Robert Graves once remarked that just as there is no money in poetry, there is no poetry in money. But Katy Lederer sees it differently. Lederer has just published “The Heaven-Sent Leaf,” a collection of poetry animated by the idea of the economic bubble. “It’s so dry when you read it in the papers, but, really, it’s mythic,” she said recently, on a day that the stock market had dropped three hundred and seventy points. “It’s Icarus, it’s ‘Faust,’ it’s Eros and vanitas. It’s ‘Star Wars’!” If this is not a formula for literary success, it’s good market timing, at least; she might be the John Paulson of verse.
For the past six years, Lederer, who is thirty-six and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has worked at D. E. Shaw, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with thirty-six billion dollars under its management. The other day, in her apartment in Prospect Heights, she recalled her decision to take the job: “Everyone I knew in the poetry world was pretty confused, like maybe I had gone crazy.” She had already published a volume of poetry and a memoir, “Poker Face,” which describes her coming-of-age in a family of gamblers (her siblings Howard Lederer and Annie Duke are two of the world’s best poker players). Still, facing her thirtieth birthday, she was bouncing between illegal sublets and living on part-time jobs and peanut-butter sandwiches. “I wanted money,” she said.
At first, Lederer’s two lives—the creative and the corporate—remained separate; she was another one of New York’s day jobbers, leaving her writing each morning to toil in “pristine white hallways,” as a line from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” puts it. Meanwhile, her fortunes rose along with the fund’s; she became vice-president of recruiting, earning a salary that was “multiples of what many creative-writing professors I know make.”
Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.
The results were the beginnings of “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” (BOA Editions), whose title takes its name from a passage in “Faust” describing money. The book explores not just economic bubbles but metaphysical bubbles—the highs and lows of love, religious ecstasy, and aesthetic rapture. In “The Flower of Life” (the title is from Wharton), Lederer writes:
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?
The poems are tense and flinty (a review in Publishers Weekly praised their “viscous push-pull between money and Eros”). From her insider’s vantage point, Lederer said, she could see that this most recent bubble was bound to explode. “It was in the air three years ago. Like, at work everyone knew,” she recalled. “Even I could tell it was going to happen. I wondered, why would people trade if they knew the bubble would burst? That’s what the whole book is about.”
“Intimacy,” probably the first love poem to cite the nineteen-eighties junk-bond king Michael Milken, describes Milken’s “pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart.” Lederer said she views Milken as a “Gollum-like” figure. “He was a creative genius, the way that he packaged debt,” she said. “In finance, that makes you Mozart. Ultimately, however, that was also his downfall.”
Just before Labor Day, Lederer left the hedge fund, though she continues to do freelance recruiting for financial firms. She is now on a twenty-eight-city book tour. (She’s paying for it herself.) Still, she said, she hasn’t been writing much. “I’ve been watching my 401k go up and down.” ♦
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