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Outside those poems constrained by explicitly procedural and chance operations, a lyrical impulse, which is not to be confused with the lyric per se, dominates almost all the modes of contemporary poetry. Whether explicit or implicit, this impulse, apparent in narrative-, image-driven, and paratactic poetics, is irreducible to any specific subgenre or mode.[1] Though the lyrical impulse differs from the lyric, which can be defined as “a relatively short poem in which the sensual and musical qualities of language are heightened in order to present a subjective, emotionally charged moment, an interior event with lasting resonance,”[2] it functions, like the genre from which it derives, as a “law of poetics,” imposing constraints during the composition of poetry, the judgment of what to publish and what not to publish, the judgment of what is and isn’t poetry, etc. The various practices of poetry under this law habituate authors, publishers, and critics to its apparent inevitability, naturalizing the lyrical impulse, if not the lyric per se, as the sine qua non of poetry in general. These practices tend to calcify into irrepressible, complementary habits of writing and reading which function as “local” laws in relation to the general law of the lyric. These “laws” explain why readers and critics can “trace” or follow motives and motifs in a poet’s career; the final suppression of the lyrical (not the lyric) impulse rarely occurs.[3] The poet returns incessantly to the scene of instruction which is, of course, the scene of the crime, the enabling trauma that enters public life under the mask, in the cage, of the law of the lyric.[4]

The law of the lyric is not the sole law of contemporary poetics; the epic and prophetic,[5] and thus the epical and prophetic impulses, also function as laws of poetics and poetry. But while epical and prophetic impulses may not always be present in what are deemed “successful” poems, it is difficult to find “successful” poems completely void of the lyrical impulse (excepting, again, procedural and chance poetics).[6] It may be helpful to recall, for example, that one of the strategies of early Language poetry relied on agrammatical, nonsyntactical, and proto-surrealist formations to liberate ludic “content” from the constraints of the ego, often — though not entirely — reduced to the grammatical marker “I” and the subgenre “confessionalism.” The resulting “anti-lyric” poetics and poetry did not mean, perhaps could not have meant, the final suppression of a lyrical impulse. Language poetry availed itself of procedural and chance operations in order to decenter — not expel — what Olson called the “individual as ego.”[7] That many readers habituated by the conventions of grammatically and rhetorically “correct” — and thus “clear” — poetry found much of the output of Language writing difficult to decipher is hardly surprising. As noted above, habits of reading and writing are not easily, if ever, jettisoned, but they can be tempered, tamped down, though doing so is difficult.

Other contemporary poets interested in countering the “lyrical interference of the individual as ego” but wary of what they perceive as over-experimentalism in the avant-garde line of modernism (Stein, Zukofsky, Mac Low, etc.) have felt a need to return to, or at least invoke, vatic/prophetic traditions. Indeed, it is not uncommon for American poets to begin their careers writing largely in the lyric mode before moving “outward” to embrace larger social, cultural, or philosophical issues via epical/serial or other narrative modes. For example, the traditional lyrics and narratives that comprise Harryette Mullen’s first book, Tree Tall Woman, do not herald the dizzying syntaxes, prose forms, and social/cultural critiques of later books like Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge. On the other hand, social and cultural critique is present from the start in Carl Phillips’s first book, In the Blood, however embedded in traditional narrative and lyric forms. Phillips uses his first book to clear social and cultural space for himself as a gay black writer by taking on normative themes in black writing, a topic he largely abandons in his later, more elliptical, more philosophical, poems and books.[8]

As the example of Phillips indicates, the general failure or inadequacy of social, cultural, and political institutions to address the most pressing concerns of modernity have led some poets to turn to traditional or speculative modes of idealism from the very start of their careers, spirituality and religion being two of the more common ones. As it happens, some of the most interesting, even perplexing, contemporary American poets are those that invoke spiritual/religious traditions in relation to the secular modes of poetry available to them: think of poets as varied as Nathaniel Mackey, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson, Armand Schwerner, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg.[9] That this list is comprised of those deemed minorities is not coincidental. In Mackey and Schwerner in particular, the law of the lyric and lyrical impulse, the law of the epic and epical impulse, and the law of prophesy and prophetic impulse struggle with, and against, one another. Each law attempts to assert itself as the law, the a priori matrix from which the other laws derive. In their complex negotiations between identity and responsibility, choice and predetermination, the poetries of Mackey and Schwerner are drawn less along racial or ethnic lines (though these are present) than along religious or spiritual lines. Thus, the extent to which these poetics “press” toward an “end,” gesture toward a utopian moment, is the extent to which they confound literary genres.[10] The enduring presence of prophesy and the prophetic as characteristic of certain American poetries indicates that the literary — understood here as primarily the site of aesthetics — is, perhaps always has been, under assault, or receptive to assistance, from without.[11]

2

Or, should we say, from within? What if prophesy is not a cross a poet takes on, however reluctantly, but the very impetus of his birth as a poet? Such is the unique, if conflicted, argument of Lawrence Joseph’s poetry. By almost any standard Joseph’s poetry is formally quite traditional; it is, by turns, descriptive (though abstractions punctuate each book) and confessional (though not necessarily autobiographical), narrative (despite the collage-effects that increase with each new book) and lyric-driven (as well as driven by lyrical impulses). At the same time it raises the bugaboo of “identity politics” even as it complicates the meanings of both “identity” and “politics.” For Joseph, as with Mackey and Schwerner, the question of identity is not exclusively or even primarily tethered to the usual accidental attributes of race, ethnicity, and/or sex. For Joseph, the question is tied to the accident of birthplace — another traditional feature of the work[12] — and the “choice” of a profession. But in centering so much of his work on the problem of “choice,” will and responsibility in relation to his birthplace, Joseph calls into question the very concepts of accident and choice — that is, his poetry questions the alleged differences between accident and essence, choice and predetermination. His work alternates between affirming and undermining accident, essence, choice, and predetermination, and it draws analogies between these differences and that which obtains between the law, the lawful, and the lawless. As a lawyer, Joseph appears to be particularly drawn to the work of Wallace Stevens, hardly just another lawyer and poet. In the work, and perhaps even life, of Stevens, Joseph finds both justification and condemnation for his “double” life as an attorney and poet. Unlike Stevens, however, Joseph can never sever his ties to that which follows and leads him, spurs him on — his accidental but essential birthplace, Detroit, Michigan.

In contrast to that over which they have no or little control — birthplace, race, ethnicity, sex — artists have generally emphasized their vocations as those of their own choosing. Of course, there is a long tradition of the poet having been chosen by spirits, the gods, the muses, and in more secular cultures, poetry itself. Joseph integrates himself into this tradition by linking the sacred and secular; he explicitly affirms that he was, in some sense, chosen by both. Over the course of his four books of poetry, Joseph is chosen, even as he chooses, to be a poet “born” in Detroit, Michigan. And both choosings originate in at least two sources: the gods (the poet as witness à la Whitman) and aesthetics (the poet as aesthete à la Stevens). Both “callings” will conflict with the secular “call” of the law. In short, Joseph’s quandary is worse than that of, say, Stephen Dedalus who “only” has to decide if he wants to be a shaman-prophet[13] at the service of the gods (sacred or secular) or a godhead-forger of his own creation. Joseph has to decide how, or if, he can serve human laws, divine laws, and aesthetic laws, for in serving one, or even two, sets of laws he betrays the other(s). To be law-abiding he must, in turn, be a lawbreaker.

Given that he grew up in Detroit during one of the most violent periods in its history, Joseph may be excused for repeatedly returning, in his poetry, to the subject of his family’s fate in his hometown. Though Detroit becomes less and less the focus of Joseph’s poetry over the course of his career thus far, at least one poem in each of his four books explicitly concerns the Motor City. As one of the most infamous (ex-Murder Capital of the United States) and famous (Motown Records, the Big Three automakers) cities in the United States, Detroit has left its mark on Joseph. It would be an obvious mode of oversimplification to reduce Joseph’s decision to become a lawyer to a reflection of his being raised amid urban lawlessness — Monday morning quarterbacking from Dr. Freud’s armchair, so to speak — but it is a fact that all four of his books have as a central concern the tension between his lawful (largely Catholic) upbringing and the apparent unabated lawlessness of urbanity.[14] In the early books Detroit is the site of the crime, but in later books, after Joseph moves to New York City, he discovers that Wall Street is no less lawless, in its own way, than the unforgiving streets of Detroit. From an ethical and moral position, one might suppose that the different modes lawlessness takes would be insignificant, but for Joseph the differences make all the difference in the world: he became a lawyer — not a policeman. Thus, though lawlessness prevails amid a more or less impotent law, law, however, weak, must be endorsed. Insofar as this necessity is psychological, its sources can easily be traced back to Detroit.[15] However, its weak moral foundations suggest that the secular — chosen or choosing — represents itself as inferior to the sacred. But since Joseph offers both realms as sites of potential or possible freedom (we are chosen or we choose in both), why imply that the secular remains “weak” in relation to the sacred?

Because to the extent its foundations are human, not divine, secular law is fundamentally, necessarily, weak in relation to sacred law. Yet this weakness is also its strength. Its human limitations perforce make secular law humane in every sense of the word — that is, both “good” and “bad.” On the other hand, sacred law, by its very nature, is perfect — and inhumane. And since he is human — by choice and not by choice, as we will read — Joseph tends to prefer the vagaries of finite imperfections to the certainty of infinite perfection, a preference which will serve to justify the movement toward the aesthetic in the third and fourth books. He is “born,” however, a prophet utilizing the lyric mode of poetry, reminding us that the gesture toward the horizon of the utopian can be inward as well as outward.[16] And because he will never be able to free himself of the prophetic voice even as he embraces the aesthetic of the lyric, the poet will shuttle back and forth, inward and outward, gesturing toward the lyric and epic: his poems will be written in the frequencies of the lyrical and epical impulses.

3

Joseph pits the divine against the human in his first book, Shouting at No One (1983). It opens with a pre-genetic “epigraph” whose first line is “I was appointed the poet of heaven.” The phrase “poet of heaven” can be read in at least two ways: heaven’s representative on earth and heaven’s own, singular (“the”) poet. Both readings are supported by the poem. The poet is “appointed” to describe “Theresa’s small roses / as they ben[d] in the wind” but soon tires of this rather pedestrian lyric mode. Requesting a change of duties, he is ordered to “copy” the “breaths” of the angels, only a slight upgrade, from his perspective. However, he does as he is told and, somewhat surprisingly, wins “a public following.” Presumably jealous of his success or just tired of the poet’s failure to please the divine powers, God, or God’s representative, orders the poet to leave heaven.[17]

It’s an old story, of course, one of the oldest myths: the jealousy of a god as the “father” of earthbound poetics. Like Lucifer the poet has been cast out of God’s grace, and like that fallen angel, his spiritual “brother,” the poet too will make a heaven of hell, first by a little revisionist history in the closing stanza of his “Generation”: “So that’s when we got the idea in our heads, / to be born” (24). These lines occur in Joseph’s third book, Before Our Eyes, a book that, as the title suggests, attempts to heed the call of earthly delights and abominations. Published a decade after Shouting at No One, Before Our Eyes offers a rejoinder not only to his own story — he was ordered out of heaven by God — but also to the more sanguine details of his birth as asserted later in that first book: “I was pulled from the womb / into a city.”[18] Taken together, these lines are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The “divine” idea to be born might well have demanded human help to pull it off. Still, these lines stand in tension with one another, especially when we consider a third variation on this theme as it appears in Joseph’s second book, Curriculum Vitae, published exactly five years after Shouting and five years before Before Our Eyes: “I might have been born in Beirut, / not Detroit, with my right name.”[19] The conditional past participle, separated from two different, if not opposing, simple indicatives by half a decade, can be read as an epic in progress, one in which the hero-poet has “forgotten” the circumstances of his origin and is making it up as he goes along or is ashamed of the circumstances of his origin and is prevaricating to ward off (self) discovery.[20] Everything hinges on this conditional, the very engine of equivocation. Let’s not forget that this string of obfuscating, if not quite self-cancelling, statements began with the poet’s punishment for doing exactly what he was told to do. Thus the Kafka-esque law, the punishment for “failing,” however obedient, is, as it turns out, precisely what the poet must face again on earth and it is not insignificant that the poet finds himself a “son” standing helpless before another fallen father, the origin of the law.

4

Like Lawrence Joseph, I too “might have been born” in a different country, a different city, “not Detroit, / with my right name.” When I was growing up in the Motor City, Joseph’s Market was a local Detroit grocery store I occasionally frequented though it was not located in my parents’ neighborhood. We had relatives on the east and west sides of town and I would sometimes stop in for snacks before or after visiting my cousins, especially when I was in junior high and high school. It was the stereotypical — therefore, unremarkable — grocery store: owned by immigrants (“Chaldeans” or “Jews,” as my parents would say in those can’t-be-bothered-with-ethnic-distinctions days) who seemed to work hard, complain little, and say even less. Because there were several black-owned grocery stores in my neighborhood, I did not grow up “resenting” immigrants for taking “our” jobs. Having worked in a large grocery store chain (no longer extant) throughout my high school and college years, I would not have minded handing over my job to some eager immigrant upstart. I digress here in order to come clean, a matter of full disclosure, and to contextualize my comments about Joseph’s Market as portrayed in several poems throughout Joseph’s collection, especially in the context of the 1967 riot. To be honest, aside from the name, I barely remember Joseph’s Market — it blurs in my memory with every other mom-and-pop grocery I patronized — but I understand why Joseph cannot forget it. Here indeed is his scene of instruction, the scene of a crime that shattered his family in general, and his father in particular, but that also gave birth to the prophet as lyric poet.

The 1967 riot in Detroit was the culmination of over a decade of frustration for many of the city’s residents. It was a race riot, a class riot and an anti-authoritarian riot: black against white, under-or unemployed against a burgeoning middle class, and citizen against the police.[21] As usual, other ethnic and racial groups, predominantly immigrants from the Middle East and Eastern Europe, got caught up in the violence. After 1967 there was no turning back, only a turning inward. Intra-and interracial violence became, more and more, the national image of Detroit as its more legitimate claims to fame, the music and automotive industries, began to wane.

Apparently, Joseph’s grocery store was burned during the riot. A few years later, Joseph’s father was shot and wounded. The explicit references to violence regarding his father occur in the first and last poems, entitled, respectively, “Then” and “Not Yet,” of part 1 of the first book, Shouting at No One. Because “Then” follows the poet’s “expulsion” from heaven, temporality, as “then” and “not yet,” frames the opening section: the poet’s failure in paradise condemns him to birth, to time, to the succession of moments or “nows.” The latter is reflected in the name of the father and the very first act we see him performing, yet another sign of the damnation of earthly life: breathing: “Joseph Joseph breathed slower / as if that would stop / the pain splitting his heart.”[22] “Joseph Joseph” (or now now) is temporal succession in tension with the longing to hit the brakes, to slow, if not stop altogether, the headlong fall toward death. Hence the repetition of the same (Joseph Joseph) even if The Inferno, The Castle, and The Third Policeman,[23] for example, remind us that repetition is itself an index of Hell, that Joseph Joseph was, in some sense, “already” dead.[24] And the enjambment of “those” initiates another theme that will pursue Joseph throughout all four books: the advent of the other. As immigrants, as founders of the grocery store, Joseph’s grandparents were “those” others; “now” (or “then”) they find themselves being driven out of business by other others. Out of the flames of this burning, this exodus, the poet, retroactively, discovers the moment, the “now,” of his birth: “it would take nine years / before you’d realize the voice howling in you / was born then.”

This second birth, the scene of the crime, of instruction, will not be religious, at least not in any traditional sense. This birth will promise no immortality, as both the title and theme of “Not Yet” indicate. However, this second birth is a second chance, not to praise the heavenly powers but to avenge the breaking of their sacred laws. As we might expect, this second chance is compelled, not chosen:

… there is so much
anger in my heart,
so much need
to avenge the holy cross
and the holy card
with its prayers for the dead,
so many words
I have no choice to say. (17)

As he will discover over the course of the next three books, this “chance” will itself be revised. For the poem ends with the invocation of chance as the ambiguous name of the offspring of predetermination and choice: “I don’t want / the angel inside me, sword in hand, / to be silent. / Not yet” (18). Compelled and compelling, chosen and choosing: the difference between these words blur in the potent potion of the imperative and subjunctive. It is the latter that is, of course, yet another sign of damnation, of earthly life, and thus, of temporality. Not surprisingly, then, the “holy cross” and “holy card” will gradually recede from view during the poet’s exodus that will eventually take him to New York. He will take up the law of human institutions and, most important, the law of the lyrical impulse. He will begin his “turn” toward the aesthetic, not in order to abandon the prophetic, much less the secular, impulse (he will remain a lawyer), but in order to make both the prophetic and secular more bearable. The aesthetic — the lyrical impulse — will provide respite (if not only that) from the unsparing demands of the God roaring inside (the epical impulse) as well as the oft-obscene demands of human law.

5

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before the second book, the second (and not the last) chance that is also Curriculum Vitae, before the narrator will learn “to delight in a measured phrase, / to bank the rage in the gut, / to speak more softly, / to waken at three in the morning to think only of her / — in the age of postcapitalism” (3), he will have had to put away childish things. Such are the lessons of the rest of Shouting at No One. But the narrator is human; he suffers memory, and so, nostalgia, wistfulness, even as he propels himself forward, headlong, toward an uncertain, adult future. He looks back through the frame of a frame (“When I was a child / I saw this church through the window of a ’51 Chevrolet,” 5) or propels himself back even further to the pretemporal world of another life (“I was a child when the wolves came / from the north and ate our donkey,” 21). We have, here, then, a “when-when” situation: the signifier — adverbial, conjunctive — modifies the “past” as static moment and bottomless regression. In that sense the boy invoking these “whens” is an adolescent aswirl in the currents of dissolving childhood and simmering adulthood. At the same time it should not escape our notice that these scenes are moments of loss: the grandmother whose “small / soft hands [were] holding [his]” is gone, replaced by “a woman, / … who lowers her head / to spit” (3); the donkey-eating wolves in rural Lebanon are merely prototypes for “those” burning Joseph’s Food Market in urban America. Indeed, in poem after poem in Shouting at No One (and, as seen below, in Curriculum Vitae), “those” others are brothers, cousins and strangers, so eloquently put at the end of what is probably Joseph’s best known poem, “Sand Nigger”:

… a Levantine nigger
in the city on the strait
between the great lakes Erie and St. Clair
which has a reputation
for violence, an enthusiastically
bad-tempered sand nigger
who waves his hands, nice enough
to pass, Lebanese enough
to be against his brother,
with his brother against his cousin,
with cousin and brother
against the stranger. (29)

The alternating alliances (we will see another example of this later) are matters of chance and circumstance that are not, here, mystifications of history that pit a permanent “good” against an intractable “evil.” These ever-widening conflicts in which allies and foes are interchangeable, a matter of dates and places, derive from ancient antipathies that apparently predate blood relations and cultural values. “Lebanese,” like “American,” tells one nothing about regional, geographical or intra-ethnic differences. Thus the gesture “out” of, or “before,” history points toward the prelapsarian paradise referred to in “I was appointed the poet of heaven.” But as noted above, Joseph’s overarching myth is not a religion of the closed Book; there will be no reappointment to his former post as “the poet of heaven.” This point is driven home in the most provocatively titled poem in the first book: “There Is a God Who Hates Us So Much.” As we recall, the poet “was pulled from the womb / into this city.” Buffeted about amid sin, guilt and atonement, the poet confesses that he “was a system of laws / [he] hated” (43). For the law, secular or Christian, forbids the self-regard implicit in revenge. And since only God avenges through self-reproduction in the fullness of time (the “coming” or “return” of the Son), the poet, trapped in temporality, feels betrayed. Yes, the city “pulled,” but perhaps either God or the narrator’s mother, did not struggle enough, if at all, to hold him back. Thus the sweeping condemnation of his judgment: “I measure you according to your creation.” Given the mixture of guilt, anger, and self-recrimination encapsulated in the poem, it is difficult to exclude anything or anyone from Joseph’s wrath. This line could apply to his father and mother as well as to the city in which he was born, to say nothing of God. Yet, perhaps the line refers first and foremost to the poet, for this book ends with another admission: “It’s not me shouting at no one / in Cadillac Square: it’s God / roaring inside me, afraid / to be alone” (55). God, Author of the closed Book, is inside the poet. Hence he is a prophetic declaimer of the Law by which God, through him, measures and judges. That Joseph does not avail himself of vehicles appropriate for the prophet-poet, that he declaims within the lyric, tells us the God inside him is not (yet? ever?) fused with the poet. Nor, perhaps not coincidentally, is the vengeful, bargaining and gambling God of Abraham, Moses, and Job reconciled with the loving, forgiving and self-sacrificing God of Mary, Peter, and Jesus of Nazareth. Either this God is not omnipotent (the poet’s resistance to fusion is too strong) or this God is, in fact, no God, at least not the God of Judaic, Islamic, or Christian theology. This God would be some indeterminate force, perhaps the id catapulted into the godhead, determined to avenge the past, a folio of unresolved cold cases. Yet, the poet admits that the holy roar within may simply be the prolonged cry of existential loneliness, which is to say, a loneliness only partially alleviated by another human being, a beloved: God as the first lyric poet. Eventually this God or godhead will undergo metamorphosis, will be eroded by age, love, and/or, ruthlessly decapitated, will become, but only in part, a godless aesthetic, a law of the lyric that is only a copy of a copy (secular law) of sacred law.

6

We are still ahead of ourselves. Before the exteriority of an exodus there is “internal” exile, which is to say, the silence and cunning of a Stephen Dedalus or a prophet biding his time. Joseph goes to work in the infamous plants of the (formerly) Big Three automakers and quickly learns that who and what he is or, more to the point, isn’t — “What’s the matter, Rabbi?” a coworker inquires — doesn’t matter. The uniformity of “those” from the point of view of the “family” is reflected back to Joseph in the uniformity of the machines as well as the uniform(s)ity of the machine operators. In this industrialized Detroit, there are “only” blacks, whites and Jews, workers and bosses. Thus, “When a stranger asks / ‘Why’s someone young as you work here?’ / don’t answer. You don’t answer / when he answers ‘You’re a factory rat like me.’” (12) But as indicated by the very next poem, “I’ve Already Said More Than I Should,” which is situated in New York, this Dedalus-esque strategy will apparently be necessary even “after” the exodus. New York will turn out to be another turn in a journey of exile without end, another verse in an interminable song:

It isn’t for nothing that I deny
interior theological dialogue, doubt

the existence of the new aeon,
don’t sleep past dawn anymore.

In the offices of the great firm
whose name might matter

I won’t reveal what I abhor,
or my desire, if I can’t be rich,

to be, instead, moral or famous (14–15)

Here, the contemptuous sneer of “moral,” just another option squeezed in between “rich” and “famous,” tells us that the vatic/prophetic voice, however receded or suppressed, has followed our narrator to New York and into the law firm. The secular lawyer is hounded by the vatic voice of divine responsibility, next to which human morality is a mere shadow. Though he will not acknowledge it until Before Our Eyes, he is now double: a lawyer and a prophet. Having been “trained” for New York by Detroit (and later, in Ann Arbor, by the University of Michigan Law School), he understands what it takes to survive: “I stuffed the crisp ten dollar bill / he paid me into my pocket. / I knew where it came from. / I knew that much was mine.”

This Machiavellian ethos will be reinforced in the third book, Before Our Eyes. Thus the first stanza of “Over Darkening Gold”:

So here we are. Thieves stealing from thieves
in a society of complex spheres,
wondering what you should do. And still
stars blown outside the eye’s corner. (20)

The uniformity of the family, of the factory, will extend to the law office — “I couldn’t help but overhear / my thoughts and opinions” — and suggest that differences dissolve under the intense pressures of those old standbys, land and money: “What if poverty and anger / and the desire for thrills, / and tribal attitudes, exist / not only on the streets but innately / — inherent, if you will, / within the boundaries of the nation, / social and economic classes, our time?” (19) Thus the threat of a life as a mere secular automaton butts heads with the necessity to resuscitate the God roaring inside him even if the latter appears to be, here, on life support. In Curriculum Vitae both the automaton and prophet — the birth of the aesthete will occur in Before Our Eyes — vie for the poet’s soul, which in this context is his voice. On the one hand, a poem like “That’s All,” with its world-weary title, appears to offer the automaton the consolation of memory, if nothing else: “I work and I remember, that’s all.” The penultimate line, however, tells us that this attitude is the result of the blurring of accident and choice: “I don’t know why I choose who I am” (35). Here, the poet is not a prophet; moreover, he heralds none, foreshadows no one: “No spirit leaped with me in the womb” (34). He goes to work; he gets paid for his use of words as a lawyer, as a teacher. Still, the God roaring inside will not be so easily appeased: “I live in words and off my flesh / in order to pay the price. // When the ancient fury persists, / I pay the price” (43). The prophetic law within is an incessant reminder that he, a law-abiding citizen, is, in the fullness of time, a lawbreaker. Small wonder that Joseph insists, at the end of the second book’s title poem, “Curriculum Vitae,” “I am as good as the unemployed / who wait in long lines for money” (8). The consolations of secular law — the “people” avenge the wrongs done to the individual, the individual has his day in court before the “people” — cannot assuage the ancient injustice of the burning of Joseph’s Food Market. A lawyer, he has yet to find employment suitable to the abatement of that ancient fury. Just as human morality lacks the rigor of divine responsibility, so too secular law is a weak imitation of divine righteousness.

7

 Joseph serves three masters, surrenders himself to three law systems, the laws of secular, sacred, and aesthetic adjudication. The gods he appeases, however, are not the objects of any positivistic theology. But while, and because, it relegates the sacred (as religion) to its “proper” place within the private sphere, the secular has no place for either aesthetic play or prophetic railing. Indeed, the secular is wary of this impish renegade that refuses to recognize borderlines: “I had to tell him to lower his voice. / Imagination split forever — one side fear, the other, hope; no one knows / how to decide even within oneself” (65). Here the secular and prophetic (whose voice is always too loud, too public) struggle for the soul of the narrator even as they shield one another: the secular voice of “reason” disguises the divine wrath of the prophet while prophetic righteousness, sotto voce, steadies the secular lawyer assaulted on a daily basis by the ordinary lies and half-truths (i.e., secular law) that pass for the (divine) law. For the poet, then, for the aesthete who has not (yet?) freed himself of either secular rationalization or prophetic inspiration, the psychic conflicts suppressed in order to function in “objective” public life achieve a kind of volatile but homeostatic equilibrium. Out of this interminable but apparently manageable crisis poetry is born, a poetry that confounds generic distinctions precisely to the degree it partakes of the lyrical, epical, and prophetic. From the point of view of the general public, however, it is the practice and teaching of law that constitutes maturity which, as Freud reminds us, depends upon the suppression of play, the patrolling of the aesthetic.[25] And, as Max Weber reminds us, maturity under the Protestant ethic depends upon the privatization of evangelistic fervor. There is, in the “disenchantment” of “becoming mature,” nothing shameful, even if shame is one of the weapons the “healthy” self deploys against its ugly duckling siblings, id and alter ego.

Except, here, “which” is the ego, the alter ego, the id? The general stance of the poems in the last two books is that of a lawyer (ego), but this does not tell us how the remaining two “selves” (the aesthete and the prophet) line up with the alter ego and id. Because the latter can never appear as such except in the guise of an alter ego and because Joseph clearly distinguishes between the appeal of the aesthetic and the duty of the prophet, we can posit the presence of two alter egos, one aesthetic and one prophetic. The latter avenge themselves, “roaring” as two gods or a split God, judging not only the world but also the healthy ego as unhealthy, as unworthy of a secret it keeps in reserve: “”I’ll let you in on a secret. One’s deepest secret / is a certainty that protects against the world” (54). These lines, from “A Year Ago This June” in Joseph’s fourth book, Into It, point to the untold, the matrix of what might one day be said,[26] projected into an indeterminate future: “But that’s another story” (54). The alter egos spin tale after tale that, far from revealing, enwrap themselves in layer after layer of language. These two alter egos, the sacred and aesthetic, constitute an alliance of convenience against the secular ego. By the time we reach Into It, the secular will be ceded the “actual”; that is, the sacred will be in retreat, resigning itself to the Protestant ethic.[27] The withdrawal of the epical will clear ground for the advent of the lyrical. The secular ego will be left with one alter ego and the trace of the other alter ego.

That trace of the other accounts for the elegiac tone that permeates much of Into It. Although the muses of Into It are Wallace Stevens and Ovid, neither the celebrant of a post-religious humanity nor the advocate of aesthetic pleasure would have endorsed the figure of the “fallen” poet. Nor would either have endorsed the powers of observation as “consolations” for any alleged lost paradise, sacred or secular, as seen in Joseph’s third book, Before Our Eyes. That book, as its title suggests, begins as homage to the consolations of phenomenology and enabling “observation,” that is, to a lyrical alter ego and epical alter ego: what is seen consoles or outrages. We cannot imagine Stevens, the hardboiled author of “the the,” “the nothing that is,” writing this conclusion to “Before Our Eyes”: “For the time being / let’s just keep to what’s before our eyes” (5). Joseph’s qualifications — “For the time being,” “just,” — are not, could never have been, Stevens’s.[28]

Given what we observed above concerning the problematic “place” of the aesthetic and the sacred vis-à-vis the secular, it is not surprising that the figure of the “double” arises explicitly in the third book, largely set in New York, at the same time that Joseph begins his, if you will, aesthetic turn. Because the ego and its alter egos enforce, respectively, secular, lyrical, and epical laws, the “double,” as we observed above, is itself doubled; it veils the competing powers of the lyrical and epical impulses, consigned to the aesthetic and prophetic respectively. Moreover, as we will see, the secular (legal scholar and professor) ego, the sacralized (prophetic) alter ego, and the aestheticized alter ego take turns hiding behind or shielding one another.[29] Their differences subvert any positive identities we might be tempted to read in them; everything depends on the position from which Joseph writes. Most of the time he positions himself as a lawyer writing poetry, but sometimes he is a poet practicing law, or a prophet pretending to be both a lawyer and a poet. No single poem can juggle all these balls at once. However, several of the poems in Before Our Eyes and especially in Into It attempt just such a feat. For example, the opening title poem of Before Our Eyes can be read as an attempt to locate secular adjudication and aesthetic claritas[30] within the social, to proffer both as res publica:

                The point is to bring
depths to the surface, to elevate
sensuous experience into speech
and the social contract.

However, a few lines later, after affirming the link between inside and outside, subjective and objective, private and public, aesthetic and secular law — “By written I mean made, by made I mean felt; / concealed things, sweet sleep of colors” — the poet admits that the prophet indeed risks dishonor in his own country:

So you will be, perhaps appropriately,
dismissed for it, a morality of seeing,
laying it on. (3)

Here the “you” seems more pointedly self-referential, acknowledging more keenly its doubled (tripled) existence. The rest of the book affirms this hypothesis. The double lives of the lawyer/poet//poet/prophet (it isn’t clear that the poet that doubles as a lawyer is the “same” poet that doubles as a prophet), is linked to the dyad of predetermination/choice: these duplicities tend to enforce silence, cunning, though it isn’t always clear “who” remains silent, “who” resorts to cunning: “A lot of substance / chooses you. And it’s no one’s business // judging the secrets each of us needs: / I don’t know what I’d do without my Double” (13). Given the asymmetrical balance of cultural and social power between these selves, it isn’t surprising that the public ego/secular lawyer is forced to chastise and ridicule its epical, prophetic, alter ego — “So you rampage within yourself — you think / you should be thanked for it?” (67). Even language partakes of this doubleness: “words are talk and words themselves / forms of feeling” (16).[31] If all is “feeling,” mere “talk,” it isn’t surprising that an escape valve from the law office might depend on withdrawing from humanity until some crisis rouses one: “I surfaced from my reflections to see / wartime” (27). What had once been a sub rosa strategy, however failed (“I’ve Already Said More Than I Should”), however compromised by having (been) chosen, “in a badly measured time / human form over non-being” (24), has become, here, a disfigured form of the subaltern, if not quite submarine, “life.”[32] And, of course, there is the other temptation of the poet: to not only be a prophet but to be a politician, to measure the impact of his sayings: “Exactly how much one poet’s thinking has influenced / what’s in the air” (31). These lines come from “Whose Performance Am I Watching,” taken directly from a Fernando Pessoa poem, but they also echo the existential dread of the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”:[33] to live as an inconsequential automaton.[34] For Joseph, however, the dilemma is even more acute: on the one hand, secular law is not only ineffective but, worse, it collaborates with the unlawful; on the other, the sacred law is, at best, irrelevant to those pursuing the mirages of the gold standard (“The filtered sunlight insinuating opulence”), which renders the epical-prophetic mode outdated.

At the beginning of this essay we noted how the lyrical impulse finds its way into any number of disparate poetics because, presumably, it is perceived as a, if not the, primary site of the aesthetic per se. We also noted that it is precisely because of its aestheticism that the lyric and the lyrical impulse have been viewed by some poets as incapable, or inadequate to the task, of representing the social, political and cultural crises of the modern era. In the context of Before Our Eyes, however, only the law of the lyric, the common measure of compromised, inauthentic selves, appears inviolate. Moreover, it provides plenty of opportunities for the self-lacerations of guilt: in the face of the interminable tragedy that is human existence, the poet, shorn of his prophetic-sacred powers, can only play with language: “What / do I see? A baby’s / mysterious inability to open his eyes. / What do I do? / Mysteriously, a month-old baby / can’t open his eyes.”[35] (41)

8

After so much apparent exhaustion before the ordinary horrors of daily life (“you won’t kill their love of the actual”), can the prophet be blamed for retreating, however momentarily, to the play and pleasures of the poet, from both secular and sacred law to the law of the lyric, especially since he has already discovered that, at a certain point, the secular, sacred, and aesthetic realms of adjudication intersect? As we will see below in a poem that marks a crucial transformation in the way the poet imagines the three sets of laws he tries to serve, the word “sentences” will mark the site where the secular, sacred, and aesthetic meet. This is not, however, a meeting of equals. Here, the human realms of the secular and aesthetic are inflated, the sacred, deflated, and so the poet praises the ordinary earthly light of perception, knowledge and what’s “before our eyes”:

And that’s the law. To bring to light
most hidden depths. The juror screaming
defendant’s the devil staring at her
making her insane. The intense strain
phrasing the truth, the whole truth, nothing
but sentences, endless sentences. (43)

Here, the roaring God of the prophet-poet gazes upon its reflection in diminutive form, a “juror screaming”; both are, as we have seen, town criers, wracked with anger, anguish, and however futile their bellowing, bellow they must. Each has only the power to hand out, write out, “endless sentences,” or as the poem’s title makes clear, to enact “Variations on Variations on a Theme.” This poem is a turning point in the book and in Joseph’s career. It signals his farewell to the prophet-poet, which will not mean the end of social critique, as Into It makes clear. Rather it marks another scene of instruction: the impotence of the poet in the face of the actual is converted into the very source of his transcendental powers.[36] But first, a last prophetic gesture of refusal:

… the sun continues its journey. You won’t
kill their love of the actual. Let them go
conquer the world, march with Alexander:
  there is Ur, the Chaldean city, a bronze
flake on a rock; there are millions, millions
  plunged and numbed by dreams of blood. (44)

This “last” gesture is repeated in Into It, for like all performances (including linguistic) within the temporal world, terms like first and last can only refer to idealized terminal points “outside” this hell of repetitions. But hell this is, and so, too, repetition: “The realization — the state of the physical world / depends on shifts in the delusional thinking / of very small groups” (25) and “I know of no // defense against those addicted to death” (36). As we will see more forcefully, more explicitly, in Into It, Wallace Stevens will have already become the enabling muse that justifies this swerve, this movement “away” from the “actual.”[37] Taken together, the lines above clarify the first poem in Before Our Eyes: the phenomena of beings cannot be conflated with the “actual” since, for Joseph, the former refers to the occulted, which must be revealed (in the court, in the poem, and so forth) while the latter refers to the occulting sediment the world takes for the totality of existents. I believe the Heideggerean language is appropriate here since Before Our Eyes shuttles back and forth between occultation and revelation, between warring ideas of lawlessness and lawfulness, between those who obfuscate and those who clarify. However, exactly what these terms mean, exactly what is being occulted, being revealed, is a matter of perspective, positioning, whose borders or parameters constitute legality and illegality, licit and illicit, fidelity and infidelity, etc. Joseph cannot give himself entirely over to lyric clarity, which would be tantamount to conflating the legal and illegal, licit and illicit; at the same time he distances himself (somewhat) from epic occultation, from the supposed purifying oppositions of legal/illegal, licit/illicit, and so forth. Hence the movement toward a diminished prophetic mode, diminished precisely to the extent it confines itself to, even as it tests the limits of, the lyric. As a result, this inflated lyric (the lyrical), this weakened epic (the epical), will always risk a bloated rhetoric and enfeebled ethos as it returns to the scene of instruction.

The scene of instruction has its instructors, however belated:[38] no doubt his wife, a painter, Ovid, and Stevens, our Virgil of the post-Romantic imagination. We can thus read the second person pronoun in the penultimate line of “Variations” in the plural: “Within the intensity you showed me / both cloudiness and transparency can be painted” (45). This motif will dominate Into It, from the aesthetic play of poems like “The Bronze-Green-Gold-Green Foreground” (“opaque, though clear, painted language”) to the political commentary of poems like “The Game Changed” (“Neither impenetrable nor opacity / nor absolute transparency. I know what I’m after.”). Transparency, opacity — which of these, we might ask, validates the secular, the sacred? Within the secular realm there is an entire history that has validated transparency and clarity as the sine qua non of Western poetry in general, the lyric in particular. However, as we indicated above, the sacred realm, especially (but not exclusively) the religions of the (closed) Book, elevates “cloudiness” to a principle of fidelity in relation to the occult (we see as through a glass darkly, etc.). Thus, what may be generally lawful in the secular realm, transparency — whether we mean the world of legal opinions or aesthetic judgments — is generally lawless in the sacred — and vice versa.[39] The qualification “generally” is necessary here because if things were that simple, an algebra of equivalences among transparency and cloudiness, secular life and sacred hope, one could easily render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s, unto God what was God’s, and, for the artist, unto aesthetics what was aesthetics’. But in actuality obfuscation and occultation serve, for example, the state apparatus — including the legal system — quite well, and clarity and revelation have been used to justify political and religious wars, for example, since time immemorial. Hence both transparency and cloudiness must be used cunningly by the poet, that is, at the “right” time, in the “right” place, just as the political, literary and religious powers do.

9

In Before Our Eyes, “Sentimental Education” attempts to enact this strategy, cleverly deploying both transparency and opacity. It begins with a return to the past, to Detroit and the scene of instruction, a spiritual initiation sans religion:

… My baptism by fire
in the ancient manner,
at my father’s side in a burning city,
nothing sacramental about it. (33)

The simple past tense shifts into the prophetic-epical mode of the past perfect — “But first, back to Henry Ford” — and then a proleptic leap — “But back, first, to Marvin Gaye, / during an interview in Brussels” (34). The tone of these lines is one of compulsion, as though the poet is forced to return, here, to two of the enabling figures of a particular history, Detroit’s, yes, but also a general, if capsule, history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. What is “occulted” and “unveiled” here, what remains hidden and open, like Poe’s purloined letter, is the common denominator of the factory system: Ford Motor Company and Motown Records.[40] A prophet here, the poet reveals and hides this tacit conjunction by sleight of hand (“But first, back …” and “But back, first, …”), by bait and switch:

Of the world-famous Highland Park Plant
Otto Moog, the German engineer,
in 1923 proclaimed (Vladimir
Lenin thought so too): “No symphony
compares to the music hammering
through the colossal workplace”
— proof, so to speak,
that speech propels the purposes
by which it’s been shaped. (34)

The conjoining of compulsion and volition, imperative and subjunctive, in the last two lines “fulfill” the promise of Ford and Gaye, the Motor City and Motown, as the price of greatness, determined and willed, like the relationship between the grammatical variations on the “simple” past. The shuttle effect — from New York to the Detroit of “first” Ford, “then” Gaye, from the “symphony” of old Europe to the “music hammering” of upstart America — is compelled; not so the next-to-last stanza where the return to the past is willfully summoned forth:

Back to, because you want to,
Grand Boulevard, excessive sky
hot and indigo, poured out
onto Hendrie.

We have returned to the lyrical mode which, according to the tradition of Western literature cited above, demands clarity, transparency. However, this mode cannot be realized as an ideal for the poem besieged, like the poet, by epical impulses from within; it will have already been, will always be, infiltrated by what it supposedly had fortified itself against: the first five predominantly prophetic-epical stanzas. Here is the rest of the sixth stanza:

Grandpa lifts you into his arms,
small as a single summer Sunday,
a kind of memory trance truly
dark, deep and dark, steel dark,
not as pure, but almost as pure,
as pure unattainable light. (35)

How to make a heaven of hell? By repeatedly insisting — “not as pure,” “almost as pure,” “as pure” — that that which is “steel dark” is “almost as pure, / as pure unattainable light.” However, as Joseph’s use of commas is rigorously purposeful, we risk misreading these lines if we ignore that last comma; it blocks any facile reading that would turn those last two phrases into one: the apophantic “as” serves as an impasse to the simile “as.” An essential difference between these last two clauses is maintained; so too the difference between the first stanza’s reference to light — “Detroit’s achromatic / sky …” — and the sixth’s stanza’s reference to “pure unattainable light.” A sky without color can still emit light, which is why, to the young Joseph, it “glowed,” even if it does so because “the city is burning” (33). Hence the necessity of affirming the dark and the light, the “achromatic sky” and “excessive sky / hot and indigo.” Here is the movement of memory from scene to scene, from the simple past of the father to the past perfect of the grandfather, from a city burning to “a single summer Sunday,” however “small.”

Thus, as seen above, the formal strategy of blending the prophetic and sacred with the lyrical and personal will demand the suspension of temporality to a “now” and the reduction of spatiality to a “here.” In earlier poems like “Then” the procedure was achieved by repetition; we will see this procedure again (e.g., “Why Not Say What Happens”). In “Sentimental Education” the procedure will depend upon “a kind of memory trance.” This “trance” functions along the historical axis in the same way both “transparency” and “opacity” function along the spatial axis: they both collapse perspective toward a single moment, a single “here.” As such, the “trance” functions as a kind of mimicry of paradise where time and space are forever ceasing to exist. For example, although I have linked the simple past to the father and the past perfect to the grandfather, I want to stress that it would not matter if the memory of a summer Sunday with the grandparent occurred “after” the riot associated with the father and the grocery store. The terms of tense, as noted above, refer to idealized states “outside” history in “some kind of memory trance.” Even if that “summer Sunday” occurred, say, in 1970, it is still, literally, for all intents and purposes, prior to the father inside his burning store in 1967. For the period of absolute happiness is always before. In Joseph’s mythic cosmogony, this “before” applies even to the eternity of paradise. Recall that the epigraph/poem that opens Shouting at No One describes temporal events in heaven. There “is,” apparently, a happier time prior to the happiest timelessness promised by all the major world religions. Not only memory, then; history, too, “works” this way, or rather, is worked this way. The point of ritual celebration — the Fourth of July — or mourning — 9/11 — is to insist on the eternal presence of the past, which is why a year (1776, 2001) is rarely attached to the epigrammatic and sacralized event. In memory, as in history, in condensation, as in abbreviation, the health of the (psychological/social) body depends upon “some kind of memory trance,” some mode of suspended disbelief that would collapse outside the hermeneutically sealed spheres of memory and history. Thus, as a poem like “In a Fit of My Own Vividness” suggests, a “memory trance” cocoons the poet within the scene of the crime — “So much for a family market / reduced to the poverty line / by a freeway” (46) — even if “This discord enacts no measure,” another swerve from the actual which cannot be melded to an aesthetic. Yes, “There’s refuge in observation,” if “Just That” and nothing else since, as,

                                                                     … It turns out
Joseph’s Market is as free as the boy with one arm
kissing the tangerine my father gives him.
The entire place — upside down. Only money
and credit move around, part of the future. (61)

The actual is confined to place and time; not so “money and credit.” But what of language, one of the realms of the aesthetic? As it turns out, it too belongs to the actual: “You wait and see. That language doesn’t work / anymore, its century is over” (61). Note: Joseph leaves open the possibility of some other language that might be put to work inside history. The specific reference in the poem is to the language of industrialized or monetary capital and one of its foundations, the small proprietor. The shift to financial, that is, liquid, capital renders its older, more material, sibling marginal, if not irrelevant: “As for the economies on which my parents’ lives depended, / they won’t be found / in any book” (29). These lines, from “Why Not Say What Happens?” in Into It, echo the divide between memory and history, ground and figure, monetary and financial capital, and so forth. As we will see when we return to Into It, the same will be said of the normative language of transparency, the traditional lyric mode, even as the poems in that fourth book, infused with a lyrical impulse, represent some of Joseph’s most transparent and most opaque language.

Given that these essential revisions of lyric transparency and epic opacity may be found in the toolbox of both the civilized victors and barbaric losers of history, we find ourselves in the presence of that old saw: can the tools of the master dismantle his house? Can obfuscation and clarification, used so well by the economic, political, cultural and, not insignificantly, literary powers, be used with cunning by the artist who offers his work as social critique and enlightenment without the pretense to, or hope of, prophecy? The question is, obviously, rhetorical; it remains open to a future never absolutely determined in advance. Still, the issue arises for most poets at some moment in their careers and Joseph is no exception.

10

In his most recent collection, Into It, Joseph confronts this question with what appears to be, at first glance, a concession to transparency: “Why Not Say What Happens?”[41] While “A Sentimental Education,” from Before Our Eyes, faithfully reproduces, even as it condenses, the philosophical, if not empirical, flaws intrinsic to Flaubert’s, Rousseau’s and Sterne’s projects,[42] the new book’s “Why Not Say What Happens” explains both why the poet must say what happens and why he cannot. This poem begins within, so to speak, the endless sentences” of “Variations on Variations on a Theme,” in a mock-prophetic-epical mode:

Of icons. Of divination. Of Gods. Repetitions
without end. I have it in my notes,
a translation from the Latin, a commentary
on the Book of Revelation — “the greater
the concentration of power on earth,
the more truth is stripped of its power,
the holiest innocent, in eternity,
is ‘as though slain …’”
It has nothing to do with the apocalyptic.
The seven-headed beast from the sea,
the two-horned beast from the earth, have always —
I know, I’ve studied it — been with us.
Me? I’m only an accessory to particular images. (24)

Framed by the signs of original sin (“Of icons,” “particular images”), by the desire for knowledge, the poet, stripped of divine prophetic powers, only has access to an enfeebled scholarly apparatus (“a translation from the Latin, a commentary”), to “Repetitions / without end.” He is thus, de facto and de jure, an accessory before and after the fact of the crime. Still, this gnostic, however much a diminished knower, knows something: we were always ahead of ourselves. The future anterior of prophecy is thus rendered superfluous — “it doesn’t take much these days to be a prophet” — for monstrosities “have always — / I know, I’ve studied it — been with us.” The last days, the end times, are “now,” as is the past, which “has no existence / except in the present.” History, as we know it, is over — perhaps fulfilled, perhaps simply irrelevant. In either case the prophet is essentially unemployable. But what of “History For Another Time”? Humankind may have run its course but not existence, or “life,” for new worlds, new possibilities, already exist:

                                          … If the creation
of the universe happens outside time,
it must happen all the time, the big bang
here and now, the foundation of every instant …

Here, now, at the end of history, the temptation to interpret the apocalypse in fire-and-brimstone terms would erase the admittedly self-serving distinction between the lawful and lawless. Joseph insists, however, on the distinction, however self-serving:

                                                       Neither seriousness
nor laughter is much help, either. You need only
be approached by one of the beggars
in Pennsylvania Station to see that certain rules
prevail in our midst. Still, I,
for one, don’t condone cut-off ears … (61)

No prophet could — except as a form of judgment after one’s words fall on deaf ears. The hardened hearts of a stubborn people are themselves so many “cut-off ears,” severed from the many-headed, headlong plunge into greed, selfishness, murder, terror, etc. Thus, as foretold above, the withdrawal from the world is accomplished in Into It via two paths of retreat: “into” the play of aesthetics and “into” the trances of memory. These maneuvers can only be justified before the law by presenting a compelling case for withdrawing; hence, Into It is Joseph’s most prophetic and lyrical, “political” and “personal,” book of poems. And as we have already seen, and see again in “Why Not Say What Happens,” Exhibit A is the fate of Joseph’s Market:

My father? My father was a worker. I can still hear him
getting up in the morning to go to work.
Sadness, too, has to be learned,
and it took my father time to learn it,
but he did, though when he did
his tears were never chronic. (29)

Sandwiched in between police brutality, terrorist threats, 9/11, his grandmother’s death and the over-mortgaged house of mirrors that is capital (“a dream, it’s a dream, the dream / of a dream song, the dream of a dream”), this memory trance (“My father? My father,” “but he did … when he did”) serves as a bulwark against a world too much with, too much for, too much against, the poet. This world has many faces, none of which is perhaps more riveting than the one described in the extraordinary last section of “Why Not Say What Happens.” Here, the commodification of nature — the first mode of primitive accumulation — reaches a fever pitch in the monstrosity of the factory figured against a sunny backdrop blending memory, perception, and illusion:

I remember it — the gold burnt gold,
the gold on gold and on white and yellow,
an incandescence condensing the sunlight,
outburning the sunlight, the factory
molten, the sun behind it, in it, thin,
gold, pig iron, a spray of fire, flywheels
revolving through the floor, rims almost
reaching the roof, 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. (32)

Here the factory is not only one site among many where the abstraction of human labor finds its material form; the pitched swings of the flywheels conjure up some wild, insane, coupled dance always about to fly apart and reengage as the sweet science. Dancing or boxing with the actual, the poet remains engaged, implicated, a latter-day Ezekiel who realizes the vanity of both lyrical expressionism and political critique. The irrelevance of the aesthetic is analogous to the impotence of the prophetic. Yet, following Stevens, whose words serve as the epigraph to this book, the poet/lawyer, aesthete/prophet, chooses, is chosen, by the former. Hence the crowning irony, actuality’s crown of thorns: all that is actual melts into aesthetics. The revenge of the aesthete is that he finds beauty in the secular; the secular is adorned with precisely that for which it has no use:

                                                         The sky blue, dark blue
yet pure in color, not blackened
or tarnished, above the low, old
buildings, like a painting of something
solid rather than the solid thing itself,
a high and low composition. But what
light there is in that landscape … (32)

Aestheticized, the actual withers beneath the dismissive glare of this latter-day prophet: “A monk, say, of Hue, who, to protest / the killing of innocents, is dragging / an altar — yes, it was, Hillside Avenue. / So what else is new?” In the next stanza, part 2, the poet admits that “Two things, the two things that are interesting / are history and grammar.” One can manipulate the latter, not the former: “In among the foundations of the intelligence / the chemistries of words: ‘The fault lines / of risk concealed in a monetary landscape …’ / What of it?” (6) The world-weariness evident in these lines from “When One Is Feeling One’s Way” leads to the temptation to reduce history to the repetitions of the same:

                                                       Nothing but the same resistance
since the time of the Gracchis —
against the arrogation by private interests
of the common wealth,
against the precious and the 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). (6–7)

The endless tragedies that constitute history may well be worth bringing to light — even in the Ezekiel-Jesus-Marx rhetoric — but this negative service pales next to the nigh-pure light, the “endless sentences,” of the lyrical aesthetic which, at its most abstract, can paradoxically create its own positive, concrete, world. Thus the very next poem is the aforementioned “The Bronze-Green Gold-Green Foreground” and it begins as homage to a unique aesthetics:

The bronze-green gold-green foreground:
what can only be said in that language,
opaque, though clear, transparent language. (9)

The refuge of this singular image which both occults and reveals becomes, traditionally, a kind of Grecian urn, gesturing toward a beyond, an outside of history, as the very next poem, “I Note In A Notebook,” suggests. Here, repetition is a comfort:

Pink sunlight, blue sky, snowed-upon January morning.
The romantic restated — a woman and a man
by themselves, each alone in the other. Those
transcriptions of the inexpressible — perhaps
the experience of having heaven
is just simply perfect luck … (10)

As a great epic-prophet poet like Wordsworth knew, the “romantic restated” must be foregrounded against a world too much with the two.[43] Tragedy depends on the sublime, puny human desire up against, and outmatched by, forces (historical, natural, divine, etc.) scarcely conceivable. Thus, the very next words in the poem tiptoe outwardly, tentatively, to encompass other possible modes of the “romantic restated.” One may access the romantic alone, insolated, like “ice floes” on Belle Isle on the Detroit River or, as one, “a figure in motion, / muted reds and grays” in Angel Park. But in stepping outside the lyrical cocoon of “a woman and a man / by themselves,” the poet cannot prevent his perceptions and memories of the world from rushing headlong toward the epical. Thus, once again, memories of his father, of the Twin Towers, flood the romantic island. But the contamination of the romantic by the political defines epic, if not prophecy (the holy is contaminated by sin). Thus the poem ends with a heroic gesture toward this tainted romance, toward epic, suggesting that like the dialectic of opaqueness and transparency, the two may interpenetrate in the secular realm. The “perfect luck” of “having heaven” notwithstanding, this is not the one-way possession of the narrator by a roaring God:

                                                                     An epical
turn, so great a turn — her voice in him,
his voice in her — the vista, a city,
the city, taking a shape and burning … (11)

The complement of the other’s voice in one is an instance of the lyrical impulse understood as communication between humans. It is neither the monologue of self-expression (the traditional lyric) nor the monologue of an inspired prophet (the traditional epic). However, since the “vista,” the background, is, in the epic-tragic mode, always “a city,” indeed, “the city,” one may imagine New York City in 2001, Detroit in 1967, Rome at the end of the empire, or, in more literary terms, the Los Angeles of Day of the Locust. Tod’s painting of the burning city of Los Angeles appears prophetic when the city burns at the end of West’s novel. Here, Joseph’s sparse rendition of 9/11 is equally stirring if only elegiac (because belated). The endless return of “Nothing but the same” in both the secular and aesthetic worlds? Exactly halfway through Into It, the poem “In A Mood” concludes with another, or the “same,” apocalyptic gesture: “A man and a woman beside the river … / A line consisting of the burning sky, // a sky on fire … the sky is on fire! / Then what, and then what, unfolded …” (34)

A mere “man and a woman,” their lyric potentialities, can never appease entirely the poet who was born with a God roaring inside him. That internal(ized) law cannot be satisfied by the throes of romantic love. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Joseph must still, this late in the game (which indeed has changed), defend the very possibility of poetry under the “endless sentences” of wartime:

              And, yes, it brings to mind I am constantly aware of,
in making the poem, Brecht’s point, to write about trees —
implicitly too, to write about pleasure —
in times of killing like these is a crime;
and Paul Celan’s response, that for Brecht a leaf
is a leaf without a tree, that what kinds of times
are these when a conversation — Celan believed a poem
is a conversation — what kinds of times are these
when a poem is a crime because it includes
what must be made explicit. (12)

At the end, in the last days, all is, or should be, revealed. The poet-prophet is responsible for making sure that the sinful, the defilers, the bosses, murderers, and muckrakers, have a last chance for salvation. But here, at least, the prophet has vanished, replaced by a conversationalist, a lyric poet for whom the lyrical impulse is not self-expression but dialogue. Still, as we have seen, the promise and hope of conversing with “those” others, instilled in these lines from “Inclined To Speak,” a title that itself marks the exact middle between compulsion and choice (inclined to kneel in prayer or arch his back, the better to bellow?), are immediately undercut as the poet admits to his failings as a prophet, as even a conversationalist, or admits to our failings as hearers, as though we too walked around without ears:

                                                                                      The immense enlargement
of our perspective is confronted
by a reduction in our powers of action, which reduces
a voice to an inner voice inclined to speak only
to those closest to us. (12)

Here, the circle seems complete; the curse of knowledge, as the gods tried to tell us at the beginning of history, is that it is the knowledge of all we cannot — or will not — convey or do. From the “voice” of a roaring God to the “inner voice” of lyrical outrage, lyrical resignation, this Joseph is perhaps not worthy even of Joseph Joseph whose name, while bearing the stamp of repetition as the principle punishment of hell, also bears the insignia of God, the great “I Am Who I Am.” Like Lucifer, like Satan, like Beelzebub, Lawrence is singularity fallen into temporality, a first and last name: Lawrence Joseph. As for “those closest to us” — are these other poets (the literary references escalate in Into It), other artists — including his partner, a painter — and other friends? The lyrical turn will not be the last turn — we are only at the beginning of this book — but it does augur a tendency throughout Into It, a predilection toward, for, the personal, the aesthetic, a turn of the heart, if not the head, away from the world and toward those “closest to us.”

In Into It, then, the need to be “explicit” seems to have less to do with prophetic/political responsibility than with the desire to make the case: turning away is justified by both the horrors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the “same” horrors that comprise history, and the irrelevance and impotence of the epical-prophetic voice. Moreover, the facticity of the event which hits too close to home, which has not been temporalized, spatialized, “enough,” resists its historicization and thus, by association, if not implication, its aestheticization: “What isn’t separated, what isn’t / scribbled, what will not be metamorphosed, // reduced, occurring, it will be said, / unyieldingly fixed, unyieldingly present” (37). Call it the revenge of the actual. Under these circumstances the law of the lyric and the law of the epic appear inadequate to the task of rendering what resists representation. Under these circumstances, then, senility — “The past / rearranged by hardening arteries” — or catatonia — “some kind of memory trance” — may be two examples of that “perfect luck” of “having heaven.” To be wounded by history is not the same thing as knowing — or here, not knowing — that one has been wounded by history. This “heaven,” a diminished paradise, can be reached by the “perfect luck” of senility or the catatonia of a “memory trance.” By making explicit the tenor of these end times, the epical prophet fulfills his duties, his responsibilities (“But, don’t forget, there’s evil. / Do you think a muse // will avoid evil? One’s imagination / polluted, one’s imagination unhinged?”) (47), freeing the lyrical poet (“The world once more / the means by which the meek are to be // brought to their knees. Not the poet / espousing simplicities, shifting the props.”) (52). He can turn back, retrace his steps back over the mountain, even though he can never return to Egypt. But in turning back, in retreating to the desert, the poet disappears and the prophet returns. In the desert, life thrives, teems, however discredited. “There,” the prophet can make, or find, oases, even as, and because, he implements his own spartan, if hardly draconian, laws:

When this time comes to an end, what I don’t write
will not exist. I did my work, lived

as if the day, my own day, had come. I was, I am,
who I will be. I will not be eternally condemned. (52)

11

In the last poem of Into It, “Once Again,” we find ourselves in a proto-Stevens poem, human beings beneath a sky emptied of the divine. This poem accepts, as it repeat, our inescapable destiny: to make new myths — “endless sentences” — to replace the old ones. “Once Again” we finds ourselves borne forward on the “current” of a “sky,” as if we had no other choice but to give in to our fate, to our faith, for what always remains “before our eyes” is precisely what remains out of sight: “The sea is beyond // the sunset’s light —” Earlier, in our discussion of the poem “Why Not Say What Happens,” we noted that the conflicted lawyer/poet/prophet discovers in language the site where the secular, aesthetic and sacred intersect. There we cited the phrase “endless sentences” as one of those intersections. Faith would be another word necessary to the myths of all three realms. Still, there are “sites” where the conflicts among the three systems remain unabated. For example, the strophes of verse resist, however futile, “Fate’s precisive wheel revolving, / force’s writhing wheel” (66). Moreover, in opposition to the obfuscating repetitions of the secular (“Capital? Careful! Capital capitalizes”) (30) or the transparent fantasy of personal salvation (“The final words of the book are being written — / have I made it? — light and sorrow and dream”) (50) that underlies religious fanaticism, the poem,

… is the dream, a dream technique;

the primary soul-substance
on which our attention is fixed —

supernal, metaphysical — in other words,
a representation,

as we have seen,
of mythical origins. (66)

The inadequacy of the aesthetic to represent the actual is compensated for by its dovetailing with the “supernal, metaphysical — in other words” those “endless sentences.” For secular law, as much as aesthetic law, rests, finally, on metaphysical foundations, on faith, on assumptions which are given to us in advance. The inadequacy of the aesthetic — whether we mean its limited abilities to influence or to represent — is only an instance of the inadequacies of the secular and sacred. There was never any secular justice for the burning of Joseph’s Food Market. Even if there had been a trial of the perpetrators, no legal brief could adequately “represent” the labor that went into the building up of Joseph’s Food Market (hence the “compensation” of money for “pain and injury”). Likewise, no prophet could adequately represent the outrage of a roaring God. And indeed, insofar as God apparently needs representatives, the divine itself cannot avoid the inadequacies of mediation (a son, a prophet, etc.) of language.

We are left then with “a woman, a man, / love’s characters, the myth // their own” (67). We repeat the story of love despite, because of, all its foibles. It is, for better or worse, our story. In this narrative, we are “characters” pitting our wills against fate, and as with any good detective or mystery or romance, we know the outcome. The pleasure we derive from living out this story is precisely in the living out. In this story, repeated ad infinitum, we use words, use dialogue, to propel the narrative forward even as we know all too well the inadequacy of language to represent our thoughts and feelings, our dreams and fears. In this story every other narrative — including those collected in books — serves as potential, if inadequate, mirrors of who and what we imagine — in the strongest sense of the word — ourselves to be. And though the Book is often an emblem of a law we swear by, we know that “love” is finally one of our ineffable dreams:

We place our hands

on the silence
and, once again, repeat the vow.

 

---

 

1. Though she does not reduce the debates about the function of poetry during the 1980s to infighting over familial law, Lisa Steinman is concerned with the underlying ontological and epistemological strata that link poetics often defined in opposition to one another. See her article “‘Telling the Time’: Narrative and Lyric in the Poetry of Lawrence Joseph.” More generally and specifically, my ideas regarding the persistent lyrical impulse in contemporary American poetry owe a great deal to my reading and my understanding (not his, so he is absolved of responsibility) of Norman Finkelstein’s two books on the lyric tradition and the utopian gesture of that poetry. See his Lyrical Interference and The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry.

2. Finkelstein, Lyrical Interference: Essays on Poetics (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2003), 140.

3. It is precisely the constraints of habit that led to the deployment of chance and procedural poetics in poets like Jackson Mac Low, Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, et al.

4. I am thinking of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s two most famous “Standard English” poems, “Sympathy” and “We Wear the Mask.” While the latter is generally read as referring to the price African Americans pay to enter a predominantly white public sphere, I read both poems as also referring to Dunbar’s frustrations that only the “lowly lyrics” of his black dialect poems were well received during his lifetime. Dunbar aspired to poetic greatness which he conflated with writing in standard English.

5. Below I note that the prophetic is not, strictly speaking, a literary genre; it belongs to theology. In acknowledging this division I concede to the historical secularization of poetry in the West. As my argument will make apparent, poets have not always conceded this division, however institutionalized it may be.

6. Of course, ruled-based or chance poetics are explicitly constrained; they are clearly driven by laws of composition (even if the law is that there are no laws). Because they represent the only mode of poetics potentially absent of any lyrical content these modes have often been deemed — by both detractors and proponents — as an “anti” or “non”-poetics or poetry. This suggests that the lyric is considered a necessary, if not sufficient, component or attribute of poetics and poetry per se.

7. A cursory reading of the writers assembled under the manifesto In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1986) shows how motivated so many of the pieces are. This is an effect of not only habit — we have had almost a quarter of a century to learn how to read this anthology — but also of the interminable nature of the Language writing project itself. Olson wrote that he was after “the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.” That participle indicates that Olson was aware of the ongoing nature of his project which he dubbed objectism.

8. See Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006), and Carl Phillips, In the Blood (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992). Justifiably or not, almost all the articles in the original 2009 University of Cincinnati Law Review symposium that are concerned with an overview of Lawrence Joseph’s four books of poetry (some include a fifth, the selected, in their analyses) generally see a movement from the personal and local to the social and historical over the course of his career as a poet.

9. Norman Finkelstein argues for a generalized religious — not just spiritual — turn in twentieth-century poetics and poetry in his recent study On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010). None of the poets I cite are part of his study which focuses, in part, more narrowly on what we might call the “Duncan line” insofar as it includes Spicer, Palmer, and Mackey, among others. Roger Gilbert also discusses the “turn” to religion as it manifests itself as the term “angel” featured in the titles of a plethora of books of poetry (he lists nearly twenty). Gilbert considers this phenomenon as less an indication of a return to traditional religion than a generalized elegy for the demise of spiritual transcendence. In these poets’ titles and poems, angels seem to mediate between “lyricism and dissonance, tradition and its subversion.” See his “Awash in Angels: The Religious Turn in Nineties Poetry,” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 239–269.

10. Finkelstein makes this point in both Lyrical Interference and The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1988).

11. As the term identity politics suggests, to focus on one’s “accidental” attributes within aesthetic forms is perforce to “contaminate” the aesthetic with the political, for the aesthetic is presumed to be concerned with the “essential” attributes of human existence. Though New Criticism is often cited as the primary source of this line of thinking, it, in fact, can be traced back to the very origins of the Enlightenment.

12. Richard Hugo’s influential book The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992) can stand in here as an exemplary argument, within the lyric tradition, of the immanent and transcendental resources associated with the poetry of place.

13. Andrew Krivak labels this prophetic tradition “Catholic,” by which he means a visionary poet with a “necessary kinship to the social and the contemplative poets.” Since so many non-Catholic, to say nothing of non-Christian and non-religious, poets in the visionary or “contemplative” tradition are also concerned with the “social,” Krivak’s reductionism seems to be merely a form of imperial annexation even if, in the case of Joseph, it is valid. See Krivak’s “The Language of Redemption,” Commonweal 130, no. 9 (2003): 12–16.

14. For Norman Finkelstein, Joseph’s narrator(s) is a latter-day flaneur, a Baudelairean consciousness roaming among the urban crowd to which he longs to be connected but for which he has utter contempt. See Finkelstein’s “Ground Zero Baudelaire” elsewhere in this symposium on Joseph.

15. Nonetheless, Lebanon, especially its civil wars, also figures prominently as a motif in Joseph’s oeuvre. Frank Rashid emphasizes Joseph’s wider geopolitical and historical context in his article “Transparent Eye, Voice Howling Within: Codes of Violence in Lawrence Joseph’s Poetry,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1611–20. Rashid also emphasizes that the themes in Shouting at No One surface repeatedly throughout Joseph’s work, implicitly rejecting any “developmental” model for understanding the four books of poetry.

16. See Finkelstein, The Utopian Moment, 24.

17. This atemporal, “eternal” locus of this poem appears on an unpaginated page prior to part 1 of the book; pagination, enumeration, is another index of the fall into time. Joseph, Shouting at No One (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983).

18. Joseph, Before Our Eyes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 42.

19. Joseph, Curriculum Vitae (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 7.

20. This is, of course, the classic dilemma and background plot of Oedipus.

21. In Into It (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), Joseph asks, rhetorically, in “Woodward Avenue,” a poem that refers to the main thoroughfare dividing east and west Detroit, “Am I not correct in saying that for purposes / of insurance there was considerable dispute / as to whether it was a war, a riot,/ or an insurrection?” (16).

22. Eric Selinger suggests that the slow breathing of the father, contrasted with the angels’ breath in “I Was Appointed the Poet of Heaven,” is another sign of the poet’s demotion to the fallen world. As far as I know, Selinger is the only critic of Shouting at No One that gives this poem the careful, meticulous reading it deserves. See his essay “Several Kinds of Chronicler, He’s Been: The Books and Selves of Lawrence Joseph.”

23. See Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), and Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (Chicago: Dalkey Archive, 1967).

24. Hence Stephen Dedalus’s idealized concept, per Aquinas, of the aesthetic as “certainly a stasis and not a kinesis.” As we recall, Stephen goes on to define an evolutionary concept of the aesthetic, per Aristotle, that depends on the gradual extinction of the artist’s “personality” and its regeneration in “characters. Thus the dramatic form is the highest or final form toward which the literary arts aspire. As for the “epical” (the exact form of the word Joseph employs), it is the nodal point between the lyrical and dramatic. To the extent Joseph’s poetry is filled with multiple voices, especially in Into it, one could make a case that his work in general becomes less and less “autobiographical” with each book. I argue differently; for me each book evokes the lyrical, the epical and what I deem as the prophetic. I neither affirm nor deny the argument that the later work teems with “other” voices. See James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1976), 207–15.

25. See Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969).

26. At the end of Into It, in the poem “Once Again,” a title that, like the “secret,” can be read in at least two different ways, with two different registers, neither of excludes the other, the poet appears to choose the silence of human love over the living speech of divine prophecy.

27. How to live as a Catholic under a predominantly Protestant society is a motif in Joseph’s poetry we cannot pursue here; suffice it to say that the prophetic epical alter ego is largely if not entirely Catholic in orientation and content.

28. There is, however, at least one notable exception in Stevens: “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea …” This qualification from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1982, 380–408) determines the necessity of the transience of all reality, including language, Hence poems must be constantly written, constantly reread, to reach, “For a moment,” that “first idea.” This is quite different from Joseph’s “For the time being,” written under the pressures of an apparent endless parade of human disasters, foibles, and calamities. In brief, Stevens’s supreme fiction displaces the myth of divinity as the final cause or end of human triumphs and failures; in “Two or Three Ideas,” from Opus Posthumous (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1982), he writes, “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences” (206). Joseph’s desire to focus on just what’s “before our eyes” is a form of responsibility to human existence but also, as I argue later, a form of case-building to justify the lyrical turning away from larger social and political realities even if the transitory per se outrages the prophetic/epical id, always looking back toward the past, toward the pre-birth amniotic warmth of the womb, the pre-conception eternity of paradise.

29. That is, sometimes the alter egos and sometimes the ego is the figure of sacred prophecy, and so on. Truth to tell, however, it is rarely the ego since this is the social self constructed to facilitate one’s public offices. Unlike, say, Denmark where it is possible to be “employed” as an artist by the state, that possibility rarely (there are the “temporary” employment opportunities of NEH, NEA and other federal, as well as some private, grants) holds in the United States.

30. This Aristotelian term is used by Stephen Dedalus during his discussion of aesthetics in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (see note 17). Joseph himself has used this term to describe his own ars poetica.

31. A number of commentators have noted the motif of the double in Joseph’s poetry. See, for example, Fred Muratori’s review of the selected Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), in American Book Review (“Self and the City,” September–October 2006, 16–17, and Michael Stanford, “The Cyclopean Eye, The Courtly Game, Admissions Against Interest: Five Modern American Lawyer Poets,” 38, Legal Studies Forum. Michael Stanford, “The Cyclopean Eye, the Courtly Game, Admissions Against Interest: Five Modern American Lawyer Poets,” Legal Studies Forum 30, no. 1/2 (2006): 9–45.Eric Selinger also discusses the double in his article cited above.

32. The poet is poised, then, “between” the Imaginary and Symbolic Orders, precisely the “field” of play. Thus, from a Lacanian perspective, the poem gestures toward the amniotic even as it, from a Freudian perspective, aspires “to myth” (Selinger, “Several Kinds of Chronicler, He’s Been”), to an order either pre-birth (as we see, for example, in Wordsworth) or after life: post-postlapsarian. Selinger’s emphasis on the preposition reminds us, as I argue throughout the article, that reunion with, or achievement as, myth is, by definition, impossible. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).

33. See Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” Remain in Light (Warner Brothers, 1980).

34. Nathanael West was among the first literary artists to realize that the philosophies and values associated with the traditional humanities would resurface, however abbreviated, in the modes of popular culture, rendering the literary prophet — and West, for all his cynicism, can be read as a prophet — superfluous. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions, 1962).

35. Is it mere coincidence that the Lacanian reconceptualization of the Freudian fort/da as objet petit a occurs in lines about an infirmed infant, one not “blind” but simply unable (unwilling?) to open its eyes? This poem alone deserves an essay. For now we will just affirm Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, to say nothing of Dickinson, Stevens, H.D., Duncan, Howe (Susan), Mackey, and a host of others: the playing with language is an index of the fact that the play of language resists the intelligence almost. A fixed, rigorous language, what hovers beyond the grasp of every Tower of Babel and Twin Towers, every spire and minaret, like “pure light,” is, as Joseph himself makes explicit, “the unattainable.”

36. Stevens himself makes this point in his essay on the poet, poetry and social responsibility, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1965). Joseph buttresses Stevens’s argument throughout Into It; see, for example, the opening of ”Inclined To Speak” where Celan’s retort to Brecht is generalized as every post-Holocaust poet’s response to Adorno’s severe injunction regarding poetry in an age of systematic terror.

37. As we will see below, this swerve “away” from the “actual” will demand a hearing before the law. Thus the focus of many of the poems in Into It will indeed constitute a confrontation with, a putting on trial of, the “actual.”

38. The analysand who is supposed to know arrives at self-knowledge by way of a detour through the other, the analyst. Outside the psychoanalytic space (an office) and time (an hour) the others are, for the artist, other artists, other “significant others,” however delayed their arrival at the scene of the crime and instruction.

39. What is terrorism and military adventurism but the deliberate occultation of “divine” purpose, divine “right”? God promised futility to His messengers; He would harden the hearts of the backsliding Israelites to prophecy. So too the architects of state-sponsored and tribalized slaughter; the lines in the sand will be drawn in blood.

40. See Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter,” in Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Washington Square Books/Simon & Schuster, 1983).

41. As Eric Selinger pointed out in his commentary on a draft of this essay, the poem is a revision of Robert Lowell’s poem “Epilogue” which contains the line “Why not say what happened?” Selinger notes that the present tense of Joseph’s title suggests that memory, as the underpinning of post-Romantic lyric, won’t be the crucial term here. According to Selinger, “What happened can be clarified by memory, turned into representational art; what happens is messier, has more vocabularies and systems at work at any given moment” (note to the author). Since the Lowell poem concerns the problem of fidelity of perspective and concerns, in part, the painter Vermeer, it is not surprising that Joseph, whose wife is a painter and whose book Into It is full of “painterly” images, revises Lowell to suit his purposes.

42. I take “A Sentimental Education” as a reworking of the nineteenth century’s concern with the risks of formal “learning” as evinced in Flaubert’s and Rousseau’s projects (A Sentimental Education and Emile; Or Treatise on Education) in relation to both the eighteenth century’s concern with this issue (Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey) and, a century earlier, Milton’s “forensics” poems, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” which debate the two forms of heroism available to men: military distinction or excellence in letters and arts. An Enlightenment value, sentiment, like sympathy, is conceived of as one of the essential attributes of “human nature” even though both, like “book learning,” must be cultivated. The implicit tension at the heart of the terms — an essence subject to the accidents of cultivation — can be seen in the major literary texts that debate, as it were, the value of the literary “text”: from Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare to Sidney, Pope, and Blake. Of course, this “debate” is one of the central issues at the heart of the high modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. See Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; Or Treatise on Education (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), ed. Graham Petrie (New York: Penguin, 1768); John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Odyssey Press/Bobbs-Merrill, 1957).

43. As the stakes rise in the social, cultural and political conflicts that beset the world, the romantic image, the singular detail, offers respite. From the perspective of the world, this kind of response can seem trite, if not irresponsible. Thus David Yezzi’s review of Before Our Eyes is entitled “A Morality of Seeing,” taken from the book’s eponymous poem, and it sets the tone of his piece. Generalizing from this single line in a single poem, Yezzi praises Joseph’s social conscience as enacted in most of the poems in the book; his only complaint is precisely when Joseph offers “pure” romantic images and details, so much “uncut sugar” after the poet’s castigating “salt.” Yezzi misses the import of the last lines of “Before Our Eyes”: “For the time being/ let’s just keep to what’s before our eyes.” The “sugar” isn’t, as much as the poet might desire it to be so, “uncut.” The romance, no more than the epical, cannot be read, because it does not appear, in isolation in Joseph’s work. Those brief moments of apparent bliss or respite, of “uncut sugar,” are just that, moments. Even though Yezzi, like some other critics, reads “Our Eyes” as indicative of the poet’s broadening perspective in his third book, that “Our” is always in dialectic with the poet’s “my.” In this regard, the difference between the first two books and this third book is Joseph’s insistence here that others adopt his strategies of silence and cunning (if not exile). The lines right before the ones quoted above read, “The soft, subtle twilight / only the bearer feels, broken into angles, / best kept to oneself.” That “oneself” mediates “our” and “my”; it is both the other and the self. See Yezzi, “The Morality of Seeing,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 19, no. 2 (1994): 83–90.

Here is one version of Lawrence Joseph, an excerpt from the profile that appears on the St. John’s University School of Law website:

Joseph was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1948. His grandparents were Lebanese and Syrian Catholics, among the first Arab emigrants to Detroit. He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa with High Honors in English Language and Literature in 1970, and received first prize in the major Hopwood Award for Poetry; Cambridge University, where he received both Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees with First Honors in English Language and Literature, in 1972 and 1976 respectively; and the University of Michigan Law School, where he received a JD in 1975. He then served as law clerk to Justice G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1981, he was a member of the School of Law faculty at the University of Detroit. In 1981, he moved to New York City, where he was associated with the firm of Shearman & Sterling. At Shearman & Sterling, his practice included securities, bankruptcy, anti-trust, mergers and acquisitions, products liability, and real estate litigation. Joseph has published and has lectured extensively in areas of labor, employment, tort and compensation law, jurisprudence, law and literature, and legal theory. He has served as Consultant on Tort and Compensation Law for the Michigan State Senate’s Commission on Courts, and as Consultant for the Governor of Michigan’s Commission on Workers’ Compensation, Occupational Disease and Employment, and has received a grant from the Employment Standards Division of the United States Department of Labor to write on workers’ compensation.

And here is another biographical description of Lawrence Joseph, from the Academy of American Poets website:

Joseph was born in 1948 in Detroit, Michigan, and received his BA and JD from the University of Michigan. He also earned a BA and MA in English from Cambridge University. He is the author of the books of poems Into It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), Before Our Eyes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), Curriculum Vitae (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), and Shouting at No One (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He is also the author of Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), a book of prose. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships.

It’s not that we have portraits of two different men born in the same midwestern city in the same year. And admittedly I have taken excerpts from the two biographical sketches, although I have not misrepresented the relative longwindedness of the law school biographical sketch (four long paragraphs compared with the Academy of American Poets’ one brief paragraph). Yet although the first description does go on to mention the poetry books and prizes, while the second ends noting that Joseph teaches law, there are salient differences. Most obviously, St. John’s University is interested in letting its audience know which areas of law Joseph covers and touting his expertise and experience as a lawyer, while the Academy of American Poets is sending its readers to the literary Joseph, with less vested interest in promoting him as one of the Academy’s selling points. To use the vocabulary of literary critics, the story is the same (that is, the person, settings, and happenings) but the plots — the order in which the story is told or narrated, the representations of the story or, more simply, the narratives as well as the narrative discourse or the story-as-told — differ.

The literary vocabulary above is not uncontested, I would add, and almost all critics admit that to propose stories just exist in some way “out there” while stories-as-told are each constructed differently raises ontological, even metaphysical, problems. Even given the obviously different rhetorical ends for which the biographical notes with which I began were crafted, that is, leaving aside the question of audience, to assume the biographies tell the same story differently still raises the question of whether the “real” Lawrence Joseph is a transplanted midwestern American of Lebanese-Syrian descent who has done well both in his career (focused on labor, employment, tort and compensation law, jurisprudence, and legal theory) and in his literary avocation. Or is he a poet who — like most poets — has a day job? Or is there some other way of talking about the self that would, on one hand, allow for the fluidity of our and others’ construction of our selves without, on the other hand, denying that the stories, the facts, the dots we connect in order to construct narratives, do exist, often stubbornly and despite us as (to quote Wallace Stevens) “the gray particular[s] of [our] life”?[1] While literary critics usually find most interesting what we come to know by looking at narrative discourses (what the speaker foregrounds or elides, the tacit implications of tropes or diction) rather than the ontological status of the stories behind narrated variants, the issues raised by narrative discourse are nonetheless ontological as well as epistemological; the very word “narrative” comes from the Latin gnārus (“knowing,” “expert,” “skillful”) and narrō (“relate,” “tell”) from the Sanskrit root gnâ (“know”), as Hayden White points out.[2] In short, narratives always, if sometimes unwittingly, call into question both what we know and how we know it.

I dwell on the kinds of questions raised by the very mention of the word “narrative” in literary critical circles because ontological and epistemological questions inform Joseph’s poetry from the start, even as the poems become increasingly self-conscious about the ways in which the self exists precisely in narrative discourse (what Joseph later calls “the increasingly complicated ‘poetic space’ between ‘subject’ and ‘object’”[3]) or the ways the self negotiates the stories of which it is part.[4] Which pressures (personal, professional, poetic, and historical) form Joseph’s story, inform his questions, and shape the language in which he explores questions are what interest me here. Or, more precisely, the complexity of “the pressure of reality” (another Stevensian phrase) is what interests me, and — as I hope to indicate — what seems to be part of what interests Joseph in his poems, as well.[5]

Surely shifts in legal theory inform Joseph’s developing poetics. However, despite the fact that this essay originally appeared in a law review, I am not here concerned with comparing literary and legal theories of narrative, even if it is worth noting that Joseph himself offered just such a comparison in his 1993 essay “Theories of Poetry, Theories of Law.”[6] Still, what I want to discuss here is how the ways in which people were able to talk about “what is” shifted over the course of Joseph’s literary career to date. In particular, it is significant that Joseph’s first two books — Shouting at No One (1983) and Curriculum Vitae (1988) — appeared in the 1980s, when in the world of American poetry at least three theories about poetry’s task and about poetic language competed for poets’ attention. In other words, not only would Joseph’s professional c.v. have been different in 1983 and 1988 — the poems that appear in his first volume were written while Joseph was in law school and first entering the legal profession, while the poems in his second volume were largely written after he moved to New York City, first as a practicing lawyer and then as a teacher of law — but expectations about how poetry should sound and what it might hope to accomplish were at the time in flux and in contention.[7] This would have been especially obvious to someone whose poetry was first published, as Joseph’s was, by the University of Pittsburgh Press, known in the 1980s for its championing of lyric poetry and especially of so-called poetries of witness, or testimonial poetry, which is to say poetry grounded in or representing the gritty experience of the less privileged, responding to calls heard more broadly in the academy as well as in poetry circles for previously underrepresented voices to be published, anthologized, and taught. Certainly to write the kind of poems Joseph wrote in the 1980s was to take a certain position on how poetic language should work as well as on what it should talk about.

Some background, then, on the literary battles of the late 1970s and the 1980s is useful here, before looking more closely at the work in Shouting at No One and Curriculum Vitae. There was in the period what many (some with praise and some with dismay) called a “mainstream” lyric style, sometimes called the style of the “scenic” lyric, meaning descriptive poems that become occasions for crafting intense, emotionally charged scenes or that aim at the effect of intensity.[8] Richard Wilbur’s “Poetry and Happiness,” for example, remarks on poetry’s origin in the need for “deliberate human meaning,” and sees in poetry “a longing to possess the whole world, and … to feel it,” “to produce models of inclusive reaction,” and, at the same time, to offer a “discovery and projection of the self,” linking all of these impulses centrally to description and further linking descriptive power to a quest for “conversancy or congruence between self and world.”[9] Wilbur goes on to address that which he thinks poetry arises from and nourishes in its readers, namely “a vital sense of community” and a “model of felt experience.”[10] Between the mid-sixties and the mid-to-late eighties, Wilbur’s poetics (like the style of many of his poems, also closely allied with the scenic lyric) would hardly have surprised readers attuned to expressive theories of poetry in confessional verse, American versions of surrealism, or so-called deep image poetry, represented variously, along with Wilbur’s ideas about poetry, in Donald Hall’s anthology of essays on poetics, entitled Claims for Poetry, by writers such as Sandra Gilbert, Richard Hugo, W. S. Merwin, and Charles Simic.

On the other hand, Ron Silliman’s seminal piece “The New Sentence” — despite that fact that a shortened version of the 1979 essay is included in Hall’s collection and despite Silliman’s genealogical claims, looking back to the writings of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein among others — sounded new in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At first blush, “The New Sentence” seems simply to dismiss Wilbur’s poetics, questioning the idea of selves, of reference, and of ordinary procedures for constructing human meaning, arguing for the “limiting of syllogistic movement [and for writing that] keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below”; Silliman thus promotes the ways in which what is now called Language poetry resists — even as it calls attention to — more typical or less self-conscious forms of reading that involve “linguistic integration.”[11] Yet Silliman also insists on the ways the poetry he admires can “suggest the internal [i.e., syntactical] presence of once exteriorized poetic forms” and “incorporate [while defamiliarizing; Silliman might add rematerializing by recontextualizing] “ordinary sentences of the material world.”[12] There are also implicit truth claims made about Language poetry’s representational power, however stylistically unconventional; of Stein’s “Custard,” for example, Silliman writes: “The portrait of custard is marvelously accurate.”[13] This is in part a joke, since custard is a perfect emblem of instability, despite Silliman’s skepticism about language as stable or referential.  It is also in part an act of defamiliarization, since the literary style of Stein’s portraits is not what we think of as representational. Yet the claim to “accuracy” remains. Finally, too, Silliman’s essay focuses on “the collective work and interinfluence” of his poetic community’s endeavor, which, he implies, thus connects writers with one another, while the community’s “new sentences” are meant to refashion readers’ awareness not so much of the languages of the everyday world but of how reading normally moves from language (or away from language) to integrative meaning.[14]

The above précis flatten Wilbur’s and Silliman’s poetics in some ways while, I hope, still making clear that Wilbur and Silliman have quite different responses to “integration” or “congruence” or “feeling” in or as the goal of poetry. Most distinctively, perhaps, in opposition to Wilbur’s emphasis on feeling (or “felt experience”), Silliman replaces the rhetoric of feeling or emotion with that of “ambiguity and polysemy,” features of language, or of the interaction of language and reader, not of individual subjective states.[15] At the same time, both Wilbur and Silliman focus on the tendency to move toward integration or meaning, especially while reading or writing poetry, even if the former wants to celebrate and the latter to resist this tendency. Further, although Wilbur proposes a range of projects for poetry (from praise of the outside world to self-discovery) and Silliman focuses how language is processed by readers, a more overtly interactive image of the relationship between worlds and selves, both see the border between worlds and selves as poetry’s territory (even if speaking of “world” and “self” introduces a vocabulary Silliman’s early writings eschew). Indeed, Silliman’s “world” — that with which poetry connects a reader — is first linguistic, not that toward which language might be understood to gesture. Nor is Silliman’s “self” Wilbur’s, but closer to what Jed Rasula — also associated with Language poetry — describes when he writes that “subjectivity is simply the most acutely engineered of … our technologies.”[16] Still, even Rasula’s use of the personal pronoun (“our”) and his assumptions about the political work done by Language poetry, as that which unmasks the internalized operations of late capitalism, make claims about how agency and truth-telling are central to poetry, claims — unlike the poetic style promoted by Silliman and Rasula — with which Wilbur would not wholly disagree.

There were other positions about what good poetry should do and sound like staked out in the eighties, schools that saw themselves opposed to both Language poetry and to at least some scenic lyric. For my purposes here, the most interesting was the short-lived (or at least short-lived theorization of the) school of so-called New Narrative poetry, related to New Formalist poetry, and featured in Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell’s journal The Reaper (published from 1981 to 1989), which resisted what was seen as the “navel-gazing” of free verse scenic lyrics and promoted images used in service of what Jarman at the time thought of as more accessible or populist poetry, poetry that could memorably tell stories (by which Jarman and his coeditors meant that poems could and should capture their readers’ attention by paying more attention to characters and story than to narration).[17] The exchanges between proponents of these different schools tended to be acrimonious. Still, looking at the ways in which Jarman, Wilbur, and Silliman or Rasula locate poetic power actually underlines how their claims are not only that poetry concerns “what is” (aiming at some form of “accuracy” or truth telling) but also that “what is” finally involves the meeting of what might be called an agent with a world (social, linguistic, or material), a meeting arrived at — or described — in terms of feeling or seeing, even if seeing, in Silliman’s case, is most often related to seeing through the usual ways in which we represent inner and outer worlds.

So what has the above to do with the poetry of Lawrence Joseph? I began with two portraits of Joseph in order to talk about literary definitions of story and narrative, as well as to discuss how these definitions raise ontological and epistemological questions. I then turned to a different genre, poetry rather than biographical sketches. I noted, first, that rhetorical style in poetry comes with its own entailments insofar as poets and poetry readers explicitly attribute different kinds of significance to different poetic styles. While I also argued that there was some perhaps surprising agreement among poets about the ends of poetry, it is also almost certainly true that most of those on whose essays I have drawn would not accept my sense that they agree with one another. And they certainly did not in the 1980s agree on how poetry should work or sound, even if they all assume that poetry is a site for negotiating between individual selves (however the self is defined) and some outside world (however that world is defined). In short, I proposed that there seems to have been agreement about what poetry is for, namely to negotiate — or model the negotiation — between individual subjects and the world in a way that centrally involves feeling or insight. At the same time, textual practices distinguish different types of poetry, and — although these different practices may move different communities of readers in similar ways — the style of poems matters. Finally, I offered the above short digression on American poetry in the 1980s in order to show that the way in which style matters is culturally defined, shifting over time as well as over cultures. So, to read Shouting at No One and Curriculum Vitae as they were first read requires knowing that both volumes would have been seen by their first readers as forms of scenic lyric and as involved with the identity politics of the period, and that Joseph would have known this.

I will concentrate here on the first volume, not because Joseph’s first two books are indistinguishable but because it is the book that first set readers’ expectations about the kind of poetry he wrote and because both of the first two books were written and circulated in roughly the same literary world. The poems in Shouting at No One most obviously root themselves in Detroit, with references to factory work, to class and racial divides, and to the Detroit riots.[18] We are invited to read the poems as at least quasi-autobiographical, despite the fact that the first person is not always used. Still, the very first poem of the volume, “Then,” tells the story of Joseph Joseph fleeing Joseph’s Food Market while “fire was eating half / Detroit” (7). The story told (or as told) is not simply that of Joseph Joseph, however, nor of his father, who is also described. It is more broadly a poem about the breakdown of civic order in Detroit. “Had you been there,” the poem says, “[y]ou would simply have shaken your head / at the tenement named ‘Barbara’ in flames / or the Guardsman with an M-16 / looking in the window of Dave’s Playboy Barbershop” (7). Including sites from “Dave’s” to “Van Dyke Avenue” or “UAW Local 89” (in “Driving Again,” 9) to “the 7-Up Cadillac Bar” (“I Had No More To Say,” 11), the poems consistently mention the particulars of working-class or lower-middle-class life in a working- or lower-middle-class city. On first reading, then, the details establish the poems’ ability to bear witness to the broken lives and the broken city, as well as proposing a connection between lives and places.

How to bear witness is a question that is not explicitly raised, but it is a question that the poems might lead us to ask, especially in light of the above-mentioned arguments in national literary circles about poetic style and about what might count as “accuracy” when it comes to language or to representing worlds and people. For example, the narrator tacitly provides us with one of his purposes in “It Will Rain All Day,” which asks:

                            What
do I want, driving through streets
past bars where fifty-year-old
truck drivers sip whiskey
and don’t feel like talking,
past houses where chimney smoke
reveals fires and rooms I will
never know? (17)

The narrator in the passage above explicitly says there is some knowledge about others — other lives or ways of living — he does not have. At the same time, he knowingly states the age of the truck drivers in their cups, and he knows how they feel (they “don’t feel like talking”). While the latter gesture both shows the narrator’s empathy and draws us in precisely by not claiming to know everything, one can still say that the truckers essentially serve as telling details just as the various named Detroit bars, factories, and streets do. There is a larger cast of characters in Shouting at No One: not just truckers or Joseph Joseph or immigrant memories of Lebanon (see “The Phoenix Has Come to a Mountain in Lebanon,” 25–29) — details that we are again invited to associate with Joseph’s personal history — but others like “Thigpen” (15), “Lopez” (21), “Louie, Son of Hanna Francis” (31), “Youmna” (33), and “Khatchig Gaboudabian” (36) are named. Again, this is a form of testimony, yet at the same time we, like the narrator in “It Will Rain All Day,” encounter the marginalized people of Detroit as part of the urban environment’s resistance to meaning, part of what we “will / never know.” Indeed, “It Will Rain All Day” ends:

                            I want to look
into the black eyes of the lone woman
waiting for a bus and say
something. I want my memory
to hold this air, so I can make
the hills with white hair
and the clouds breaking into blackness
my own, carry them with me
like the letters and icons
immigrants take in suitcases
to strange countries. (18)

The narrator here gives voice to one of the book’s desires (and that it is described as a desire suggests it is unfulfilled), namely the desire to look others in the eye, to be able to speak to as well as about others (“to say / something” instead of, as the title poem has it, “shouting at no one” [60]) and to lodge what is witnessed in the speaker’s and the reader’s memories. That is, in effect, the speaker’s feelings not only testify to his response to urban blight, but also are offered to the reader, feelings that range from rage (the first poem ends with a “voice howling” [8]; see also “Not Yet” [21]) to despair — a fog erasing the details witnessed “says, / Who will save / Detroit now?” (33), as if bearing witness could be a form of salvation — to hatred and fear. In “There Is a God Who Hates Us So Much,” the narrator says: “I was a system of laws / I hated, a boy / afraid of burning / in a city that was burning” (47), presumably drawing on Joseph’s own Catholic upbringing but also referring to the various codes — religious, civic, and legal (if not yet explicitly stylistic or linguistic) — that seem to do no good.

The book’s poems, however, do tacitly propose to do some good precisely by bearing witness to both the speaker’s inner “burning” and to Detroit’s other burnt-out citizens, and in calling attention to what has set these fires burning. The poetics, further, are closely tied to the way visual images and local details are used, familiar from the work of other poets like the early poems of Galway Kinnell (for example in The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World) or of James Wright, as well as of Philip Levine, another poet whose work is commonly identified with Detroit. As an example, let me take one of Levine’s best known poems, “You Can Have It,” which chronicles the speaker’s brother, age twenty in 1948, home after a late shift at an ice plant with “hands / yellowed and cracked” and “crusted with dirt / and sweat” (64).[19] Following his references to Detroit as a (Ford) company town, and to idiomatic speech (the title draws on the brother’s verdict on his life), toward the end of Levine’s poem he offers images that — like the images of hills and clouds and the simile comparing a sense of having a place to other more physical signs of personal contact like icons or letters at the end of Joseph’s “It Will Rain All Day” — give us a moment of urban pastoral:

The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,

and that grass died. (65)

With a nod to Whitman’s leaves of grass (as well as to Wordsworth’s London seen from Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802), Levine’s transparent speaker most obviously stands in for a larger sociopolitical class.[20] Still, Levine’s snow and ice, his stagnant pools, gutters, cracked pavement, and dead grass, are offered as images of themselves, as metonymic. If the “gutter” and the “cracks” tempt us to more metaphorical articulations — these are the lives of people who have fallen through the cracks or into the gutter — the sheer amount of detail allows readers only a momentary glimpse of a symbolic register. To draw for a moment on psycholinguistics, at the stanza break we perform a “breadth-first search” (gathering the ways in which ice and sun, a sleeping city, a river, and “bright grass” might invoke Wordsworth’s London all “bright and glittering,” its “river glid[ing],” and its “very houses seem[ing] asleep” or Williams’s frozen dirt and grass in poems like the 1930 “The Flower” or, again, Whitman’s leaves of grass) before the syntax pushes us on to a “depth-first search” that “gambles … about the alternative most likely to be true.”[21] Poems like Levine’s (perhaps all poems) depend on the fact that some of the alternatives ruled out will nonetheless resonate in a reader’s consciousness. But finally Levine’s gutters and cracks are from Detroit, not from Williams or Whitman or Wordsworth, although the way in which such details are used is drawn from earlier poets, especially when the idiomatic American expression — the working-class voice and gesture — of the title are taken into consideration. That is, Levine’s language is identifiably poetic language in large part because it sounds (and works) like the language in other poems (in Levine’s case, especially Williams’s language), including the ways in which it both flirts with and resists certain modes of symbolic identification. Many of the details in Joseph’s early poems, like “the barbed wire, rusting / scraps, stacks / and stacks of pallets” (from “Fog,” 33), work similarly.

More importantly, what is at stake in the style of such lyrics is the tacit claim that the poem can make its audience feel how the aesthetic and the social complement (or perhaps voice) one another. To quote Robert Kaufman, left critiques of less accessible poetry tend to rest on “an essentially Enlightenment and progressive notion that useful presentations of social, political, historical, and cultural reality should be offered in as clear and communicable a manner as possible — so that the greatest possible number of people can share in such knowledge (and so that they can, should they so decide, attempt to use that knowledge to change the world).”[22] In part, the poems in Shouting at No One fulfill such calls for clear, accessible presentations with the further hope that readers share the feeling of the speaker, that they, like the speaker, feel angry about how the city offers its citizens no redemption outside of places like the “Resurrection Lounge” (“Do What You Can,” 57), with the corollary that they feel themselves able to act on their felt knowledge. There is, however, also another way of reading the poems, as attempts to restore passions deflected or repressed. On this reading, we, as readers, eavesdrop on a more intimate conversation, although presumably with similar results for us, namely that through an act of compassion we feel with the dramatized speaker for the disenfranchised, including at times the speaker himself, made human and humanly engaging in the poems. Like the style and the poetics, the ideological underpinnings, or hopes, of these poems are that the aesthetic and the process of writing can open a new subject position for both writer and reader. Such hopes about what poems can do are perhaps most succinctly stated in a passage from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” where William Carlos Williams insists: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”[23]

When Curriculum Vitae appeared in 1988, it seemed to operate similarly, although, as the first poem of the volume makes explicit, the primary setting changed to “New York City, / during the nineteen eighties” (66).[24] Cambridge, London, and (again) Detroit also appear in some of the poems. The sense of personal, scenic lyric still remains, however. The title poem opens, “I might have born in Beirut, / not Detroit” (69) and continues on to say “I remain many different people / whose families populate half Detroit” (70); “In This Time” returns not only to Detroit but to Catholic school Latin lessons (84) while issues of race, class, and personal identity circulate even more explicitly through lyrics like “Sand Nigger” (90–92). “Let Us Pray” begins, starkly, “My name is Lawrence Joseph” (108). At the same time, the world of Curriculum Vitae is larger than that of Shouting at No One, not simply because of the multiple settings but because there are more references both to what might be called the national news — interest rates, war, television broadcasts, bits of overheard speech — and to what might be called an interior life, that is, among other things, to books and authors, such as Céline (97), Simone Weil (100), Saint Augustine (102), and Baudelaire (107). Whereas the focus and language of Shouting at No One appear bound to the poet’s Detroit, Curriculum Vitae, at least tacitly, seems both to align itself with issues we would now say are issues of identity politics in the style of the scenic lyric and, at the same time, to question that alignment. Or at least this is the effect when we return to the quotation from Wallace Stevens that prefaces the volume: “Both in nature and in metaphor identity is the vanishing-point of resemblance.” Stevens did not quite mean by “identity” what we might mean by talking about personal or ethnic identity. His is a more metaphysical claim, among other things about the differences between things and things as seen, like the difference between story and narrative, which Stevens saw as opening a gap that sparked the imagination and so poetry. Joseph’s knowing adaptation of Stevens’s aphorism is itself an example of Stevens’s point, which is to say it opens a gap between what Stevens presumably meant and the connotations brought to mind by the use of the word “identity” in the US in 1988, when the book appeared. The poems, the style of the poems in the late eighties, and the very title of the volume first focus us on the problem of defining a social or personal self, but they also show us a world where one’s past and one’s social identities (as Lebanese-American, as lawyer, as formerly lower-middle-class) do not seem easily summed up; the book thus questions the way biographical sketches or curriculum vitae seem to freeze and so misrepresent selves that are not captured by bare or static lists of facts. These poems do still present themselves as a form of bearing witness, but with an increasing emphasis on the ways world and narrator are in flux in themselves as well as in relationship to one another. In other words, the pressures of reality and the language of individuals pressing back are not represented as unchanging.

In the nineties, moreover, things again changed in the world of poetry as in the actual world. Ideas about the fluidity of the self and styles seen to acknowledge that fluidity were suddenly everywhere. In 1998 and 1999, Stephen Burt was asked to introduce recent American poets to British readers and challenged “to invent a school”; half tongue-in-cheek, he introduced the term “Elliptical poets” to characterize younger American poets. On Burt’s account, Elliptical poets are those centrally concerned with questions of epistemology and language, who avoid straightforward narratives or confessional lyrics, and yet who use Language writing of the sort Silliman champions, or at least “a ‘Stein tradition’ of dissolve and fracture,” as a resource, rather than to bolster or embody a theoretical position.[25] When Burt’s essay “The Elliptical Poets” first appeared, it circulated widely not so much because it announced a new school (despite the question under the title of the article on the journal’s cover, “new school or new spin?”) but because it seemed to affirm what most readers of journals featuring American poetry in the nineties already heard: a shift in younger poets’ practices, which no longer were informed by (even if many were aware of) the more theoretically driven battles over poetry in the eighties between New Narrative, New Formalist, Language, and so-called mainstream poets. If, then, Joseph’s third book, Before Our Eyes — published early in the decade — sounds a bit different, one might speculate that he was not only developing his thinking about the questions of self and identity first framed in his earlier volumes but also well aware of the new options abroad for what poetry raising such questions might sound like.[26]

An interest in language per se and an awareness of debates about the significance of poetic style clearly surfaces in Before Our Eyes. The first poem, also the title poem, is in conversation with then-current theories about poetry. Before Our Eyes opens with a striking visual description of sky and weather and the look of a landscape, including the “pink flesh” of fish in a fish shop, but then turns explicitly to talk about both social and poetic linguistic codes:

                              The point is to bring
depths to the surface, to elevate
sensuous experience into speech
and the social contract. …
…
By written I mean made, by made I mean felt;
…
So you will be, perhaps appropriately,
dismissed for it, a morality of seeing[.] (125)

In this passage, what is “before our eyes” as readers is speech, which we are told is itself sensuous: felt and constructed. As “Admissions Against Interest” puts it, the narrator of these poems is “late at [his] singing, / too much to the point, but now [he’s] seeing / words are talk and words themselves / forms of feeling” (134). That is, the words of the poems no longer simply focus us on description or use telling details as they were used in the first two volumes. We have, at least as often, details about the act of telling. On the one hand, this is no surprise. Before Our Eyes appeared in the nineties; it was not a University of Pittsburgh publication but from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York; and it addressed readers whose ears were by then attuned to what Burt later called poems centrally concerned with questions of epistemology and theories of language.[27] On the other hand, the book neither gives up on subjectivity (in the sense of representing interiority) nor abandons the suggestion that however difficult to represent or malleable they might be, there are both social and physical worlds with which subjects interact and by which they are formed even as they reform what is seen in language. As Joseph puts it in “In a Fit of My Own Vividness”: “It’s hard to throw off what you’re subject to” (157), presumably including both the sense that there is a world that impinges on you and the sense that you are a subject. Importantly, this is not the left-leaning Enlightenment view, with its prescribed style seen by Kaufman to inform scenic lyrics. As Joseph writes in “Movement in the Distance Is Larger Up Close”: “Enlightenment? I’ve got mine, you’ve got yours” (173). But it is not quite Language poetry, either. It is “too much to the point.” Nor is it Burt’s Elliptical poetry (which Craig Arnold cuttingly characterizes as “Language-Lite”) insofar as it is committed to representation and to skepticism — and to thinking about both commitments.[28] The poems say that “[t]hat language doesn’t work / anymore, its century is over,” that “[o]nly money / and credit move around, part of the future,” and that if money is what counts, poetry may not: “never expect to make hard cash from a poem” (“Just That,” 169). Yet the poems nonetheless press back against such skepticism with their insistence on “the morality of seeing” and their refusal to deny that there are moments when self, world, and language seem (even for skeptics) to converge.

It is not skepticism alone but a “violence without” — Stevens’s phrase — against which the poems found in Joseph’s fourth book of poetry, Into It, most clearly “press back.”[29] At the same time, pressing back against the world’s political and socioeconomic violence after 9/11 increases the worry heard in Before Our Eyes that conditions do not seem auspicious for poetry:

               I am constantly aware of,
in making the poem, Brecht’s point, to write about trees —
implicitly, too, to write about pleasure —
in times of killing like these is a crime;
and Paul Celan’s response, that for Brecht a leaf
is a leaf without a tree, that what kinds of times
are these when a conversation — Celan believed a poem
is a conversation — what kinds of times are these
when a poem is a crime because it includes
what must be made explicit.

                                                        What is seen, heard, and imagined
at the same time — that truth. (“Inclined to Speak,” 12)

Joseph’s syntax in this passage presents the poem itself as a conversation, or as conversational, not as descriptive per se, although there is also a distant echo of Pound’s definition of the image (“that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”).[30] More explicitly, pleasure (tacitly, beauty as well) is offered as what the times may need and even, insofar as what is “seen, heard, and imagined” is what is truly 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. In the title poem that opens the volume, “In It, Into It, Inside It, Down In,” a woman’s voice, in Williamsesque plain speech, asks why “the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species” (4), even as the next poem, “When One Is Feeling One’s Way,” counters: “So what else is new? … Nothing but the same resistance / since the time of the Gracchi” (6).

Indeed, the epigraph to Into It comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “give me the voice / To tell the shifting story.” Joseph thus focuses on what could already be heard in Before Our Eyes, namely a metadiscourse on image and narrative in poetry, even as the poems themselves do sing, do remain lyrical. More precisely, although Into It still uses and is still concerned with image (“clear, painted language”) and with those “places where the narratives began … there, / too, in the rain” (“The Bronze-Green Gold-Green Foreground,” 9), the poems are as focused on voice — offering a kind of rigorous meditation on history and the self’s ability to thrive — as on image or on story or storytelling.

At the same time, throughout the book, there remains a self-consciousness about how, more specifically and more contemporaneously, the stories-as-told of Americans with Arab backgrounds (like Joseph) shifted and are still shifting after 9/11. As “The Pattern-Parallel Map or Graph” — a poem that opens with images of detritus on Canal Street, but also includes Apuleius’s story of Eros and Psyche and cites Stevens’s commonplace book on necessity or fate — puts it, the poems attempt:

a linear polyphony forming harmonies in strange
developments. All kinds of different stuff, mixed
and fused, is where it’s at, chunks of vibrato …
Simultaneity requires the use of a topological
logic. (13)

The “stuff” in question is not simply the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse or the “strange / harmonies” of New York after 9/11, Apuleius, and Stevens. It is also the stuff of language, of the languages with which we position ourselves in the world. Throughout the volume, the voice of Into It tries on a series of personal, public, and literary languages, from the caustically dismissed “turgid language / of pseudoerudition (thugs, / … false-voiced God-talkers and power freaks / who think not at all about what they bring down)” (“When One Is Feeling One’s Way,” 6–7) to the descriptive language that paints urban beauty closely observed in a Precisionist manner — “half dark blue moon, half copper, / black stripes across it, above a round / neon clock next to the red and white / billboard in the shape of a toothpaste box” (“August Abstract,” 22) to the plain diction and largely end-stopped lines of Wordsworthian, Levine-like memory or testimony, reminiscent of Joseph’s earlier poetry:

My father? — my father was a worker. I can still hear him
getting up in the morning to go to work.
Sadness, too, has to be learned,
and it took my father time to learn it[.] (“Why Not Say What Happens?,” 29)

As Joseph writes in “Woodward Avenue”:

Like the man said. So many selves —
the one who detects the sound of a voice,
that voice — the voice that compounds
his voice — that self obedient to that fate,
increased, enlarged, transparent, changing. (18)

The self and its languages may be constantly changing in a changing and fractured world, the fractures by 2005 a matter not just of ontological or epistemological doubt but of historical fact. Finally, it is unclear whether the angle of vision in such a world determines truth or whether “[t]ruth determine[s] alchemies of light” (22). That is, as the question is posed in “Unyieldingly Present,” which speaks of those who fell from the twin towers: “Is it that reality, disjointed, / cannot be discerned, or that consciousness, / disjointed, cannot discern it?” (36). Joseph’s project is thus not just to write a poetry of “light and sorrow and dream … / [and] discourse” (50), all in flux — although it is that. What Joseph seems also to want to see “into” are the workings of the public and historical realm, even if (in an echo of Baudelaire’s or Eliot’s “unreal city”) he writes that it is “unreal, the extent to which / all political discourse is the same. Legal relations / arising out of economic relations — Engels, isn’t it?” (60).[31] Engels appears not to explain but to show the poet trying on languages that might seem more real, more explanatory, only to conclude that “the era of after, or postmodernism — has proven / more difficult to configure” (“History For Another Time,” 60). The attempt to forge a poetry that can simultaneously think about and resist that unreality is most clearly framed in the poem that returns us to the epigraph from Ovid, “Metamorphoses (After Ovid)”:

Sometimes I feel a little dizzy, even

structurally unstable. The world once more
the means by which the meek are to be

brought to their knees, Not the poet
shifting simplicities, shifting the props. (52)

And yet, Joseph adds, “I compose as I feel” (52). In other words, these poems record the work of connecting the self to the world (both moving targets) feelingly. For Joseph in this book, as opposed to the testimonials of his earlier books, the “code changed” (9) and (in the penultimate poem) “The Game Changed.” The stakes seem to have been raised by such changes:

The intent is to make a large, serious
portrait of my time. The sun on the market
near Bowling Green, something red, something
purple, bunches of roses and lilacs. A local
issue for those of us in the neighborhood.
Not to know what it is you’re breathing
in a week when Black Hawk helicopters resume
patrolling the harbor.
…
                             Neither impenetrable opacity
nor absolute transparency. I know what I’m after.
…
A continuity in which everything is transition.
To repeat it because it’s worth repeating. Immanence —
an immanence and a happiness. (64–65)

The pun in “I know what I’m after” is telling; that is, Joseph writes after modernism, after 9/11, but also knows what he wants, which might be characterized as the contemporary equivalent of what Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” calls for in modern poetry: “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” “It Must Give Pleasure.”[32] The immanence to which Into It keeps alluding seems to be the merging of the eye and ear and feeling mind with the realities, the stories, that have escaped public and political discourse. One suspects this quest for a poetic world and language sufficient to resist or press back against the pressures of the times informs the persistent use of the deictic in these poems, as in the final poem, “Once Again,” which points us to “the sky / a current carrying us along, / heavy with that green and that black” (66, emphasis added).

Although Joseph does not mention Adorno’s skepticism about whether after Auschwitz — now, we might add, after 9/11 or postmodernism — lyric poetry can be written, he tacitly suggests a response to that skepticism, tracing how in the world of violence and (to use his post-Yeatsian term) disjointedness, poetry must be written to salvage an economy of feeling and reflection, one that can be set against larger intractable, inhuman, forces. In “Theories of Poetry, Theories of Law,” Joseph wrote that the “modernist self is partly constituted by language. Subjectivity does not exist on the surface of mirror-like language, but in the recesses of meaning expressed by new forms.”[33] In light of his renewal of received styles in Into It, one might say that Joseph’s work is “after modernism,” which is not the same as being postmodern; the act of constructing the self (not the self or world narratively constructed or deconstructed and not self or world lyrically staged) is what the poems feature. As he puts it in the previously quoted passage from “The Game Changed”: “The intent is to make a large, serious / portrait of my time. The sun on the market”; this is a new, more self-conscious version of Adorno’s claim, from which I take the title of this essay, that lyric poems are “philosophical sundial[s] telling the time of history,”[34] precisely by letting us read the shifting shadows cast by the pressures of reality. In Joseph’s poem, we read the act of reading, as well.

 

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1. Wallace Stevens, “The Rock,” in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1997), 447.

2. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1n2.

3. From an unpublished letter by Joseph, September 10, 1993 (original on file with author).

4. Indeed, the “what” and the “how” — “how to tell what one has to tell” — forms Gertrude Stein’s definition of “narration,” quoted by Lawrence Joseph as the second of his “Working Rules for Lawyerland” in the Columbia Law Review, vol. 101 (November 2, 2001): 1793.

5. Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” in Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, 650.

6. Lawrence Joseph, “Theories of Poetry, Theories of Law,” Vanderbilt Law Review 46, no. 5 (October 1993): 1227–54.

7. The description of the circumstances under which the poems in Joseph’s first two volumes were written is taken from David A. Skeel Jr., “Practicing Poetry, Teaching Law,” Michigan Law Review 29, no. 6 (May 1994): 1755–56.

8. I take the term from Charles Altieri, Sense and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially 10–15.

9. Richard Wilbur, “Poetry and Happiness,” in Claims For Poetry, ed. Donald Hall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), 470–71, 476, 480. Although Wilbur’s essay was written in 1966, it nicely encapsulates assumptions informing what was celebrated or deplored as “mainstream poetry” through at least the 1980s.

10. Ibid., 484, 486.

11. Ron Silliman, “The New Sentence,” in Hall, Claims for Poetry, 397, 396; see 381ff.

12. Ibid., 394, 396. Those associated with this school would include Clark Coolidge, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, and Charles Bernstein, who coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (published from 1978 to 1981 and collected by 1984 in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, in which a longer version of Silliman’s essay “The New Sentence” appeared).

13. Silliman, “The New Sentence,” 391. Stein’s portrait of custard — from Tender Buttons and quoted by Silliman on page 390 of “The New Sentence” — reads in its entirety as follows: “Custard is this. It has aches, aches when. Not to be. Not to be narrowly. This makes a whole little hill. It is better than a little thing that has mellow real mellow. It is better than lakes whole lakes, it is better than seeding.”

14. Silliman, “The New Sentence,” 398.

15. Ibid., 396.

16. Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996), 49–50.

17. See D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996), 163. See also Vernon Shetley’s trenchant analysis of the most audible debates of the eighties in After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), especially 19–20, 26–29, and the concluding chapters.

18. Shouting at No One appeared in 1983 from the University of Pittsburgh Press; it is reprinted in Lawrence Joseph, Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973–1993 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). Although, as I have noted, publication in the eighties by the University of Pittsburgh Press would have called forth different expectations from readers than would publication by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005, citations are from the latter, more readily available volume.

19. “You Can Have It” was first published in Antaeus 30, no. 3 (1978): 113–14, and collected in the 1979 7 Years from Somewhere (New York: Atheneum), 64–65, from which I quote here. It also appears in the fourth edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 1996), 1650–51.

20. The full title of Wordsworth’s poem is “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” The sonnet is frequently reprinted and anthologized, and can be found in The Norton Anthology, 727.

21. See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995). Pinker’s work was first brought to my attention by Ellen Bryant Voight, The Flexible Lyric (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 123, from which I quote. William Wordsworth’s lines come from “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”; William Carlos Williams’s “The Flower” appears in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 322–25. The reference is to lines 11–22 of “The Flower.”

22. Robert Kaufman, “Sociopolitical (i.e. Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” Romanticism and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (June 2003), Romantic Praxis Series, ed. Orrin Wang, para. 6.

23. William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, vol. 2, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1988), 318.

24. Curriculum Vitae (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); page references are to the reprinted poems in Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos.

25. Stephen Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” American Letters & Commentary (1999), 45n1, 46. The full text appears on 45–55.

26. I am not, I would add, suggesting that Joseph was specifically influenced by particular writers in the nineties. Rather, I’m suggesting that he knew his readers could hear what Burt calls a style of Steinian (for Joseph this would also be Stevensian) “dissolve and fracture” without immediately hearing the kinds of theoretical assumptions, including challenges to the very idea of subjectivity or feeling, with which such a style had earlier been associated. At the same time, it seems clear that the changes I find in the style of the poems in Before Our Eyes owe something to Joseph’s reading of John Ashbery’s poetry. He describes reading Ashbery’s poems in a 1992 review as follows: reading Ashbery is “like listening to an intriguing conversation, or returning to a piece of music whose powers you’re convinced of, to listen to parts of it, or the whole in relation to the parts — like focusing, for example, on the interstices between abstraction and figuration in a Modernist painting.” See Joseph, “The Real Thing,” The Nation 254, no. 15 (April 20, 1992): 531.

27. Burt, “The Elliptical Poets.” Page references for poems from Before Our Eyes refer to the reprinted poems in Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos.

28. Craig Arnold, “Poetry in Review,” The Yale Review 92, no. 1 (January 2004): 170.

29. Lawrence Joseph, Into It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). All quotations are from this edition. The discussion of Into It that follows draws on Lisa M. Steinman, “So What Is Poetry Good For?,” Michigan Quarterly Review 45, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 544–59.

30. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts” (1913), reprinted in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 4.

31. Baudelaire’s 1857 “Les Sept Vieillards” appears in “Tableaux parisiens,” part of Les Fleurs du Mal, and is cited in Eliot’s footnotes for The Waste Land (line 60). Eliot’s poem is widely reprinted, for instance in The Norton Anthology, where the passage in question appears on 1238.

32. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 329, 336, 344.

33. Joseph, “Theories of Poetry, Theories of Law,” 1230.

34. I take my title from Theodor W. Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” reprinted in Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 46, where Adorno’s reading of two poems in order to illustrate his sense of how lyric poetry works is prefaced by his warning that “we are concerned not with the poet as a private person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.”