Background
Lawrence Joseph was born on March 10, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He is the son of Joseph Alexander and Clara Barbara Joseph. He is the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants.
2018
Library Walk, Washington, DC 20007, United States
Lawrence Joseph at Riggs Library on February 1, 2018.
2018
Library Walk, Washington, DC 20007, United States
Lawrence Joseph talking to Paul Elie at Riggs Library on February 1, 2018.
Lawrence Joseph with John Freeman at Οnassis Cultural Centre Athens. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
Lawrence Joseph with John Freeman at Οnassis Cultural Centre Athens. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
Lawrence Joseph with John Freeman at Οnassis Cultural Centre Athens. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
625 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
The University of Michigan Law School where Lawrence Joseph received his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree.
500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
The University of Michigan where Lawrence Joseph received his Bachelor of Arts degree.
Magdalene St, Cambridge CB3 0AG, United Kingdom
Magdalene College where Lawrence Joseph received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees.
(Visual, auditory, tactile - ever attentive to perception ...)
Visual, auditory, tactile - ever attentive to perception - Lawrence Joseph's third book of poems, Before Our Eyes, generously, almost exotically, blends various tones, atmospheres, and textures into forms of concentrated, pitch-perfect invention. The poet, an astute aesthetician, is also astutely conscious of history, a critical observer of public life. He explores American identity. He investigates meaning and language. He celebrates the mysteries of beauty and love. The result is a poetry of illuminating effects which captures a profound sense of what it's like to be alive, and what it means to write poetry, in a radically changing time.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KF29CWU/?tag=2022091-20
1993
(A professor of law recounts his conversations about the l...)
A professor of law recounts his conversations about the legal profession with lawyers in downtown Manhattan, from a corporate attorney who denounces all lawyers as pathological to a woman judge who testifies to rage and lust on the bench.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374184178/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(The first three books by the author of Into It Codes, Pre...)
The first three books by the author of Into It Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos brings together the poems from Lawrence Joseph's first three books of poetry: Shouting at No One, Curriculum Vitae, and Before Our Eyes. Now in one volume, the poems from these three books can be seen as the work of one of American poetry's most original and challenging poets.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JTIOYH4/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Int...)
Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Into It 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." 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 gives 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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JTIU1GM/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(In The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, Joseph takes...)
In The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, Joseph takes the reader through the aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, a lineage that includes Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein, switching critical tracks to major European poets like Eugenio Montale and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and back to American masters like James Schuyler and Adrienne Rich. Always discerning, especially on issues of identity, form, and the pressures of history and politics, Joseph places his own poetry within its critical contexts, presenting narratives of his life in Detroit, where he grew up, and in Manhattan, where he has lived for 30 years. These pieces also portray Joseph’s Lebanese, Syrian, and Catholic heritages, and his life as a lawyer, distinguished law professor, and legal scholar.
https://www.amazon.com/Game-Changed-Essays-Other-Poetry-ebook/dp/B0100RBCMC/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(“So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem...)
“So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem of his powerful and moving sixth book of poetry. Beginning where his acclaimed collection Into It left off, amid the worldwide violence unleashed by the World Trade Center terrorist attack, Joseph’s poems - global and historic in scope - boldly encounter the imaginative challenges of our time: issues of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war. Against these realities, Joseph presents an intimate, sensuous language of beauty and love a constant shifting and fluid play of sound and tone. With incisive intensity, intelligence, emotional force, and fierce, uncompromising vision Joseph speaks from deep within the truths of poetry’s common language.
https://www.amazon.com/So-Where-Are-We-Poems/dp/0374266670/?tag=2022091-20
2017
Lawrence Joseph was born on March 10, 1948, in Detroit, Michigan, United States. He is the son of Joseph Alexander and Clara Barbara Joseph. He is the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants.
Lawrence Joseph received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature at the University of Michigan in 1970 and a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree at University of Michigan Law School in 1975. When he was a student of the University of Michigan, in 1967 he wrote his first poems. In 1972 Joseph received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English language and literature at Magdalene College and a Master of Arts degree in English language and literature in 1976.
After law school, Lawrence Joseph worked as a judicial law clerk for G. Mennen Williams from 1976 till 1978. 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. Then, in 1984 he became an associate professor at Maurice A. Deane School of Law. Joseph has been at St. John’s University School of Law since 1987. He has taught, and teaches, courses in Torts, Employment Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Interpretation, and Advanced Torts.
In 1989, Professor Joseph lectured on law and on poetry in Jordan, Israel, and Egypt through the cultural affairs offices of the United States embassies in each country. In 1994, he taught in the Council of the Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Professor Joseph has published and 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.
He has been invited to speak at law schools throughout the country, including Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, Northwestern, and Georgetown, and is the former Chairperson of the Association of American Law School's Section on Law and Interpretation. He has also taught creative writing and law at Princeton University.
In addition to his law career, Lawrence Joseph has been writing poems from his student days. His first book of poems Shouting at No One was published in 1983. Five years later, he published his second book of poems, Curriculum Vitae. Before Our Eyes, Joseph’s third book was published in 1993. His early poetry often references the discrimination and violence he witnessed as a child, including the 1967 Detroit riots and the violent attempted robbery in 1970 of his father, a grocer. Joseph’s work, informed by his practice as a lawyer, engages themes of power and truth with an unsentimental clarity. His poetry has been widely anthologized, including in The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).
His other collections of poetry include Into It (2005), Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993 (2005), The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (2011), So Where Are We?: Poems (2017). He is also the author of the prose work Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They Talk About the Law (1997).
(In The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, Joseph takes...)
2011(Visual, auditory, tactile - ever attentive to perception ...)
1993(A professor of law recounts his conversations about the l...)
1997(Strikingly contemporary new work by an acclaimed poet Int...)
2005(The first three books by the author of Into It Codes, Pre...)
2005(“So where are we?” asks Lawrence Joseph in the title poem...)
2017
Quotations:
"The violence inherent in our systems and structures of power is a part of who we are - our thoughts, sensibilities, imaginations, language. We live in manifestations of it - permanent war, environmental destruction, poverty, racism, misogyny, the assault on labor, torture in our prisons, capital punishment - a corporate capitalist state controlled by oligarchical interests for their own private profit and gain."
"Poetry informs the law by making me more sensitive to language, different levels of meaning, different perspectives, and attention to the way things work. As a lawyer, I have to be conversant in the languages of social power, economics, history, violence, work, and face, and I try to transform them into my poetry."
"My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems."
"I've always believed that poetry must speak of realities as least as complicated as those spoken of in prose. I've read books of poems, even single poems, which are, for me, at least the equivalent of a short story or a novel."
"The poet resists the pressures of reality, including the pressures of violence, in making, in forming the poem. The tension is in the resistance - the poem is an act of resistance."
Lawrence Joseph is a member of PEN, Poets’ House, State Bar of New York, Bar Association of the City of New York, American Bar Association. He has been a member of the board of directors of Poets House, the Poetry Society of America, and The Writer's Voice, and served on the PEN Events Committee.
Quotes from others about the person
"Joseph is an increasingly important talent." - Donna Seaman
"Joseph is an aesthetic of inner and outer, public and private, physical fact and abstract speculation. This melding of opposites is appropriate for a poet who embodies many of the contradictions of American society today." - Reagan Upshaw
"Joseph captures the exact fit between legal language and the unsettled life of contemporary America." - Richard Weisburg
"The most important lawyer-poet of our era." - David A. Skeel
Lawrence Joseph married Nancy Van Goethem on April 12, 1976.