The legal literati

It’s the arts festival season, and the London literati are boarding trains for quaint villages in Wales and the west country. This year a number of festivals have lawyers involved, as Jessica Smerin discovered

Adam Taylor’s poetical style has been indelibly marked by his experience as a litigator. ‘I’ve had the unnerving experience of seeing a letter which I rushed off at five o’clock one evening being brought into court and having its every word analysed to the nth degree by barristers and judges,’ he says. ‘After you’ve gone through that you never write anything in quite the same way again. When I write poems I’m constantly checking that I’m not saying anything which I don’t absolutely have to say. After writing the initial draft of a poem I go through and cut a lot of stuff out which doesn’t need to be said. However, the main difference between poetry and litigation is that in poetry you’re looking to create ambiguity and different layers of meaning, whereas in litigation you’re going for absolute clarity.’

Mr Taylor, an intellectual property and information technology lawyer, is a leading expert on the millennium bug. He draws on his legal work for many of his poems, for example ‘Millennium Meltdown’, which describes the arrival of the bug at midnight on 31 December 1999. Other work looks at the lifestyle of the City lawyer. In ‘Alan’ he describes what motivated the first prehistoric life form to crawl onto dry land; a dissatisfaction with the quality of life in the sea and the absence of decent wine bars.

A high-flyer who is also qualified in the United States, Mr Taylor seemed to his colleagues at City firm Withers to be the classic corporate lawyer. But while he was delivering seminars across London on the millennium bug by day, by night he was hanging around the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, where aspirant poets can take the floor in ‘open mike’ sessions and read their work before the critical literati.

Mr Taylor - who reads his arch rhymes in a dry, deadpan style which is extremely funny - reached the semi-final of the prestigious Ledbury Poetry Festival slam competition. On the strength of his irony-laden performance he was invited to return to the festival this month as an official performer, where he found himself in the company of the recently-appointed Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion.

Supported by his friends and family, Mr Taylor did not tell his work colleagues about his performance at Ledbury, although they soon found out after The Independent covered the event. He was then approached by Withers’s senior partner, Diana Parker, and asked to contribute some poems to the firm’s internal newsletter, which he did. ‘Not without some trepidation,’ he recalls. ‘One is exposing oneself.’ Mr Taylor has now been invited to expose himself on a BBC televised poetry competition, to be screened in September.