"Photo of Charlie Parker and a Man Playing Saxophone"   Your eyes are stars, alive in a dark, dead room. A mug shot framed by a saxophone you are pinned against the wall. Only four inches away, your mouthpiece reaches. Caught you at a bad time, didn’t I. What are you seeing with those piercing lights, just waiting your turn to play? Smoke races and then fades from a stubby cigarette squeezed between the player’s stubby knuckles. Your clothes man, what’s with your threads? You got lapels ‘outta control, we’re talking taking you into orbit here. Awe, what the hell. Your friend on the horn, the player, he’s spent too many nights in bars like this. Bad, skin, needs a shave, shiny with grease, big Irish nose. But with lips pouting, what sweet notes he sets free. What are you trying to say with those eyes? You can’t learn from this bloke. No, not a chance. That’s right. So you shut your eyes and let your soul flow through your tool, your manhood. The dull basement blooms with life as Charlie Parker takes the stage.   Jonah Paisner 11/91

By this point in your reading of our small paper, you have no doubt enjoyed a welcome to the law school, the study of law, as well as the Letter of the Law itself. Glad you made it. Now that you've landed in this section, you can relax, put down your highlighter, and take a break from some of the dizzying effects of studying the law. My name is Jonah Paisner, and to my knowledge, I am the first ever “poetry editor” this law school has been blessed/burdened with in its proud 114-year tradition. Of course, you might ask “what does a law school need a poetry editor for anyway?” A suspicion which may be compounded when in this issue you find a somewhat average poem written by none other than this writer, the poetry editor. With that, your first lesson: self-expression and ego gratification are each necessary and healthy aspects of life here. Enough about me, let’s talk about you for a minute (as one popular modern-day singer puts it). Why exactly do you need a poetry editor, or even poetry, for that matter? When I said “ego gratification,” did you think that I wanted you to rattle off an incessant barrage of useless, nonsensical hypothetical questions from the back of the classroom? This section of Letter of the Law is committed to providing a creative outlet for you to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and dash off some NON-required lines. Hopefully, my willingness to kick off the year with a piece I wrote during an exercise in a college creative writing class sets the stage for the low-key, anything goes flavor of this enterprise. With that said . . . Send me your poems! I'll also take drawings, cartoons, and photography. Hey, if you've got songs and sculpture, I'll figure out a way for that too. The idea is for us to encourage each other, by example, in an overall effort to stay happy, with it, and looking forward to waking up in the morning. And eventually, my vision is to take our various forms of poetry—verbal and otherwise—beyond the paper and into the larger law school community. JonahP1000@aol.com

To help you get started, some inspiration. What follows is a list of upcoming poetry readings in the Portland area. Also, in the coming months we expect to have an organized trip to a reading, and then an informal reading right in our own amphitheater! So stay tuned, and remember lesson two: keeping things light and off-beat CAN help you do well in law school.