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Metaphors of meltdown: The poet of money who saw it coming
If the outgoing year will be remembered for a crisis that looked highly improbable, it may also be known for a poet who sounds highly unlikely — a poet of high finance. Katy Lederer, who worked for six years at one of the world’s biggest hedge funds — DE Shaw and Co — manages to rhyme finance almost with romance, investing money with a yearning and daily business with a heartache. Her economy of emotions applies to the leveraged reality of today’s world: “I’ve brought you all these presents which I’ve placed beneath this/Flowering tree:/Bright red box, bright blue box, and a small vial of Botox.”
Her collection of poems, The Heaven-sent Leaf, bears on the present financial crisis by coincidence rather than comment as it was written much earlier but published just a few months ago. Yet Lederer’s poems sound like a voiceover for the September spectacle of banks collapsing in Europe and the US. Her poems are prescient of the crisis not because they prefigure a developing dystopia, but because they find moral hollows in midtown Manhattan that send warning echoes.
Of literary narratives of money, there have been mainly two kinds; its mereness, and its sheerness. Lederer constructs a third narrative of money; its queerness. Money in her poetry is a phantom that has lost connect with its actual referent, overreached its value, and appropriated emotional exchanges: “There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit/As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.”
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