'Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos' and
'Into It': The Double
By David Kirby
You're having a cup of coffee, and bang! It's your neighbor,
putting his car in the garage. Unfortunately, it's your garage and
the door was down. This could be the beginning of a lawsuit - or a
poem.
Undergraduate writing programs probably send as many students to
law schools as they do to M.F.A. programs. Makes sense: whether
you're writing a brief or a sonnet, you're gathering material,
thinking about the order you're putting it in, adjusting tone to
make the right impact. "Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a
poet," Clarence Darrow said, but in recent times there have been
efforts to encourage the two professions to coexist peacefully. The
prominent literary theorist Stanley Fish is the best-known academic
to accept a joint appointment in English and law (at Duke
University; he has since taken a similar position at Florida
International University), and currently a number of law schools
offer joint programs with English departments.
For Lawrence Joseph, an attorney and a professor at St. John's
University School of Law, the coexistence of law and poetry is not
an alternative but a necessity. "I don't know what I'd do without
my Double," he says in one poem. Joseph is also the author of a
book of nonfiction called "Lawyerland: What Lawyers Really Talk
About When They Talk About Law," in which he writes: "We expect law
to get to the bottom of things. But if you ask lawyers, 'Does law
get to the bottom of things?' they'll laugh. Lawyers watch other
lawyers steal, lawyers watch other lawyers lie all the time." In
his new poetry collection, "Into It," he even offers a lawyer joke
of sorts, calling an acquaintance "one of the most repellent human
beings / I've ever known, his presence a gross and slippery / lie,
a piece of chemically pure evil. A lawyer - / although the type's
not exclusive to lawyers." (He's right: believe it or not, there
are some less-than-saintly poets out there.)
Joseph was born in Detroit in 1948, the grandchild of Lebanese
and Syrian Catholics who were among the first Arab-American
immigrants to the United States, and his poems speak of his
family's often trying experiences: the slights (his poem "Sand
Nigger" is a near-iconic study of life lived between two cultures)
and the violence, especially the 1967 riot that left sections of
downtown gutted and the wounding of his father, a grocer, in a 1970
holdup attempt. He is the author of three earlier books of poems
that are gathered in "Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems,
1973-1993" as well as the new collection.
Not surprisingly, Joseph's earlier writings include a lot of
who-am-I poems. One says, "I don't know why I choose who I am: / I
work and I remember, that's all." But as Joseph the lawyer makes
his way up the ladder, Joseph the poet begins to use phrases like
"financial markets" and "decreased foreign investment" as the voice
in the poems expresses malaise: "I make favors, complain, wear / a
white shirt and blue suit. I'm tired."
If the first three books describe the slow working out of a
sense of one's place in the world, Joseph's new poems are, though
still self-interrogating, more assured in outlook. "Into It" begins
with an invocation to the muse from Ovid that reads "give me the
voice / To tell the shifting story," and though Joseph invokes
Wallace Stevens, another lawyer, in his epigraph and elsewhere, the
voice that dominates "Into It" evokes New York after 9/11,
recalling the weary, 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 with something like fascinated
horror. Power is the subject of Joseph's new poems, and if power is
frightening, it can be comely as well. In one poem, he writes of
the beauty of a factory, how the gold of the sunlight mixes with
the fire from a furnace. But when he looks at the fearsome
machinery, he sees "enormous engines / throwing great pounding
cylindrical arms / back and forth, as if the machines / are playing
a game, trying to see how much / momentum can be withstood before
one / or the other gives way."
These lines recall Henry Adams's third-person description of
himself prostrate before the dynamo in the Gallery of Machines at
the Great Exposition of 1900, "his historical neck broken by the
sudden irruption of forces totally new." At the time, Adams was
taken for a pessimist, though my guess is that Joseph would say he
was simply being realistic. In "History for Another Time," the poet
looks back from the distant future to one nearer our own period,
when "the economic / cycle had peaked" and "Rats . . . are being
considered / as the unit of currency by the new government." 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's cackling doctor. The dynamo of our age is the
computer, Joseph's poem continues, which "contains no emblematic /
power. You can no more describe the heart / of a computer than the
heart of a multinational / corporation." The arson and the
shootings in old Detroit seem pretty primitive, Wild West stuff
compared with what Joseph calls the "technocapital war" that is
going on right now, even if we only wake 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. The lawyers can't stop the doomsday machine, even if they
want to. And the poets can only write about it.
David Kirby teaches English at Florida State University. His
collection "The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems"
will appear in 2007.