after the Hittites, the Druids, the 1932 Yankees,” he starts. Huh? “I’m after Chekhov,” he continues. Okay, he’s placing himself in history. “I’m after those who survived the Potato Famine. I’m on the branch of the old tree that survived.” Hmm, he’s Irish, I guess. “I’m before Derek Jeter.” What?! The audience giggles. “I’m after Jerry Lewis”—pause for laughter; just saying Jerry Lewis’s name makes people crack up— “even if I die tomorrow . . . and he lives.” Ha! The crowd exhales, relents. And the poem takes a turn. “But with you—I’m before and after at once—” Who is ‘you’? Me? Ah, the listener. It’s a surprise that instantly seems inevitable. Speaker and audience breathe the next, last words together: his thought, his wonder, now ours.
“I like how that poem comes down to a little chuckle about Jerry Lewis,” Nolan admits with a smile later, over lunch at the Campus Club in Coffman Union. “I do like to get a laugh from people.” He is again dressed in a good suit, but what prosperous fiftysomething lawyer is not? It’s easy to imagine him in the courtroom, strolling before a jury, unspooling a narrative colored with resonant details, condensed meaning, and, perhaps, yes, humor, a thread listeners might well follow through trial into resolution.
A long-time partner at Rider Bennett in Minneapolis, Nolan has spent the summer of 2007 transitioning to McGrann Shea Anderson Carnival Straughn & Lamb in the aftermath of Rider Bennett’s headline-making dissolution. During what must have been a rollercoaster spring, he also heard that New Rivers Press will publish his first poetry collection in 2008. Another person might have felt pulled in opposite directions, but it appears that to Nolan poetry and the law are more of a piece than not. Indeed, Nolan wrote a 2001 law review article examining that proposition entitled “Poetry and the Practice of Law,” which was published in the South Dakota Law Review.
In the article, Nolan declares that the practice of law would benefit from more artfulness, even as the writing of poetry would profit from “more sense, logic and practical pressure.” He continues: “‘Practical pressure’ in poetry for me means that poets must be more of the world—or of many worlds—to be both accessible and necessary.” Yet it would be a mistake, he asserts, to characterize the law as objective and poetry as subjective. “Both poetry and the law involve the effort to move from the objective to the subjective—from fact to feeling—from observation to intuition.”
At the Campus Club, Nolan jokes that his article was a law review article only in form—“The footnotes are just footnotes to my opinion: I’m not citing anything!” But he did, he says, take time to ponder how writing poetry helps him practice law, and vice versa. “Really what you’re doing often as a trial lawyer is you’re taking a lot of information in, you’re distilling it, and then you’re telling a story. And if you’ve got a jury, you’ve got to tell a compelling story in an interesting way. Those are things that a poet needs to do also.”
The poems in Nolan’s manuscript do just that, presenting narratives small and expansive with a sharp eye for evocative details. Nolan grew up in south Minneapolis and lives there still (he took a few years off in New York after graduating from the U and earned an M.F.A. from Columbia; he then studied law at William Mitchell). Enjoying what he calls the “privilege” of being at the middle of the age spectrum, with his teenage kids and elderly parents living in the same neighborhood, Nolan describes the tenor of his poems as “joyful.” And that is a fair representation, especially in the poems about his children, which are full of tender amazement (and, yes, bracing references to green hair, big boots, and the “random” hit movie The Day After Tomorrow). But the other sense of wonder is curiosity, and these poems are rich with questions: why this memory, still? Why am I so blessed? Why this symbol, still? Why abundance, why death, why this country as it is at this time? Falling for the wonder, you stay for the wondering.
In the winter of 2007, Nolan traveled to the University of Illinois-Urbana for an inaugural conference on law and poetry. With five other poet-lawyers, in front of an audience of mainly law students, he discussed political poetry (Nolan favors 20th century Polish as a model), the growing ranks of lawyer-poets (“I’m sure you could find doctor poets and insurance agent poets, but I bet lawyers would be the biggest group”), and, in a paper he presented, literary connections between Lincoln and Whitman. The conference’s special guest was James Elkins, a professor at the University of West Virginia College of Law and editor of the Legal Studies Forum. Elkins edited the first compilation of the work of poet lawyers Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers (2004), which features Nolan.
Nolan’s easy voice quickens when he describes the conference; it was clearly enlivening to be among lawyers who, like him, view writing not as “hobby” but as vocation.
“Here is what a lawyer and poet must both be able to do,” he declares in The South Dakota Law Review: “pick up a fact or image of nearly total insignificance—a mere marble along the way—and make it significant by the imaginative effort of paying attention. . . . [I]f the lawyer or the poet pays enough attention, he can learn that what seems insignificant hardly ever is, and, indeed, the outcome of the entire case, the meaning of the poem itself, may ultimately turn on it.”
In two words, Jerry Lewis.