Lawrence Joseph famous quotes

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#War #Imagination #Racism

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#Book #Ambition #Reality

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#War #Reality #Emotional

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#Memories #Book #Identity

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

#Reality #Violence #Poet

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#Eye #Poet #Heal

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#Choices #Catholic #Soul

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.
-- Lawrence Joseph

#Book #Struggle #Justice

To be nonviolent to human beings and to be a killer or enemy of the poor animals is Satan's philosophy. In this age there is always enmity against poor animals, and therefore the poor creatures are always anxious. The reaction of the poor animals is being forced on human society, and therefore there is always strain of cold or hot war between men, individually, collectively or nationally.

My favorite action movie growing up was 'Supergirl.' It wasn't good by any stretch of the imagination, but it was my favorite because I wanted to be her. I have a Supergirl tattoo.

I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.

The black man continues on his way. He plods wearily no longer-he is striding freedom road with the knowledge that if he hasn't got the world in a jug, at least he has the stopper in his hand.

Every time one of us starts talking about more effective immigration controls, somebody else throws up the Statue of Liberty, how we're a nation of immigrants and all of that. The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion.

Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color.”  - - Unknown “Racism rests upon and functions as a kind of seesaw: the persecutor rises by debasing and inferiorizing his victim.

How grateful I am That the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints has from its beginnings stood strongly against racism in any of its malignant manifestations

I believe racism has killed more people than speed, heroin, or cancer, and will continue to kill until it is no more.

Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.

Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black community in particular.