In a recent piece on Commonweal’s website, Anthony Domestico proposed that the work of the New York poet Lawrence Joseph “bridges the gap between two very different conceptions of modern poetry: the meditative, self-interrogating poetry of Stevens and the fractured, history-interrogating poetry of Pound.”

The piece is apt and instructive; in 1500 words, a third of them words from Joseph’s own poetry and prose, Domestico sketches the running conflict between Team Stevens and Team Pound – a key divide in contemporary poetry – and plausibly presents Joseph as a poet who belongs prominently to both.

It’s a measure of the strength of Joseph’s poetry that it can bear the weight of such an analysis; and it’s a further measure that the poetry can suggest to me a wholly different pair of terms and seems to reconcile those as well – the poetry of modern cities, pulsing with the yearnings and ill-gotten gains of their large populations, and the poetry of inwardness we associate with religious devotion, the poet as a person intentionally set apart from the crowd.  

Joseph’s poem “A Fable,” in the current New Yorker, passes movingly from one to the other.   The first part of the poem is a streetscape, data and capital surging through the crooked streets of old New York.   The second part, announcing the whole as a fable, is (like many New Yorker poems) a work of art about art – but it calls out the artistry of the first part, the streets gathering “the light in majestic degrees.”

For several years now Joseph has been constructing an extraordinary new book poem by poem – poems published in Granta, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Commonweal right now is as well stocked with writers attuned to literature as at any time in its history: Domestico, Matthew Sitman, and Matthew Boudway, joining Celia Wren and Rand Richards Cooper.  

It suggests that the hoped-for state of things is actual just now – that great poetry and great criticism are calling one another forth.