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Overview
Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet
Into It, Lawrence Joseph's fourth book of poems, is as bold a book as any in American poetry today-an attempt to give voice to the extremes of American reality in the time since, as Joseph puts it, "the game changed."
Joseph's first three books dramatized the challenge of maintaining one's self in a world in the hold of dehumanizing forces. The new book finds him in a time and place where "the immense enlargement / of our perspectives is confronted / by a reduction of our powers of action"-where the word "wargame" is a verb and "the weight of violence / is unparalleled in the history / of the species." Along the New York waterfront, on a crowded street, at the site where the World Trade Center stood: Joseph enters into these places to capture the thoughts and images, the colors and feelings, and the language that give the present its pressured complexity. Few contemporary writers have been able to shape this material into poetry, but Joseph has done so masterfully-in poems that are daring, searching, and classically satisfying.
Into It is a new work by a poet of great originality and scope.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466873254 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 175 KB |
About the Author
Lawrence Joseph is the author of Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993. He lives in downtown Manhattan and is a professor of law at St. John's University School of Law.
Lawrence Joseph, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants, was born and raised in Detroit. A graduate of the University of Michigan, University of Cambridge, and University of Michigan Law School, he is the author of several books of poetry, including So Where Are We?, and of the books of prose, Lawyerland, a non-fiction novel, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose.
He is the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and has also taught creative writing at Princeton. He lives in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
Into It
By Lawrence Joseph
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2005 Lawrence JosephAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7325-4
CHAPTER 1
IN IT, INTO IT, INSIDE IT, DOWN IN
How far to go? — I have to, I know,
I promised. But how? How, and when?
And where? It was cold. The sky,
blue, almost burst, leaves burnished
yellow. Nearing Liberty, Liberty
and Church streets. So it happened
in early November. Which is to say
a story took place. Once again
new lines, new colors. One scene
and then another. Characters talking
to one another. It was she who
opened the conversation. "A wild rose,
and grapes on vines along the ground,
a butterfly on the green palmetto,
plums the size of walnuts, gray
and vermilion" — she sat up straighter,
lips pressed together, looking me
square in the eyes — "and why, you tell me why,
in this time of so many claims to morality,
the weight of violence
is unparalleled in the history
of the species ..." What needs to be said —
why not say it? "Who dares to learn
what concerns him intimately,"
is how he says it in his book. Then the mind
runs through the spaces left behind, crossing
over to a different place. It certainly was
a well-dressed crowd. Here, again, the General,
the Attorney General, a beeper in one hand,
a crucifix in the other; here, again,
language, a language — a style, a groove, a fate.
On the esplanade, Battery Park, a newspaper,
old, caught in a gust, a child,
lost, crying — the pain was ours, I know it now;
beauty, the answer, if you must know —
the sun ablaze on the harbor. Hearing
a sentence phrased in ... a tenor? countertenor? ...
an error of nature, after all — made
of thought and of sound, of feelings seen —
in it, into it, inside it, down in.
WHEN ONE IS FEELING ONE'S WAY
I
The sky was red and the earth got hot,
like a hundred degrees hot, I mean.
"Stay cool," the monk was said to have said,
"you've still got a long way to go."
A monk, say, of Hue, who, to protest
the killing of innocents, is dragging
an altar on — yes it was, Hillside Avenue.
So what else is new? One new
voice mail message. A woman,
a certain woman, has been seen, eyes,
liquid blue eyes, glistening with tears.
II
Two things, the two things that are interesting
are history and grammar.
In among the foundations of the intelligence
the chemistries of words. "The fault lines
of risk concealed in a monetary landscape ..."
What of it? Nothing but the same resistance
since the time of the Gracchi —
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).
III
A pause. Any evening, every evening.
When one is feeling one's way
the pattern is small and complex.
At center a moral issue, but composed,
and first. Looks to me like,
across the train yards, a blurred sun
setting behind the high ground
on the other side of the Hudson,
overhead purple and pink.
A changing set of marginal options.
Whole lots of amplified light.
IV
Oh, I get the idea. That image,
the focal point
of a concave mirror, is old.
And that which is unintermitted
and fragile, wild and fragile (there,
behind the freighter's yellow
puffs of smoke; God, no, I haven't
forgotten it) is, I said,
still fragile, still proud.
THE BRONZE-GREEN GOLD-GREEN FOREGROUND
The bronze-green gold-green foreground:
what can only be said in that language,
opaque, though clear, painted language.
The shy and green one, the most beautiful
one, the intensest one, on my mind,
opening, opened, in me ... The reflection
(and, or, the refraction) of a reflection:
in light of that, light in secret ...
(Tableaux: "Ancient Back Streets One November
Late Friday Afternoon" ... "The Eyes the Sky's Blue" ...)
Those places where the narratives began ... there,
too, in the rain. The code changed again.
I NOTE IN A NOTEBOOK
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 ... That winter,
on Belle Isle, the ice floes, the Seven Sister
smokestacks. In Angel Park, a figure in motion,
muted reds and grays, clouds and light, and shadows
in motion, a freezing wind out of Canada
over the lake. A figure, in the factory
behind the Jefferson Avenue Assembly, marking
and filing the parts of the new model prototype
Chryslers, standing at a window, smoking a Kool.
Those with the masks of hyenas are the bosses,
and those wearing mass-produced shirts and pants,
among them my father ... Cavafy's poem, the one
about how if he's wasted his life in this corner
of the world he's wasted it everywhere. What
is happening, what is done. Convicted
of rape and murder, he leaves a piece of pie
in his cell, believing he'll be able to eat it
after he's electrocuted — the fact that a compound,
1, 3-diphenyl propane, forged from the fires'
heat and pressure, combined with the Towers'
collapse, has never been seen before.
The technology to abolish truth is now available —
not everyone can afford it, but it is available —
when the cost comes down, as it will, then what?
Pasolini's desire to make, to write, an intricate,
yet rational mosaic, byzantine and worth, at least,
a second, or even a third, reading ... 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 ...
INCLINED TO SPEAK
I saw that. One woman, her personality
and appearance described as lovely,
while performing her predawn prayers,
watched the attackers shoot to death her husband,
her seven-year-old son, three of her brothers,
as they grabbed her four-year-old son from her arms
and cut his throat, taking her and her two sisters
away on horses and raping them. Of course it's genocide.
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.
What is seen, heard, and imagined
at the same time — that truth. A sort of relationship
is established between our attention
to what is furthest from us
and what deepest in us. The immense enlargement
of our perspectives 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 ...
THE PATTERN-PARALLEL MAP OR GRAPH
The sky? — ultramarine, tinted black, lines
of black ink. Newspapers, mud, fishtails,
betel nuts, trampled on along Canal Street.
Luck turns out hot. Eros is extraordinarily
lucky to have found Psyche. According
to the story, which is taken from Apuleius,
Eros's and Psyche's bodies are wet and hot.
Nine years — where does that take us
on the pattern-parallel map or graph?
Nine years from two thousand — nineteen ninety-one ...
Wallace Stevens — him again —
in his commonplace book,
an entry made in nineteen thirty-four:
"Ananke is necessity or fate personified,
the saeva Necessitas of Horace
Odes Book I No. 35, to Fortune ..."
I'm the one who hears it. Chromatically
suspended, as the notes feel their way
from intervals to motifs, a progression
in a manner that disguises the key —
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. Time compressed — interactivity escalated
to maximum speed. Why not? Have their official
status changed from human to animal, they live like
animals already. Once they've attained animal status
dozens of groups will come forward to defend them.
What, let's say, in twelve years
will the zone of suffering that exists
outside the established orders look like? There's
Venus again, moving across the sun,
in a mini-eclipse visible twice every century or so.
There's the achieved conception, a God
accessible and inaccessible, merciful
and just, human and divine, completed
not far from the Black Sea. That mood,
intensely subjective, scenes and myths
reemerged. There, on the table, a flower the yellow
of flax closes, the irises unfolding,
two of them deep blue-purple, a third is larger,
and china blue. There, small, bright birds
in wooden cages in a store on East Broadway,
an illuminated scroll unrolled on the counter.
WOODWARD AVENUE
The destination, the destiny, a street,
an avenue. When General MacArthur, deviating
from his itinerary, was driven out
to the Shrine at Twelve Mile Road
and Woodward to help in Coughlin's
rehabilitation. History followed
in the direction of a more or a less
cosmological evolution. On the ground
the authorities began to sense the situation
was going to get worse before it got better.
Around midnight the street was blocked,
a man, backed up against a white
Mustang, was beaten. What was it like?
The essential principles were power,
accuracy, economy, system, and speed.
The Highland Park plant was known
as the Crystal Palace because of its expanse
of windows. Moving assembly lines, conveyor
belts, gravity feeds, and railroads
constituted the materials-handling
network, portrayed, metaphorically, as a wave
of production. No singularities.
In Paperbacks Unlimited, an essay,
"The Law of Love and the Law of Violence,"
in a book of pamphlets and essays by Tolstoy.
The struggle for the "imperium mundi" down to
a not so sudden sorrow. My father
listens to the radio, reading. The past
rearranged by hardening arteries.
My grandfather's voice doesn't leave me.
So many voices, which of them to be taken
seriously? Am I mistaken or was napalm
transported by teamsters from Midland?
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? An arm's snapped,
a body's kicked down darkened stairs,
a face is spit into, one of the babies
is left to die. The Greek dictionary
lies on the kitchen table. There's a torn
photograph of the Blessed Sacrament
grade school basketball team, and, here,
a ticket stub from the championship game
held in the Memorial Building. Screaming
all day about war. Screaming that nothing
can be solved. Only the very poorest spirits
can't be roused by the practical, where we
literally are, approach. Remember that?
The heavyweight champion of the world, found
in a stupor without his false teeth, naked
in the backseat of his Continental convertible
in the parking lot of The Last Chance Bar.
Neither the proclamation nor the plea
had any effect. The men of the 701st
Military Police Battalion in full battle gear,
bayonets fixed at high port, moving through
Cadillac Square to disperse the mob of over
ten thousand. He was, Henry Ford said,
not in the business of making cars
but in the business of making money.
The Algiers Motel? U-shaped, with neon lights,
swimming pool lined by a metal fence
and faded beach umbrellas, the style
Florida Gulf Port traditional, set
back from the street, a rusted Carte Blanche
sign swinging on a post out front.
Reality explained. Those corners where
the little one curled up and went to sleep
when she was tired, where, when she was
unsure of herself, she secretly went to cry.
I can smell something cooking — I can tell
there's going to be a feast. A thickish
film sticks to the windshields and the lungs,
dawn is burnt red along the landscape's rim.
Smoke that sketches the sky with gray.
Gray. Smoke-gray. The mist lifts.
So drive this street and drop into
this hell where a man was once cut
from ear to ear. High winds again,
an unexpected chill. A soft, misty, rain.
Patches of pavement oiled and streaked
with rain. The appointed time, in detail —
the crazy weave of the perfect mind.
How much later, the light snow lay encrusted
on the oak leaves until the wind turned
a leaf over. The wind blowing constantly.
Can you get to it? A dance that you get to,
"The Double-Clutch." Listen. Sure is funky.
Everyone clapping their hands, popping
their fingers, everyone hip, has walks.
Effects are supplied, both rhythmic
and textual. Another take? Same key?
Sometimes you've just got to improvise a bit
before you're in a groove. Listen.
That's right. It's an illumination.
That which occurs in authentic light.
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.
ON THAT SIDE
April and May. There, very near,
dimensions imploded —
the point, the line, the surface.
The arrangement of power, the immanence
of the pressure. "What,"
he said with a laugh, "you think I'm exaggerating?"
I can't say that I've internalized it all yet.
I'm over on the other side —
Green Dolphin Street, the bar and café, that is,
a table in back, in the garden, engaged
in an act of asceticism.
A memory — so vivid, I close my eyes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, WHAT?
It's foreground — or is it background? —
this individual and collectivized looting
of the most astonishing complexity,
each point of an imagined circuit
attached to each of the others ...
In the King James Hotel in a bath towel,
solicitous with the interviewer
who crosses her long, tanned legs, smiling at him
when he says you need a billion
just to get into the game; on my way downtown
(no, he answers, he doesn't own his own taxi),
his name is Thomas Saint Thomas, a green card
is what he owns, a working man from Haiti —
he'll play for me (I, perhaps, have not yet heard)
a tape cassette of a speech
concerning the imminent coming of Jesus Christ
Word Incarnate, Second Person of the Triune God,
who'll whip the moneylenders out of the temple.
Clouds. Lots of sky and clouds. Clouds
of all sorts. Venus fixed on the left:
borne on the foaming crest of involution; Venus
on her wave: nothing, I repeat, nothing
but substance. February, twilight — wasn't it? —
lavender (green for youth, blue for love) sky —
a shadow, distinct, beautiful pink detail,
of all places on the pier with wood benches
near Canal Street ...
The rain was like ice. The umbrella placed
over the phone booth. "I'm all right."
"What do you mean, what?" "Why don't you leave it
at that?" "Are you sure?" "Don't think that way."
"Yes, forever." And so on, the script proceeded.
AUGUST ABSTRACT
Then the presence of that absence,
a solid haze, dominating yellows
muted and mystic. Twenty-seventh Street
not too far from Eleventh Avenue,
a place (whose place? — but let it be clear
it must be someplace, this particular place,
and the place that the one who's abstracting
finds, a she or he finds, if it's been felt,
been felt between them, will have a name too)
in search of a form. The truth? The truth
that came to grieve, was aggrieved, for whom?
Truth determined alchemies of light.
Nearly dawn, 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,
the windblown river capped wave after wave.
Kokoschka's palette transposed ... hot and still
with fact. That nothing was ... nothing
unbound. A sound, that sound, inside.
WHY NOT SAY WHAT HAPPENS?
I
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.
II
According to the translation of the police transcript,
the sheikh — the arrested head
of the cell mockingly said — in a plot
involving a chemical attack,
needs, simply,
two or three young men with brains and training
with nothing to gain or lose,
not an army.
It doesn't take much these days to be a prophet.
Do you know how much poison can be put
in a ten-liter barrel?
You pour it and spread it, then you leave.
The web is, prosecutors believe,
so intricate, the detainee,
they think, may also be a member
of cells in Barcelona and Frankfurt.
III
Yet another latest version of another
ancient practice — mercenaries, as they were once known,
are thriving, only this time
they're called "private military contractors."
During the last few years their employees
have been sent to Bosnia, Nigeria, Colombia, and, of course,
most recently, Iraq. No one knows
how extensive the industry is, but some military experts
estimate a market of tens of billions of dollars.
IV
Autumn turned to winter and the site
began to clear. The limits of my language
are the limits of my world, said Wittgenstein.
The realization — the state of the physical world
depends on shifts in the delusional thinking
of very small groups. One of Garfinkle's patients
tripped over a severed foot while evacuating
the Stock Exchange. Several others saw
the first plane pass right next to the almost
floor-length windows of their conference room.
"When I'm not working, the last thing I want to do
is talk about it," said one policeman, who,
like many of the city's uniformed officers,
is still working a schedule of twelve hours on,
twelve hours off ... Shoes, books, wallets, jewelry,
watches, some of them still keeping time ...
The congressman says he can't say for sure
there isn't a suitcase with a nuclear bomb
floating around out there. Everything
immense and out of context. The large item
in the mud, one of the motors that powered
the Towers' elevators. "It's intense" —
says Lieutenant Bovine — "no photographs! This is
a crime scene!" What happened was one floor
fell on top of another, as many as ten floors
compressed into a foot of space. What fell
was mostly metal ... The cement vaporized ...
The Night Watch was what the laid-out scene
looked like. The fences around the wreckage
covered with T-shirts, teddy bears, and memorial
banners signed by thousands of visitors;
tourists snap pictures, and, subject to the way
the wind is blowing, the air is tinged
with an acrid smoke ... "Lost/Missing Family
1-866-856-4167 or 1-212-741-4626 ..." A Web Exclusive,
the poet will speak about poetry and grief ...
The smells of burning wiring, dankness
from the tunnels, the sharp and sweet
cherrylike smell of death. At eight-ten on Friday
two more bodies are found in a stairwell
of the South Tower. Work, again, stops,
and the ironworkers, who have been cutting
steel beams, come out from the hole. The work
goes on until well past midnight. More debris
is removed, another body recovered. A group
of ironworkers stands on a gnarled beam,
one end of which juts over the pit
like a gangplank. Three 35-millimeter movie cameras
are placed on top of nearby buildings, each programmed
to take a picture every five minutes, day and night.
A bugler slips onto the site and plays "Taps."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Into It by Lawrence Joseph. Copyright © 2005 Lawrence Joseph. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraphs,
In It, Into It, Inside It, Down In,
When One Is Feeling One's Way,
The Bronze-Green Gold-Green Foreground,
I Note in a Notebook,
Inclined to Speak,
The Pattern-Parallel Map or Graph,
Woodward Avenue,
On That Side,
What Do You Mean, What?,
August Abstract,
Why Not Say What Happens?,
In a Mood,
Unyieldingly Present,
News Back Even Further Than That,
Rubaiyat,
Metamorphoses (After Ovid),
What Is There to Understand?,
A Year Ago This June,
In the Shape of Fate over My Father's Birth,
The Single Necessity,
History for Another Time,
That Too,
The Game Changed,
Once Again,
Also by Lawrence Joseph,
Praise for Into It,
About the Author,
Copyright,