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Bruce Springsteen's Hope and the Lawyer As Poet Advocate*

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Bruce Springsteen's Hope and the Lawyer As Poet Advocate* Widener University Commonwealth Law School From the SelectedWorks of Randy Lee 2005 Bruce Springsteen’s Hope and the Lawyer as Poet Advocate Randy Lee Available at: https://works.bepress.com/randy_lee/1/ BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S HOPE AND THE LAWYER AS POET ADVOCATE* Randy Lee** The Am.erican experience is filled with lawyers who were poets. 1 The overlap between these two fields should com.e as no surprise. The lawyer, like the poet, seeks to capture life in words, to use words to im.prove life, and to identify and address the questions in life that m.atter m.ost. The lawyer, like the poet, is also called to serve his com.m.unity by accepting the m.antle of the prophet: he m.ust resist the tem.ptations of the world's earthly trappings and rem.ain true to his pursuit of truth wherever that journey m.ay lead. At their best, both lawyers and poets are listeners. They "stand back"; they "let it all be"; they take it all in.2 It is easy to forget that. Before lawyers and poets can speak, they m.ust capture life, and then they translate the life into words so the rest of the world can know and understand what they have encountered.f Aldous Huxley once described words as "a device m.en use for suppressing and distorting the truth" to "protect our sensibilities and preserve * Randy Lee, Address at the Widener Law Journal Symposium, The Lawyer as Poet Advocate: Bruce Springsteen and the American Poet (Feb. 24 2005). ** Professor of Law, Widener University School of Law, Harrisburg, PA. The author would like to thank Dr. Robert Coles, Mr. Paul Freese, and Mr. Frank Stefanko for sharing their great stories and Mr. Bruce Springsteen for sharing his life and songs. He would also like to thank his family for their love and support. 1 James R. Elkins, Offthe Record: An Anthology ofPoetry by Lawyers, 28 LEGAL STUD. F. 1 (2004). 2 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, Jungleland, on BORN TO RUN (Columbia Records 1975). 3 But see Edwin Armstrong's accusation that lawyers "substitute words for realities and then talk about the words." Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men who Made Radio 217 (1991). For a discussion of the tragic intersection between the law and Armstrong's life, see ide at 186-219, 28-30; see also FIRST ELEC. CHURCH OF AM., EDWIN ARMSTRONG: THE CREATOR OF FM RADIO, at http://www.webstationone.com/fecha/armstrong.htm (last visited Apr. 22, 2005). 867 868 WIDENER LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 14 our self-esteem,,,4 and words can be used for that purpose. They can be used to further darken the veil between "what's flesh and what's fantasy.v' but they can never be used that way by him whom we call a lawyer's poet, that voice that seeks truth in the highest tradition of both callings. The goal of a lawyer's poet is always to tear down that veil, encounter the reality that is life, and only then to speak, to try to make the "honest stand," even if that means being left "wounded, not even dead.,,6 Bruce Springsteen is a lawyer's poet. In the thirty-three years since America first heard Bruce Springsteen's Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ.,7 Bruce Springsteen has never stopped listening to the voices of his community, seeking connection with their lives, understanding their frustrations, and inviting their hopes.f Furthermore, in so many ways he has remained the relentless kid on the Jersey Shore with the eager guitar and the inexhaustible supply of questions. In this light, one can place Springsteen in the American tradition of populist poets, who gave voice to the voiceless in a land that promised them freedom.9 Yet, these same persistences invite one to recognize Springsteen as, at heart, the lawyer his father hoped he would be.Io Beyond this dynamic ofbeing a lawyer's poet, just as different poets translate life into words differently, some poets practice their craft in a more lawyerly fashion. Bruce Springsteen is a poet who has grown more lawyerly over time. This can be seen in the evolution even in Springsteen's early works. With the opening 4 ALDOUS HUXLEY, Words and Behavior, in COLLECTED ESSAYS 246 (1958). 5 SPRINGSTEEN, Jungleland, supra note 2. 6 I d. 7 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J. (Columbia Records 1973). 8 HANK BORDOWITZ, THE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SCRAPBOOK 159 (2004) (Springsteen saying, "I believe that the life ofa rock 'n roll band will last as long as you look down into the audience and can see yourself, and your audience looks up at you and see themselves-and as log as those reflections are human, realistic ones."). 9 ROBERT COLES, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S AMERICA: THE PEOPLE LISTENING, A POET SINGING 3-46 (2003). 10 BORDOWITZ, supra note 8, at 16. 2005] HOPE AND THE LAWYER AS POET ADVOCATE 869 lines of "Blinded by the Light,"11 the first song on his debut album, Bruce Springsteen introduced himselfto the world: Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat With a boulder on my shoulder, feelin' kinda older, I tripped the merry-go-round With this very unpleasing sneezing and wheezing, the calliope crashed to the ground12 Backed by a rollicking melody and carefully crafted with more alliteration and internal rhyme than most readers might have thought possible, these lyrics ushered the reader into a world that, at first glance, the reader might not have understood but that the reader still wanted to understand. "Blinded by the Light" was the kind of poetry that invited a reader to linger upon its words and ask, "What is the author telling me?" Two years later, Bruce Springsteen began his third albutn with the simple lyric "The screen door slatns,,,13 and contemporary American culture jolted at the sound of that slanuning door. The poet who emerged in that album, Born to Run, was a different kind of a poet, not better nor worse, but different than the poet with the "boulder on [his] shoulder.t''" and for our purposes, one might well label him both more lawyerly and more a lawyer's poet. The Bruce Springsteen who asserted himself fully in Born to Run is not a poet who leaves his reader to ask, "What is the author telling me?" but one who demands that the reader return to his words to answer the question, "Could he really have just said that?" With such a poet, it is not the cryptic nature of the words that make them mysterious, but their unavoidable clarity and undeniable reality. Mr. Springsteen is not content to toy with the 11 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, Blinded by the Light, on GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J. (Columbia Records 1973). 12 Id. 13 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, Thunder Road, on BORN TO RUN (Columbia Records 1975). 14 SPRINGSTEEN, Blinded by the Light, supra note 11. 870 WIDENER LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 14 veil "[b]etween flesh and what's fantasy'v'"; instead, his words seek to rip down that veil. Mr. Springsteen writes as one who truly wants to know what is "real"!" and has committed himself to meet it with "no place left to hide." 17 For all the engine revving fury associated with the alburnts title track, Born to Run is filled from beginning to end with lyrics that haunt the listener with moments that can seem familiar though difficult to articulate. In the opening moments of the album.'s first song, "Thunder Road," Mr. Springsteen's protagonist confronts an uncomfortable dimension of self-awareness when he writes, "I just can't face myself alone again."18 In contrast, as the album closes with the final lines of "Jungleland," the noble poets ofthe street are haunted not by themselves, but by their world-a world which would conquer them and then not even bother to finish them off: And the poets down here Don't write nothing at all They just stand back and let it all be And in the quick ofthe night They reach for their moment And try to make an honest stand But they wind up wounded Not even dead Tonight in Junglelandi' "Born to Run,,2o is packed with lines the listener can come back to and say, "Wow, did he just say that?" Yet, for all the albums hard hitting clarity, the full measure of its meaning must be left to unfold over time. After all, it can take a Iifetime to grasp all the implications of even the simplest of those truths that matter most. Twenty years ago, I was at a Bruce Springsteen concert, and Mr. Springsteen said that when he had written "Born to Run" ten 15 SPRINGSTEEN, Jungleland, supra note 2. 16 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, Born to Run, on BORN TO RUN (Columbia Records 1975). 17 Id. 18 SPRINGSTEEN, Thunder Road, supra note 13. 19 SPRINGSTEEN, Jungleland, supra note 2. 20 SPRINGSTEEN, Born to Run, supra note 16. 2005] HOPE AND THE LAWYER AS POET ADVOCATE 871 years ago, he had not understood it. He thought the song was about running from something, but he had come to understand that it was about running to something. I find that admission reassuring, because when I first heard the whole album thirty years ago, I thought I understood it, and now I am not so sure that I understood more than a small part ofit. Some things I could not have tnissed-things that Mr.
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