Happy Juneteenth! As noted earlier this week, I hope to take this opportunity to raise awareness of a few books that were launched in the early days of the pandemic. Lawrence Joseph's A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems came out in March, 2020, just as much of the country was shutting down, to excellent reviews in The New York Times, LRB, and elsewhere. Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann stunningly observes:
“Almost uniquely among contemporary American poets, Joseph doesn’t retail privities, doesn’t chase the minuscule scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods. Readers of his work may be tempted to conclude: this poet doesn’t have a personal life. That’s because what the poems give us are the past fifty years – Joseph’s adult lifetime – in terms of event, public policy and the evolution of civilisation: the Detroit Race Riots, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Twin Towers, globalisation and the internet, archaic and experimental weapons, from stones to ‘steerable/bombs, unprecedented precision, flexibility,/cost,/one, two/trillion’, from axes to ‘those low-flying A-10 Warthogs/ ... each of them, firing/one hundred bullets a second’. Then on to turbo-capitalism, the 2008 slump, Occupy Wall Street, toxins in the water in Flint, Michigan and beyond, Hurricane Irene and the flooding up and down the East Coast, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza and Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq (twice). I remember saying to myself long ago that if you are looking for a poetry that lucidly and systematically offers a sense of this world as a place where things go continually wrong, there is no one but Lawrence Joseph. It’s as though, instead of famously not doing so, Jane Austen had written only about the Napoleonic Wars, or Kafka about World War One.”
It's my pleasure to present here two of Joseph's poems. ("In One Day's Annals" was first published in The Common.)
IN ONE DAY’S ANNALS (by Lawrence Joseph)
Inscrutable the Muse Who Selects My Fate;
Breaking News Graphic, Word of the Attack
Spreads; History of the Great Exegesis;
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew;
Truly Stupendous Levels of Hatred;
and others, too many to mention, each
with their own characters, dialogues, scenes.
In his eternity, up to his waist in a pool
of green liquid poisons, the president who
raises his eyebrows, blows out his cheeks,
purses his lips, feigns surprise, smirks.
In one day’s annals, seen through Sweet
Revenge’s windows, Carmine Street’s
gold dusk light, purplish bronze shielding
Teardrop Park turning a misty gray, slipping
on the ice, falling, headfirst, onto Rector Street,
Number Two subway train’s lights go out—
he continues to play—lights on again—
he finishes, lifts his guitar and kisses it—
on one of fifteen years of Wednesdays,
millions of gallons of untreated sewage
discharged from the North River Wastewater
Treatment Plant’s pipes into the Hudson
and Harlem rivers. What’s clear,
delicate, beautiful, what’s ugly, horrifying;
but why we go to the end of the night
is for no other reason than another
moral to the story, the primal paradise
the body remembers, elemental stasis
of infinities of light and of time, hypostatic.
Lawrence Joseph was born and raised in Detroit, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently So Where Are We (2017) and A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (2020), both from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I also want to mention—and recommend— his book Lawyerland, alternately dubbed novel, non-fiction, and non-fiction novel. He recently retired from St. John’s University School of Law, where he was Tinnelly Professor of Law, and lives in New York City.
Joseph is sui generis in American poetry—an apparent insider (frequently anthologized in Best American Poetry and other collections, Jonathan Galassi is his book editor) who until recently spent his days teaching labor law, far from the MFA circuit. Throughout his work, Joseph turns his uncompromising moral vision on the brutality inherent to the structures of power and calls for their dismantling. While his language and forms are utterly contemporary—this is a new poetry of resistance—his work is doubtlessly informed by Melville and Whitman, Stevens and Stein. A poet of “great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness,” as John Ashbery has written, Joseph expertly combines images, ideas, and the language of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, with expressions of great beauty and physical and emotional intimacy.
On Utopia Parkway, by Lawrence Joseph
Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay,
from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside
to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets
I take to work. The front yard of roses —
did I write their names down correctly? —
Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale.
Q31 bus, among the words I hear are
Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated,
Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not
physically well, a poor man, arrested
on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose,
on the street, held, choked, left unconscious,
still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation
administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death,
according to the autopsy report, a homicide —
rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins,
by employees of the Agency’s contractor,
isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence
explains, but, merely, legally justified means
of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway
was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house.
He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine
on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater
he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state
set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines
the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace,
the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression
of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual.
In what place, the Federal Reserve’s
monetary spigots and banks’ access
to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce
the market’s decline — in what places, violations
of which forms of which eternal laws?
Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place?
On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike,
in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy
blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed
and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.
