A Pause for Poetry, by Way of the OJ Trial

Which came first: the O.J. Simpson trial or the World Wide Web? According to this chronology, it was in 1994 that WWW "edged out telnet to become the second most popular" Internet service (behind ftp-data). The OJ trial didn't begin until 1995. Still, despite the chronology, I remember using Compuserve to download F. Lee Bailey's cross of Mark Fuhrman. In my mind, the OJ trial predates the World Wide Web.

In those days, I used to be grumpy about the Internet, maintaining a purist's devotion to libraries as storehouses for information. Boy was I wrong. And tonight, stumbling across a thread on poetry that's made its way from A Fool In the Forest, to ethicalEsq and Stay of Execution, I realized just how wrong I was.

Inspired by the thread, I used Google to search for a few of my favorite poems--the few that haven’t been crowded out of my brain by the Illinois Rules of Civil Procedure and the lyrics to about five hundred pop songs. To my surprise, it took me only a minute to find my favorites online. I'm fast losing my bias in favor of libraries. And in keeping with Will Baude's suggestion of a few months ago to "go find a poem you like tonight," I offer these three favorites (none of them by lawyers, unfortunately): "I Knew a Woman," by Theodore Roethke; "To Speak of the Woe That Is in Marriage," by Robert Lowell; and "My Son, My Executioner," by Donald Hall.

Comments

[Evan Schaeffer]

A reader noted in an e-mail that I was inconsistent in writing "O.J. Simpson" but dropping the period for "OJ trial." This was intentional. The first use -- "O.J." -- is initials for a name, but the second use -- OJ -- is an adjective modifying "trial." To say "O.J. trial" seemed technically inaccurate.