Literary lawyer

Four decades ago, Jim Smith, MA 81, made his publishing debut when the West Coast Review paid him $5 for a short story that he now considers "terribly derivative of Samuel Beckett. I would cringe if I were to re-read it." At the time, however, "I was thrilled, despite the small payment," Smith confesses. "It was nice to finally have a token of acceptance."

Jim Smith is a civil litigator for Ontario's ministry of the attorney general in Toronto and also a much-published poet. His most recent book is back off, assassin! New and selected poems (Mansfield press, 2009), a selection of his poetry from 1979-98 as well as more recent verse, which was one of 22 books longlisted for the 2010 governor general's award for poetry. His next poetry collection, Happy Birthday, Nicanor Parra, has just been accepted for publication by Toronto's Mansfield press for fall 2012.
| Photo by Vincenzo Pietropaolo

"I'm the only Canadian lawyer to have published a New and Selected Poems," he says. Born in Niagara Falls, Ont., Smith reveals that his Concordia MA in creative writing provided him with "a wider perspective on the world." His thesis supervisor, former professor Gary Geddes, became a lifelong friend, and his thesis, a volume of poetry, was later published as Translating Sleep (1989). In the early 1980s Smith moved to Toronto. He worked at various jobs while he continued writing poetry and also managed his own small publishing house, Front Press.

Smith cheerfully admits that much of his poetry has been agitprop — the use of art as political propaganda. He identified strongly with the revolutionary fervour of Central America's leftists and in 1984 toured Nicaragua at the invitation of the Sandinista Cultural Association. "Once back home, I began promoting awareness of what was going on in Nicaragua," Smith recalls. In the late '80s he led two small delegations of writers and artists to book festivals there. "I was an avowed left-winger, though I'm not as rabid now," he adds. Indeed, the bourgeois imperative of earning a comfortable living prompted him at age 43 to enroll in York University's Osgoode Hall Law School.

As a mature student, he worked hard but loved the experience. He then articled at Ontario's Police Complaints Commission — only to see the commission abolished in provincial cutbacks midway through the year. Smith seamlessly moved to the Crown Law Office (Civil), completed his articles in 1998 and has practised law there ever since. He specializes in trial work, defending the Crown and the Ontario Provincial Police against civil suits, often brought by plaintiffs who claim they have been the victims of malicious criminal prosecution. "I've only lost one trial, which we later won on appeal," he says proudly. Smith, however, tries to avoid highly politicized files. "It's a hangover from my leftist sentiments," he relates. "I sell my services, but not my soul."

And his other self? It's in the early morning hours or evenings — "around the edges of earning a living," he says — that Smith, the poet, re-emerges.