Katherine "Katy" Lederer is an American poet and author of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.
It should be everyone's right in a capitalist system to have some way to take advantage of compound interest.
I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).
Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in this river, I wonder, does anyone pray?
It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
The ghosts of Rilke and Wordsworth--along with the 300+ MFA programs, which now seem to employ all Living Poets--have misled the American public egregiously into thinking that poets are morally pure andor useless.
The sum of the parts equals less than the whole. Or the howl. Or the how. Or the hole.
We live in a capitalist system; anyone who believes they are above this system or purer than this system, even while shopping at the cute organic market across the street or taking a hiking vacation to Guatemala, is certifiable.
Poetry is God's work.
I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.
I remember when I was writing my memoir and I was worried about what other people would think when they read it, and my mother, who can be this incredibly wise person, said that it really didn't matter because strangers who read it would never meet me anyway, and people I knew were aware of my secrets.
What separates the professionally successful. . . from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
It is bizarre that some people can't understand how a serious poet could work at a finance firm. Goethe was a bureaucrat. Eliot worked as a banker.
There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit. As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.
When I moved to New York, the reputation just followed me, and I am regularly invited to play in home games, by writers in particular, though finance folk also invite me on occasion.
To think of the myriad ways that we live is to think of the ways that we die: Delinquent in our brains, in debt-- If we settle, then, our due account and walk through the forest, Will we finally be free?
I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are--the real boundaries.
I do not play the instrument In longing but in quest Not to be undertaken Not to be lost In a forest of bliss.