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In his 1936 essay, The Irrational Element in Poetry, Wallace Stevens suggested that since the beginning of the first World War the "pressure of the contemporaneous" had become "constant and extreme."' No longer could poets ignore the contemporaneous, the urgent social, political, and economic crises of the time; poetry must address and respond to these pressing issues. The poet's task, Stevens insisted, is to take the contemporaneous as her subject. But only as her nominal subject. Her primary subject must always be the "poetry" of the contemporaneous.2 Far more than most of his peers, Lawrence Joseph3 has created a poetry of the contemporaneous. With Before Our Eyes, his third and most powerful book of poems, Joseph continues to take as his themes the pervasive, destructive realities of our time. Again and again he returns to Detroit, the city of his childhood, a city that evokes images of industrialization and its decline, of racial tensions and urban blight. Lebanon serves as a second, recurring motif in the poems, often associated with religious violence and, as Joseph himself is the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants,4 with questions of racial identity, family history, and memory itself. Images of New York form still another insistent motif: New York as the legal and financial capital of the nation, New York as a city of the alien and dispossessed. While the discussion that follows will allude to each of these characteristic themes, the motif with which I will be most concerned in

Practicing Poetry, Teaching Law