Into It: Poems

By Lawrence Joseph

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466873254

Lawrence Joseph

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.

Book preview

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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

TO YOU, MY MUSE

… give me the voice

To tell the shifting story …

—OVID, The Metamorphoses

Moreover, in the world of actuality … one is always living a little out of it. There is a precious sentence in Henry James, for example, for whom everyday life was not much more than the business of living, but, all the same, he separated himself from it. The sentence is … To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

—WALLACE STEVENS

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

Reviews for Into It

[vpfluke · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was attracted to this book because it has impressions of Detroit. And when I read it, I could put myself back in Detroit, where I lived for 18 years. These may not be meaningful to everyone, but something clicked when I read "I note in a Notebook" this: ... A figure, in the factory / behind the Jefferson Avenue Assembly marking and filing the parts of the new model prototype / Chryslers... I worked with the bus company whose garage was in the shadow of this auto plant and can imagine the scene with Lawrence Joseph."Woodward Avenue" is the big street in Detroit, and the poem starts off calling it "The destination, the destiny, a street,/ an avenue." For us who lived there, it was the destiny of the city, even if withered at this point.I also resonated with some lines in "In the Shape of Fate over my Father's Birth." I worked in pulbic transport in Detroit, and can well imagine hearing "The Trumbull streetcar screeched/ on the switch. The ratttling, old yellow Pwl Cars late at night..."9/11 is to some degree is memorialized in "Why Not Say What Happens", "this cloud ... isn't only ash and soot", it's everything including fear and memory.