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Lawyer courts a literary love

After fighting for the rights of builders and developers like Transeastern Homes and Kearney Development, Lee Atkinson zones out in a different way.

By JAMES THORNER
Published October 16, 2006

After fighting for the rights of builders and developers like Transeastern Homes and Kearney Development, Lee Atkinson zones out in a different way.

Lee Atkinson, hard-bitten development lawyer, becomes Lee Atkinson, amateur poet. Bulldozer treads become horses' hooves. Profit and loss dissolves into profitless love.

They could have lost themselves, stripped naked, supine together on a bed. They could've hidden, traveled, imagined, forgetting ...

A private lawyer specializing in real estate and development with Foriz & Dogali, Atkinson has joined the ranks of literary lawyers. His poems were published last year in a thick collection of poetry by West Virginia University Law School.

Don't expect Ode to a Backhoe or Elegy to a Bald Cypress. For all his skill arguing rezoning cases and land disputes, the development field has been a fallow field for versifying.

"From necessity my inspiration has come from other places," he says from his third-floor office off the Veterans Expressway. "I don't see a lot of inspiration in whether the real estate bubble is going to burst."

Atkinson, 57, picked up the poetry bug in college and produced many pieces as an assistant U.S. attorney and assistant state attorney from 1980 to 1992. Other lawyers have invited him to read at their soirees.

As a prosecutor, he was known to distribute hot-off-the-page poems to co-workers. An old woman murdered by a machete so disturbed a young office colleague that Atkinson wrote a cathartic piece to exorcise the scene. He penned a scene from a courtroom trying serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin:

A lizard has more warmth, more animated eyes. My eyes, hawk's eyes, see everything: the faces of his victims, the cold hunger of his need ...

Atkinson is one of a handful of local lawyer poets. Tampa's Joryn Jenkins is another. The pair worked together in the state attorney's office and compared stanzas. In Jenkins' view, a lawyer's talent for manipulating words feeds the poetry bug. "It's all fun, it's all creative, it's all venting," Jenkins says.

James Elkins, a West Virginia law professor who has compiled 1,500 pages of poetry from lawyers, sought work beyond limericks and jingles spouted around office water coolers.

"Most poets who are lawyers don't write about the law. They write about nature, love, relationships, the cosmos. They write about all of the things poets do," said Elkins, who sought out Atkinson's work for inclusion in his 2005 volume.

Atkinson figures he's completed about 100 poems. His third wife, Charlotte, has been the inspiration for most of his latest work.

For all his efforts to separate real estate development from his poetry, Atkinson is tempted to breach the artistic barrier. Could chain saws sing betwixt fallen oak trunks?

"I'm always amazed when people express disdain for human endeavors that are only natural," Atkinson says of the development field. "Is Hoover Dam really so much different than a beaver dam?"

James Thorner can be reached at thorner@sptimes.com or 813 226-3313.

[Last modified October 15, 2006, 19:42:31]