Top Lawrence Joseph Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Lawrence Joseph Biography

Lawrence Joseph (born 1948 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American poet, writer, essayist, critic, lawyer, and professor of law.

Read about Lawrence Joseph in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Lawrence Joseph Quotes

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.

Book, Certain, Identity, Love, Memories, Poet

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. Martin Amis, in an interview with Saul Bellow in the early eighties, quotes Bellow asking, "Why not address 'the mysterious circumstance of being', say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet?" This has been and still is my ambition.

Ambition, Book, Mysterious, Novel, Reality

Is there an aesthetic "fit" in my work between God and the world? The "I' in my poems has from the beginning identified himself as Catholic, and my books certainly can be read as presenting a Catholic theology "in a very particular sense. " Catholicism is a faith morally identified with the human struggle for human dignity and justice. It is a vision of the world incarnationally rooted in the senses, a faith of and in spoken and written words - Scripture, "the Word of God," the Logos.

Book, God, Identified, Justice, Scripture, Struggle

The poet casts an eye on what is horrendous, but his truest life is in what sustains, restores, heals. Love, the act of loving, beauty, are first, fundamental truths.

Eye, Heal, Life, Poet, Sustains, Truths

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 destrucution, 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.

Imagination, Interests, Permanent, Prisons, Racism, War

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.

Including, Making, Poet, Reality, Violence

Do I address issues of the spirit, of the soul, in my work? Yes, definitely. As for being a Catholic poet, I was born in, and into, Catholicism - Eastern Rite Maronite and Melkite Catholicism. Not being Catholic has never been a choice for me - it's in my family, my ancestry, going back centuries. Catholicism, for me, is always here.

Address, Catholic, Choices, Melkite, Soul, Work

External realities - worlds of politics, economics, law, war, interpersonal and social relations - are part of prose fiction. Fiction also includes the realities of a character's interior language. Poetry can encompass the same realities, but in compressed, intensified language, which creates entirely different degrees of emotional force.

Compressed, Emotional, Politics, Reality, Social, War

Walter Inglis Anderson

Walter Inglis Anderson

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Monica Seles

Monica Seles

Rickson Gracie

Rickson Gracie

John C. McGinley

John C. McGinley

Jai Rodriguez

Jai Rodriguez

Cristin Milioti

Cristin Milioti

Johnny Basham

Johnny Basham

Maurice Sendak

Maurice Sendak

Bob Kaufman

Bob Kaufman

Leopold Infeld

Leopold Infeld

Rick Neuheisel

Rick Neuheisel