So all of you Brah readers should take note: there’s a thing out there that people read and enjoy called “poetry.” Some people actually write it. Steve Five does. This is first time in the long and illustrious history of Brahrecords.com that I’ve allowed someone to pinch hit for me in Katchin’ Up with Kid. I thought because Steve Five is a brah while he writes poetry he would be the perfect person to interview my old friend Katy Lederer. Katy and I went to high school together in the wilds of New Hampshire. I think we got into some trouble together. She was the cool upper “former” (in the stilted terminology of our prep school) who sometimes hung tight with the younger set. I lost touch with Katy but discovered recently that she’s been doing some scribbling that puts all y’all’s efforts to shame. I know it’s not a competition but she still wins! Sorry! Get over it.

Katy “just” released (a year ago) a great book called The Heaven Sent Leaf on BOA Editions—a publisher out of Rochester, NY—I’ve been there. To Rochester, not to BOA Editions – but I’d like to visit! There are some good places to play music in Rochester and some great hot dogs. Apparently there are also a couple people who publish poetry! I’ve never met them but perhaps I will someday.

So Katy and I hung out and I watched her read at an event nearer to the book’s publication. Dudes I have to say that Katy was the best reader there – and I’m not even her father so I can say that and it’s pretty accurate. The other thing that is super rad is that Katy gave us some EXCLUSIVE poems that she thought the Brah readership would LOVE. Since I’m the only one that reads (and re-reads) this stuff – she was right. I’m not sure how we’re gonna display them but by the time you (meaning me) is reading this it will have been decided. I wonder what we figure out!

Steve Five is a songwriter and lead singer/guitarist in the New York based band The Library is on Fire. He writes great stuff as well but this isn’t about him.

Steve 5: So, you are a former hedge fund manager?

Katy Lederer: Well, you’re close… I was a former manager at a hedge fund, but not a “hedge fund manager”—I didn’t manage the money; rather, I managed much of the recruiting function. I was the manager at the hedge fund who sought out the “hedge fund managers.”

The Good

To write about the good.

That there is nothing more attractive and more boring.

If I touch it with my language, will it grow or bend or disappear?

Was it waiting behind the dark doorway, jaws coiling like springs

at the innocent ears?

In the back of the cab, we make out, our limbs fingers, the two of us

big, hulking hands.

We thrash and lick our lips with our incendiary lust.

If everyone were good, they’d all be boring and attractive.

No, I am not good.

You are not good.

S5: I know John Giorno was a stockbroker turned poet—do you feel there are any kindred spirits to your approach of the theme of money? Are there even any poets you’ve found who write on the theme in more than a passing way?

Katy Lederer: Yes and no. Certainly, as I was writing, I felt it was an unusual topic for lyric poetry. I didn’t feel it was “appropriate” or “decorous,” and in many regards, this was precisely what drew me to it. After writing the series, however, I did some research and found a very rich (pun intended) history of poetry around the topic of money. Shakespeare, for instance, wrote a great deal using the conceit of money. It seems the topic became more gauche when Wordsworth came along and admonished his readership “the world is too much with us.” It didn’t really come back as a proper topic of poetry until Pound and the modernists, who, in their efforts to countenance post-industrial society, grappled with the power of money and commerce. After the Beats, of course, there are myriad poets dealing with issues of money and class; that said these treatments have generally not been lyrical in nature.

Beautiful Feelings

One is low, the other high. Like art.

One crass. The other reticent.

I speak of these beautiful feelings, though the archangel Michael

would correct me with a trumpet-blast:

That the body at birth is just an ugly, dripping skein, so we do our best

to write the flesh away:

“He was gone,” wrote sad Zelda Fitzgerald. “They had been much in love.” And:

“Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold….

When one really can’t stand anymore, the limits are transgressed,

and one thing has become another.” Or:

As Humbert Humbert complains at the end of Lolita: “I was nothing to her but

twelve inches of engorged brawn.”

We speak, but little comes of it.

Beyond this speech, the sad, sad brain, soft white, like an overpriced light bulb.

In the picture I saw in the slick magazine, the brain appeared studded after

flushings with an SSRI.

It looked just like the broken bridge that sprawls just down the hill from me,

hoary black with little threaded screws to keep it from falling to pieces.

I suppose this, then, is happiness: the neurons firing blissfully, the dendrites

put to pleasant rest. Or:

As Oscar Wilde once said: “A cynic is someone who knows the price of

everything and the value of nothing.”

S5: Wallace Stevens—Money is a kind of poetry. What do you think of that line?

Katy Lederer: I love that aphorism. To my mind it is of a piece with another aphorism of his: “a poem need not have a meaning and, like most things in nature, often does not have.” Stevens understood that great writing is not about what we already know, but about what we don’t—at least consciously—know (in this, he was like Keats).

S5: Your book seems to have been published at a very opportune (or inopportune, depending on how you look at it) time. What do you think of the recession, its causes and consequences? Did you see it coming? How has it affected or inspired your poetry since the book’s release?

Katy Lederer: Like many others, I saw it coming on some level. Quants I knew would often say they had looked at various spreadsheets (quants focus more on statistical patterns in the markets than on the underlying assets themselves) and said something was “off”—that certain numbers made no sense in relation the others. More concretely, I saw poet friends of mine who made $20,000 or $30,000 a year clearing $300,000 on real estate deals, and this struck me as incongruous. Manhattan seemed a frightening apparatus to me then—a machine built to take people’s money.

Regarding my own creativity, this recession has shut me down. I am a believer in the unconscious (or, to take the Freudian edge off, in Keats’ concept of negative capability). When I was writing the poems in the book, we were still mid-boom and I was lyrically channeling a lot of what was going on beneath the surface. Now that the bubble has burst and that surface has dissolved, I am seized. The entire culture, I would argue, has been seized.

S5: Would you characterize money as operating in the same way as, say, God, or some ultimate power? Perhaps that isn’t the right way to phrase the question to get into this subject – but a poem like “Parable of House and Broom”, for example, seems to paint the natural world as indifferent, hostile. Running with the theme of money, do you feel these two subjects – the natural world and money – share similar intrinsic qualities?

“Stromatolite”

means “bed of rock.” But really, you are one and one.

You’re single-celled and lonely in your prehistoric colony.

You’re context. You're derivative.

You make this bed of rock by troping upward toward the sun.

You make this bed of rock by shrinking back into bed once the darkness

has come.

Each day a little sand gets packed.

One on top of the other, over billions of years, you make of yourselves

in the tide pool a bed.

So they call you “the Precambrian Mason.” So they call you “the first life

on earth.”

Stupidity to then evolve, to run through the lobby and get on the lift,

the sun draping over Times Square like a kerchief, the dust in the air

spraying out like a sneeze.

Going up and then down. Going up and then down.

Oh dear S., what if the sun will rise, what if the sun will set?

What if, as we trope toward each other at night, we find that in our hearts

there is no sun?

O Stromatolite, why must you make this bed of rock!

Katy Lederer: Yes, you are the first interviewer or reviewer to draw this parallel [THAT’S BRAH RECORDS DOT COM FOR YA! – Editor]. I was very much thinking of the concept of money as operating in a very similar way in our culture to the concept of God—as an aporia, a place to insert our ideals. Money, in my mind, is a neutral concept/object. The way in which it is used is reflective of the values of the people who exchange it. This is not to say money doesn’t exist in a dialectical relationship to the culture—that, as Marx would have it, money itself isn’t a corrupting force, but it is to say, as the old Biblical saw goes, money is not the root of all evil, it’s the love of money that’s the root.

S5: The poet Rene Char once said he believed that a poet should not write for a living – that a poet should always carry on a vocation other than poetry. Do you believe this to be a good belief? For instance, should a serious poet stay away from a vocation in which writing is central, or teaching writing for example?

Katy Lederer: Teaching is a noble profession. I don’t think it’s problematic for any single poet to teach. I do, however, think it’s incredibly problematic that almost all serious poets teach. I was in an anthology of eighty-five younger American poets (poets with three books or fewer), for instance, and I think I was one of four poets included who did not teach for a living; since the anthology came out (2006), I believe two of the non-teaching poets have gone into academia. This cannot be good for poetry.

I also believe discomfort (AKA suffering) contributes to good art. A poet teaching at a university can be a little too much like a goldfish in a goldfish bowl. Round and round and round, and nothing doing.