INTO IT
Poems
Lawrence Joseph
FROM FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
"Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as
bold a book as any in American poetry today -- an attempt to
give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since,
as Joseph puts it, 'the game changed.'"
"Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of
maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing
forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where 'the
immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a
reduction of our powers of action' -- where the word 'wargame' is a
verb and 'the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history /
of the species.' Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded
street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph
enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the
colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its
pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to
shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so
masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically
satisfying."
"Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality
and scope."
PRAISE FOR INTO IT
"As Lawrence Joseph notes, 'the technology to abolish truth is
now available.' Fortunately, we have poets like him to respond to
this challenge, which he does in poetry of great dignity, grace,
and unrelenting persuasiveness. Sentences 'made of thought and of
sound, of feelings seen' give the lie to the destructive element
that wants to submerge us. Joseph gives us new hope for the
resourcefulness of humanity, and of poetry." --John Ashbery'
"Into It begins with an invocation to the muse from
Ovid that reads 'give me the voice / To tell the shifting story
...' [T]hough Joseph invokes Wallace Stevens, another lawyer,
in his epigraph and elsewhere, the voice that dominates Into
It evokes New York after 9/11, recalling ... edgy voices of
T.S. Eliot's personae making their way through postwar
London. Like Stevens and the other modernists, Eliot is a son
of Ovid, charting the metamorphoses he sees .... Power is the
subject of Joseph's new poems ... In 'History for Another Time,'
the poet looks back from the distant future to one nearer our own
period... It's as though the doomsday machine in 'Dr.
Strangelove' has been triggered and is now 'impossible to
untrigger,' in the words of Peter Sellers' crackling doctor.
The arson and shootings in [Joseph's] Detroit seem pretty
primitive, Wild West stuff compared to what Joseph calls the
'technological war' that is going on right now, even if we only
wake up to it during days like 9/11 to blink wildly for a moment
and then sink back into our luxuries. Like Henry Adams,
Joseph seems to be writing ahead of actual events, and that makes
him one of the scariest writers I know" --David Kirby, The New
York Times Book Review
"The title of Lawrence Joseph's fourth and latest poetry
collection, Into It, echoes words from Henry James's
assertion that 'the only thing' is 'to live in the world of
creation -- to get into it and stay in -- to frequent it and haunt
it...' Like Wallace Stevens, Joseph balances the vocation of
law with the avocation of poetry, so he knows a thing or two about
engagement with the external world and the complx role language
plays in determining the social perceptions and balances of power
within it... He is acutely aware of the gulf between the
officially sanctioned, abstract rhetoric that expresses an ideal
societal vision and the diminished inner voice of the disillusioned
citizenry in which that vision has been instilled... The
effect of powerlessness, the consciousness of it, produces a form
of anti-rhetoric, rhetoric's covert opposite: a reticent language
of intimacy... Detail is the medium of presence, and the truth
lies at the intersection of perception and imagination.
Synthesizing the aesethics of Williams and Stevens with his
own... Joseph's vital and emotionally hard-won poetry
suggests that each of us must discover his or her own tools of
engagement with the world, forged in the crucible of personal
experience, socicultural context, and language." --Fred
Muratori, American Book Review
The violence without' -- Steven's phrase -- is that against
which the poems found in Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poem,
Into It, 'press back.' [I]n Joseph's book the
world's violence is political and socioeconomic... Joseph's syntax
presents the poem itself as a conversation, or a conversational...
[P]leasure (tacitly, beauty as well0 is offered as what the times
may need and even, insofar as what is 'seen, heard, and imaginined'
is truy known, as a form of truth. Yet the violence of the
times does not disappear from view or from consideration in these
poems, by any means... Joseph offers more of a meta-discourse on
image and narrative in poetry, even as the poems themselves do
sing, do remain lyrical. More precisely ... the poems are as
focused on voice -- offering a kind of rigorous meditation on
history and the self's ability to thrive -- as on story...
Throughout the volume, the voice of Into It tries on a series of
personal, public, and literary languages... [forging] a poety that
can simultaneously think about and resist contemporary unreality...
[T]hese poems record the work of connecting the self to the world
(both moving targets) feelingly... The immanence to which it keeps
alluding seems to be the merging of the eye and ear and feeling
mind with the realities that have escaped public and political
discourse." -- Lisa M. Steinman, Michigan Quarterly
Review
"...[A] fiercely articulate new book of poems woven
from events before, during and after Sept. 11, 2001 ... [Joseph]
stays resolutely near [Ground Zero] and weaves a cat's cradle of
connections between that dreadful day and all the perverse
manipulating and warmongering that has gone on since ... Joseph is
an Arab American with a Catholic upbringing, a law professor who
understands law, business and politics from the bottom up and the
top down. [Into It 's] determination is to make us
think about our times. [Joseph] establishes his authority
with surreal details ... [His] staccato lines form a shattered
mosiac, as the poet fights for words to absorb what he sees.
Few poets work so intensely to provide a tapestry of how malevolent
public forces work upon us. When is the last time you read a
poem about the power of mass technology to corrupt mass
psychology? Joseph's claim to uniqueness is his relentless
moral diagnosis of 'times of killing like these.' The work
often feels like the diary of an unusually thoughtful reporter who
privately guesses at how events he covers intersect and who might
be responsible ... work [that is] always calling on a sense of
volatile complexities. Introducing an anthology of poems
written in response to wars of the 20th century, the critic M. L.
Rosenthal described poets who wrote from 'disillusionment with a
society that took war and repression and privilege for granted,'
who committed their work to 'prolonged immersion in the desolate
implications of existence and a varied search for the artistic
means to encompass them ...' It is one that Lawrence Joseph
insists upon with every line." --Allan M. Jalon, San
Francisco Chronicle
"The poet Lawrence Joseph is also a lawyer and a legal
scholar. The grandson of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, he
grew up in Detroit. Since 1981, Joseph has made lower
Manhattan his home. The event of Sept. 11, 2001 --
'everything immense and out of context' -- sets the tone for
Into It. Fundamentally, [Joseph is] a poet of ideas
... [He] sees the 'conversations' that make up Dante's
Divine Comedy as a bridge between creating an overview of
an entire culture and private reactions to it. Our age,
however, lacks the cosmology that lends the Renaissance poem its
coherence. Every epoch, Joseph observes, requires its own
metaphors. For Dante's age, theology shaped a world
view. Today, engineering has replaced the controlling deity
... Joseph concludes that too many of our current metaphors --
computers, multinational corporations, global networks -- have no
'heart,' no prime mover in the manner of older systems. Even
quantum physics suggests that the universe was created outside
time, so that past and future are actually part of the
present. What we call history is merely a construct of the
moment. But since we cannot live like this, we fall back on
the private sphere -- whatever we apprehend through our senses and
emotions. Joseph's own perceptions are shaped by his
Christian Arab heritage and his Detroit childhood. When mass
destruction arrives in Manhattan his imagination reverts to the
racial battles and economic burnout of the Motor City ... In his
wrestling with these elements, a near epic tension mounts that
renders the disparate sections of Into It whole, albeit
with holes and disjunctions. The poet trusts words to do
justice to the atrocities and the panicked reactions to them ...
Into It succeeds in placing what is almost beyond
description under the lens of poetry and illuminating the darkness
for us to make our way forward." --Phoebe Pettingell, The
New Leader
"[O]ver the course of his four collections, [Joseph] seems to
have deliberately shed any desire for elegance, favoring instead a
hard-edged and even dissonant sytle, one designed to incorporate
but not synthesize a long list of polarities. This lists
derives in part from Joseph's biography: his grandparents came from
Lebanon, immigrating to Detroit, where several family members as
well as the poet himself worked in auto plants; they poems also
allude to a Roman Catholic upbringing. Joseph later became a
lawyer, and presently lives in New York City, where he is a
professor of law at St. John's University... [I]n Joseph's
recently published collection, Into It ... the dichotomies
and ambivalence which fueled the previous poems are focused upon
discourse itself, on language's seeming incapacity to authenticate
contemporary experience... Joseph's new mode as often as not
seems to begin in the discursive -- rhetorical questions posed in a
manic perversion of the Socratic... Yet soon this method
gives way to a kind of relentless collage making -- though it
is not the formulaic reliance on lists and catalogues you encounter
in certain of the language writers... Above all, Joseph is
concerned with how postmodern culture, espcially in its more
insidious forms of political discourse, debases language, a proces
which is seem as accelerating exponentially in the wake of 9-11 and
the two Gulf Wars. This concern is of course a famiiliar one,
but Joseph expresses it with a troubled intensity of vision that
distinguishes it from theoretical cant... Joseph's new work
shares Celan's goal of restoring language to its capacity for
intimate speech, as well as his perception that language faces a
kind of apocalyptic crisis. Yet he rejects Calan's
hermeticism and drive for refinement. The realities of
contemporary existence demand from him linguistic dissonence and
the presence of sometimes violently opposing modes of discourse
with a single poem... [R]eferences to two events are alluded
to obsessively in the collection, and in a perverse fashion act as
leitmotifs which give the individual poems and the book itself a
cohesive form. As a consequence of the World Trade Center
attacks and the second Iraq War, Joseph insists in the book's
penultimate poem, 'the game changed.'... The game has changed
in no small part because the stakes have grown higher. As
Adrienne Rioch puts it, 'the problem is not 'finding an imaginative
interest inlife,' but sustaining the blows of the material and
imaginatvie challenges of our time.' And these blows fall
down without ceasing... Joseph's poems are free of the cant
and debased rhetoric from which our political discourse is
formed; they are free as well of the similarlay debased and
cant-affllicted postures which pass for most political poetry
today." -- David Wojahn, The Writer's Chronicle
"[II]t is impressive to watch Joseph's struggle with the limits
of language and the integrity of the lyric in an effort to remain
faithful to the truth. His goal is to express the immense
confusion of the last ten years, to find proper words to pose
against 'the precious and turgid language / of pseudoerudition
(thugs, / thugs are what they are, / false-voiced God-talkers and
power freaks / who think not at all about what they bring
down).' Into It radiates big ambitions, announcing
Joseph's intention 'to make a large, serious / portrait of my
time'... Joseph implies that at the moment we live in
contingency, in possibility; our world is seldom fully realized,
even as the poet works to fulfill his responsibility to communicate
it precisely. Endeavoring to assimilate the wide disparities
and sympathies of contemporary life, Lawrence Joseph's achievement
remains, in some ways, a work in progress. I say this ot as a
criticism, but as a way ofr suggesting that later poems may yet
resolve the tensions informing these ambitious, skilled, and
demanding works of art." --Michael True,
Commonweal
"How can a poet's style reflect the dislocations of New York
after 9/11, the insensate wreck he sees in American politics and
the particular gifts and difficulties of Arab-American
heritage? Joseph answers these questions ... with a dizzying
mix of abstractions, urban details, and nuggets of historical fact
... a 'dream technique' of juxtaposition and exclamations [that]
derives from the late style of Robert Lowell ... updating Lowell's
Vietnam-era frustrationss for the era of the smart bombs and
globalization." --Publishers Weekly
"Into It ... reveals a different poetic voice ... Many
lyrics seem 'coded' with essayistic digressions that gracefully
intertwine question, observation, and emotion. Being a New
Yorker in a 9/11 world has certainly resonated with Joseph, and the
melancholy, grief, and hope of so many people coming to grips with
large-scale violence is palpable. Many of these poems are
deftly painted ... with feeling as brushstroke, judgement as
perspective, language as dimension, metaphor as theme."
--Janet St. John, Booklist
"Joseph's poems, many of which interrogate 9/11, are insistently
quiet, doleful... [H]is poems ... have a[n] affinity to Greek
tragedy, to the ... lines of Euripidean choruses ... Joseph,
however, focuses on collective forces, not individuals. His
ambitious intent is 'to make a large, serious / portrait of my
time' ... His poems are in continual, often maddening flux,
constantly morphing and shifting ... They are ... poems that take
place with the mind like those of Wallace Stevens, who, in the
book's epigraph, cooly quotes Henry James and considers how the
world of the imagination relates to the 'world of actuality.'
They are, as Stevens writes in 'Of Modern Poetry,' poems of the
mind in the act of finding / What will suffice' ... Joseph ...
writes ... with the force and grace of a conductor's swift baton
... Yet Joseph is more than an intricate stylist ... He confronts
us with history -- here he differs from Stevens, who was rarely
topical ..." --Tim Kindseth, Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
"In his new volume of poems, Into It, Lawrence Joseph
asks, 'The techology to abolish truth is now available -- not
everyone can afford it, but it is available -- when the cost comes
down, as it will, then what? This quest for one true thing,
one item of surety, drives all his new poems, which find truth to
be slippery 'in an era of after, of postmodernism.' What
happens, then, is that Joseph's work becomes a refreshing document
of the struggle for truth. This struggle makes Into
It a very intimate book, one that counter-intuitively and
productively sidesteps confessionalism ... [W]hen Joseph stumbles
upon a potential truth, he doesn't shy away from stating it clearly
and almost aphoristically ... And somehow, he maintains humor in a
meandering alternative account of events surrounding our recent
wars ... Joseph sets Into It in a rational, complex and
yes, occasionally funny sensibilty. Into It is just
that, into the world, and the poems that compose it are very
much of the world and of this time. Joseph presents
information cleanly and evocatively, and in doing so most
effectively displays his search for truth and reason in a world
whose operators ... don't value them very much. The essential
pleasure of reading Joseph is recognizing that, in this world,
there's at least one other person trying to figure out how to
live, what's true and what's right." --Nicholas Gilewicz,
Bookslut
"T]he most important lawyer-poet of our era... [L]ike Joseph
himself, the 'I' of the poem is often a lawyer... Joseph's
lawyer-narrators have little in common with the subjective 'I' of
the Romantic poets, however. Rather than purporting to speak
directly to the reader, the 'I' of the poems is multfacted (not
just a lawyer but a Catholic of Lebanese descent, a child of
Detroit, a resident of blocks around Ground Zero, as Joseph himself
is) and is continuously shaped by the pressures of the external
world." -- David Skeel, Legal Affairs
"For loss, bliss, and courage met and endured, try Lawrence
Joseph's Into It. Joseph who lives near Ground Zero
and had to be evacuated in the aftermath of 9/11, gives us our
urban world anew, pressing worlds till they sing of both justice
and mercy. --Marie Ponsot, Commonweal
"... Lowell and Williams. Lawrence Joseph finds himself in
very good company as a ... witness to our times. But the
sardonic humor with which to counter the public lies distributed to
The New York Times and CNN, and the human ache, and the
search for something like peace -- to these this poet has given a
local habitation and a name." --Paul Mariani,
America
"In his newest collection of poetry, Lawrence Joseph grapples
with the task of giving witness to a brutal world. Into
It takes the hard cold materials of the madness and violence
that have entered American consciousness since 9/11 and the Iraq
war, and shapes them into portraits that honor the horror and let
it stand on its own terms... Joseph's reverent attention to
the unsayable draws one in rather than repels, bringing us to our
senses even as it tears at our senses of sanity. It also
allows the insistent question of victim versus perpetrator to
dissolve into a larger question: how is it that the 'slow, the
meek, or the poor of spirit ... allowed themselves to disappear /
into the long, red evenings.' Those in love with death are
always with us, Joseph laments, even from ancient times --
irreconciable mystery. Yet for all that, Joseph is drawn to
beauty... He marvels, amid everything, at 'what / light there
is in that landscape.'" --Image Update
"[I]n his new book, Into It, Joseph has become the
flaneur of an irrevocably changed landscape, 'the vista, a city /
the city, taking a shape and burning.' Joseph has become the
transparent eyeball that Emerson envisioned. This emphasis on
the visual carries over into the writing of a poem; like Montale,
Joseph sees the poem as a visual-aural object of emotion and
feeling... Joseph is a prophet without much honor in the land
of the military-industrial complex. But unless we heed his
message, we are lost." --Regan Upshaw, The Bloomsbury
Review