The first day of workshop for my undergraduate poetry classes was last Friday. I selected the student who would have his poem discussed first; he had shown himself to be sassy enough that a little criticism wouldn’t throw him. After a workshop that started out positive and moved hesitantly and respectfully into critique, I gave him, as I always do, a brief moment to respond. He said, “Thanks. I mean, thanks for taking my poem seriously enough to talk about it like this. You all probably want to be poets or writers, and I’m just doing this major to keep my grades up for law school.”

Yes, a small part of me cringed at the overtly expressed idea that creative writing is “easy” compared to other college disciplines, but I had to laugh. I said, “Just watch out. I tried law school, too, and found myself writing poems during Civil Procedure. You might get hooked on this stuff.”

It’s true. I did go to law school for a semester, and I did find myself writing poems during Civil Procedure, especially after I suggested in class that I would actually disclose what I was supposed to disclose to the opposing side in a lawsuit and so became an ongoing example of lawyerly naiveté.

I dropped out after a classmate confessed to me that his only happiness for the day was choosing what music he’d listen to in the shower each morning. There were other reasons, but I wanted more chances at happiness than that.

I was young. Happiness isn’t the right way to say it, what I wanted. I wanted to have to think about how to live with loss, how to tell the hard things, how to imagine death. I wanted words to give me some direction and images to carry some of the weight of my emotions. I wanted to try to understand the world, and the way I understood best was through words.

I don’t think all lawyers should be killed. But maybe they should be forced to tithe some of their income to those other guardians of society, the writers and the poets. Maybe I should suggest that to my student. Who knows? He may even come to agree.