University, receiving both bachelor’s (1972) and
master’s (1976) degrees with first honours in
English language and literature. In 1975 Joseph
received his J.D. from the University of Michigan
Law School. After serving as law clerk to Justice
G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme
Court, he joined the University of Detroit School
of Law faculty from 1978 to 1981. In 1981 he took
a litigator position in the New York firm of Shear-
man & Sterling; in 1987 he was hired as a profes-
sor of law at St. John’s University School of Law
in New York City. In 2003 Joseph was named The
Reverend Joseph T. Tinnelly, C.M., Professor of
Law; as of 2006, he remains on the faculty at St.
John’s University.
In addition to publishing and lecturing fre-
quently on the law throughout the United States,
Europe, and the Middle East, Lawrence Joseph has
published five collections of poetry, as well as nu-
merous critical articles and essays on contempo-
rary poetry and poets. His five books are Shouting
At No One (1983, winner of the Agnes Lunch Star-
rett Poetry Prize), Curriculum Vitae (1988), Before
Our Eyes (1993), Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Ta-
boos: Poems 1973–1993 (2005), and Into It (2005).
He is also the author of the acclaimed prose work
Lawyerland: What Lawyers Talk About When They
Talk About The Law (1997).
Like Wallace Stevens, an admitted influence,
Lawrence Joseph is concerned with poetry’s abil-
ity to present “things as they are”—that is, the
world of experience presented in vivid and inven-
tive language, but unfiltered by self-consciously
“poetic” embellishment. Reviews of Shouting At
No One and Curriculum Vitae praise the blend of
cultural influences and series of strong narrative
voices, such as the student narrator of “Stop Me
If I’ve Told You” (from CV), who in the middle
of a freezing January at Cambridge remembers a
Feast of St. Elias in Lebanon, linking the rituals of
religious faith with the often repetitive practices
of academic study: “while Beirut’s heavy moon /
and tin and cardboard houses / revolved behind
my eyes, / I danced one step forward / and, then,
one step to the side, / knelt, rose straightbacked /
upright in the beginnings / of some strange knowl-
edge / I thought was true.”
The remarkable “Sand Nigger,” also from C V,
presents the narrator’s childhood in a multilin-
gual Detroit home filled with relatives, detailing
a multitude of voices in conversation and argu-
ment with each other throughout the poem. The
narrator concludes by grappling with the racist
slur of the title, declaring himself an amalgam of
many cultures, which makes him appear strange
to observers unfamiliar with the Arabic and
American elements of his identity: “The name
fits: I am / the light-skinned nigger / with black
eyes and the look / difficult to figure... / nice
enough / to pass, Lebanese enough / to be against
his brother, / with his brother against his cousin, /
with cousin and brother / against the stranger.” In
subsequent books, Joseph’s poetic devices become
less narrative and more imagistic, often achieving
their effect by setting tightly described, seemingly
incongruous images in close proximity to each
other, as in “Over Darkening Gold” (from Before
Our Eyes), in which “The state of the state / con-
sumes the sublime ebony of the moon,” “Around
us wild metallic shimmering, / history, a subject,
inside the sky.”
In a self-composed contribution to his bio-
graphical entry in the Contemporary Authors se-
ries (written in the third person), Joseph writes
that “Two things remain constant throughout
his poetry: a preoccupation with how a poem
sounds—everything that’s said in a poem is spo-
ken by someone; voice for him is sensual—and an
acute formal sense of how voice (or intonation)
can be constructed.” Blending the “voices” of law,
religious faith, family, and multiple nations and
cultures, Joseph’s poetry draws attention to the di-
versity of voices with which Americans speak.
Joseph is the recipient of numerous awards
in poetry and law, including two National En-
dowment for the Arts poetry fellowships, a John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow-
ship, and a grant from the Employment Standards
Division of the U.S. Department of Labor for his
writing on workers’ compensation law.Bibliography
Contemporary Authors Online. “Lawrence Joseph.”
Gale, 2006. Reproduced in Biography Resource140 Joseph, Lawrence