Brooklyn/American Poet

OK, decided to hide my blog from search engines. Had only wanted this to be a diary for friends, that sort of thing... so... a diary for friends. Search-engine-hiding hasn't seemed to work, though... maybe someone out there is more geekie than I and knows how to fix this? In the meantime, finished American Poet essay... haven't heard from editor yet, but feeling great relief. Cleaned house from top to bottom... House now very clean. Bad Kitty sleeping under my legs, which are under the covers. Bad Kitty is very warm. He is also VERY BAD. Here is final essay (for now!)... I found thing I said at the end about LANGUAGE poetry interesting and reasonable, but it will probably piss someone off. For the record, however, I don't mean to say the LANGUAGE poets are responsible for the current financial crisis, no. (Thank god they never got access to any actual automated trading systems, though, that would have been a disaster...)

Dangerous Magicians:
Speculations About Money and Poetry
Katy Lederer
DRAFT

“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, which, as Dana Gioa remarks, is “not an allegory, but a metaphor.... Money is the one thing in society you can turn into almost anything else.” Or, as Kant says, money “represents all goods, since it is conceived as a universally accepted mere means of commerce [and has] no value in itself as opposed to things which are goods.” In other words, money—perhaps contrary to popular belief—is fundamentally neutral, a figure or lens, a means by which we magnify our motives and desires (in this it is a form of humanism). There is a kind of nonsense to it—money (“a poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Stevens also wrote). It can be like religion (a conveyance of prayer) or language (a means of expression) or love (one can lose oneself in it). I do not fault money for my desires, though society may fault me for desiring to have money. It isn’t money that’s the root of all evil—no that’s a form of humanist self-loathing—it is the love of money that’s the root. There must be a passion, a surfeit, some kind of excess to make money qua money a sin; in this, it is really like anything else.

Or not—for it is this very quality, this representational facility, that makes money precisely unlike so much else. It is everything or nothing, what you want and what you cannot have. It is made and made-up—and sometimes painfully un-made. We agree to believe all those pieces of paper are actually worth what is written upon them until we no longer believe. The influential economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote:

There is very little in economics that invokes the supernatural, but by one phenomenon many have been tempted. In looking at a rectangular piece of paper, on frequent occasion of indifferent quality, featuring a national hero or monument or carrying a classical design with overtones of Peter Paul Reubens, Jacques Louis David… they have been assailed by the question: Why is anything intrinsically so valueless so obviously desirable?... Surely some magic is involved; certainly some metaphysical or extraterrestrial explanation of its value is required. The priestly reputation and tendency of people who make a profession of knowing about money have been noted. Partly it is because such people are thought to know why valueless paper has no value. [1]

In its sheer malleability, its creative force, money is as human as language [2] and yet we have historically believed that it is evil, supernatural—a trick. Consider the following passages from Act 1 of the second half of Goethe’s Faust, which take place after Mephistopheles has persuaded a financially desperate Kaiser to start printing paper money (“the heaven-sent leaf”):

Chancellor:
Listen! and look upon the heaven-sent leaf,
That into joy hash changed a people’s grief.
“To all whom it concerneth,” and so forth:—
This note of hang, that purports to be worth
A thousand crowns, subjects to such demand
The boundless treasure buried in the land.
[….]

Kaiser:
Audacity unheard of!—foul deceit!
Who signed the Emperor’s name to such vile cheat?
[….]

Treasurer:
Forget you, Sir, the writing is your own?
This last night you were in the character
Of Pan: we saw the Chancellor prefer
The suit. He said, “A few strokes of your pen
Will bless the people over whom you reign.
Do make them happy on this festal night.”
And then you did take up the pen and write.
No time was lost. A thousand artists plied,
A thousandfold the scroll was multiplied;
And that the good to every one might fall,
We stamped at once the series, one and all.
[….]
The alphabet! What is it to this sign?—
To this “hoc signo vinces” note of thine?
[….]

Mephistopheles:
Once used to them, men will have nothing but
These leaves—so easy to receive and spend;
And the realm circulates, from this hour out,
Jewels, and gold, and paper to no end.

Riddled with not-so-subtle allusions to writing (we see notes, signs, a taking up of a pen and a multiplication of a scroll; there is a climactic mention of the alphabet and an equivalency made between “jewels and gold” and “paper to no end”), these passages draw a clear parallel between the making of money and the production of literature. They also illustrate nicely the distrust with which both the making of money and the making of literature have been met by the wider society; both processes appear to the common observer alchemical in nature, supernaturally creative. Like the makers of money to whom, as Galbraith observes, we have historically assigned a kind of priestly stature, the writers of verse have been regarded by the larger society with a mixture of envy and awe, loathing and reverence.

Historically, the dialogue—both aesthetic and political—between money and poetry has been a fascinating one. The great works of antiquity—the Bible and many of the major Greek and Latin epics—display not only a comfort but also an authorial facility with money, the marketplace, and international economics. The Bible, particularly the New Testament (the climactic passage of which is, of course, the exchange of coins for information on Jesus’s whereabouts), is littered with references to money and commerce, and epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey would make no sense without a clearly drawn backdrop of world economic affairs.

The Renaissance was a golden age for poetry incorporating money as a theme (in part because metaphysical poetry, with its penchant for conceit, found money—the figure of the coin in particular—an attractively versatile, multivalent symbol). “When all Birds els do of their musick faile/ Money’s the still-sweet-singing Nightingale,” Robert Herrick wrote in a paean to the constancy of money, while John Donne (1572-1631) in his major poem “Love’s Usury,” employs the metaphors of banking to poeticize romantic yearning and inconstancy: “This bargain’s good; if when I’m old, I be/ Inflamed by thee,/If thine own honour, or my shame and pain,/ Thou covet most, at that age thou shalt gain.” Shakespeare is similarly facile with the tropes of economics and money, Sonnet IV being particularly jam-packed with economic terminology (likely the only occasion the word “audit” has been used in a major lyric poem):

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tomb’d with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.

In contrast to the metaphysical Renaissance writers, who enthusiastically employed the figures, metaphors, and language of economics and commerce in their verse, the English Romantics generally eschewed such tropes, preferring to structure their poems around images and figures of country life. (Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” are two excellent examples.) Even Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us,” which famously invokes commerce, does so only as a contrastive device—a way to highlight the superiority of the country over the city, the natural over the artificial, the mythic over the banally commercial. He admonishes the reader.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Many of our most public contemporary poets—figures like Robert Pinsky, Frank Bidart, and Louis Gluck (as their Confessionalist predecessors Lowell, Bishop, and Plath also did)—continue to work in the Romantic tradition, employing the figures and tropes of domestic country life in order to elaborate upon inner intellectual and emotional states. Whether by choice or by tradition (probably by both), figures such as these have perpetuated a Romantic bias against the employment of tropes of money and commerce in poetry, and the general public has seemed to neither notice or care. I cannot think of a single Poet Laureate who has made issues of class, commerce, or economics one of the cornerstones of his or her laureateship, even though one might argue that issues of class and, by extension, access to quality education, are at the heart of poetry’s limited popularity in this country.

On the more experimental side of the aesthetic divide over the last two hundred years, there has been a greater openness to the employment of tropes of class and money in poetry. Modernists like Pound (in the Cantos in particular; he also authored a book, now out of print, called the ABCs of Economics), Eliot, Stein, and Stevens were, either biographically or aesthetically (again, often both), inclined to include the economic and commercial in their work. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” is at once an anti-Humanist and anti-Romantic poem, employing tropes of both (an “unreal”) city and (a menacing) country in order to admonish and at the same time mourn the impoverished spirituality of contemporary man.

Formal experimentalists Auden and Larkin continue in the anti-Humanist, anti-Romantic Eliotic tradition, refining an aesthetics of great erudition combined with a post-Nietzschean spiritual nihilism; both employ the tropes of money and commerce to witheringly brilliant effect in their most famous poems. Auden’s “Fall of Rome” references “absconding tax-defaulters,” “temple prostitutes” and mutinying “muscle-bound Marines” using a diffident, notably anti-lyrical tone only to end with an obviously ironic—and patently anti-Romantic—bucolic scene: “Altogether elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ Miles and miles of golden moss,/ Silently and very fast.” Larkin, in his poem “Money” uses a similar strategy, musing rather banally in the body of the poem on his titular theme only to end with a sudden burst of Romantic high lyricism:

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don't keep it upstairs.
By now they've a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

–In fact, they've a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can't put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won't in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

“Money” was published in 1971, a point at which the dialogue between money and poetry gets at once more convoluted and more interesting. Whereas pre-’70s poetry was—whether “raw” or “cooked” to use Lowell’s terminology—generally relatively easy for a typical college-educated reader to digest, post-’70s poetry fragmented into several often vehemently opposing aesthetic camps. Previous to 1970, the post-Romantic Confessionals were writing and publishing alongside the similarly content-based and accessible Beat, Black Mountain, and San Francisco Renaissance poets (Ashbery’s The Double Dream of Spring was published in 1970; Robert Grenier’s famous speech-act “I HATE SPEECH” appeared in This magazine in 1971), but post-1970, a poetics developed that, though legible to the readership of die-hard poetry aficionados and lovers of the writings of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, was generally opaque to the common reader.

The aesthetics of LANGUAGE poetry and the more sophisticated strains of the New York School were consciously derivative (which I would here define as the reliance on the previous generation’s work and an extra-poetic contemporary discourse to provide a working aesthetic vocabulary for a reader; the individual works do not tell you how to read them) of their Modernist precursors. Speculation and generative chance operations replaced “inspiration” or other traditional instigators of poetic composition, and a consciously discursive poetics was developed to at once generate and explicate the poems. Finally, the mimeo- and small-press revolutions allowed the poets unprecedented access to the resources required to publish one another, which produced to some a symphony and to others a welter of small-run periodicals and books.

While experimental poetry was developing in all of these interesting, and historically unprecedented, directions, strikingly similar changes were happening in the world of trading and money. Just as what amounted to a high-post-modernist aesthetic was being developed, so too were new technologies being invented in the field of high finance. Algorithmic trading—the sophisticated use of computer programs to generate and execute trades—was introduced to the markets in the early 1970s when the “designated order turnaround system” or “DOT” was brought into the New York Stock Exchange. This was the beginning of modern high finance, and the parallels are fascinating. In both fields—poetry and finance—the 1970s and ’80s saw the proverbial “death of the author.” Whereas LANGUAGE POETRY did away with the idea of an inspired composer of brief subjective lyrics in favor of a highly algorithmic, operational producer of texts, finance did away with the figure of the brilliant but impossibly temperamental trader in favor of the cool-headed, operational quant. Both fields saw the rise of particular technologies (email, cheap off-set printing; high-capacity computers and trading systems) revolutionize the content and form of their productions; and both also saw the availability of these technologies expand the scope of their fields such that any one contributor could be dwarfed by the volume and scale of the projects they might reasonably undertake. In both cases poesis—literally “making”—became at once more esoteric and more powerful. In so many ways, after 1970, both the makers of money and the makers of literature became even more dangerous magicians.

The poet Robert Graves famously remarked that, just as “there’s no money in poetry, [...] there’s no poetry in money [either].” In the contemporary milieu, in which both money and poetry can be generated at the touch of a finger, and in which, even in the world of lyric poetry, persona trumps autobiographical subjectivity (just as derivative instruments trump underlying assets), such a witty pronouncement sounds a bit like a marketing slogan—unsubtle, unsophisticated, closed. And yet it harks back to time in which both money and poetry operated on a smaller scale, after the birth of humanism, but before the death of the author. It harks back to a Renaissance subjectivity—a subjectivity that not coincidentally developed alongside the rise of the great banking family of the Medici—and in this it is certainly quaint.

In the spirit of the age, I now perform an algorithmic operation. I am looking for a quotation with which to end my roughly 2,500-word essay on the subject of poetry and money: “money poetry magician” I Google, and here is what I get: “Money,” by David Keig, from the website poemhunter.com. Poem in its entirety: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/money-31/

* * *

Notes:

[1] Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went. Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston. 1975, p. 62. “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled,” he also wrote.

[2] I like this quote from Gertrude Stein. You can’t tell if she is kidding: “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing that no animal can do is count, and the thing that no animal can know is money.” The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1936.

Phew. Exorcised.