OK, the subtext of money worries there will lead directly
to this poem, "Money."
There's an epigraph by Gertrude Stein.
"I am I because my little dog knows me."
There's lots of Monopoly references,
which everybody knows.
You do have another reference here that I'll explain.
Fair use is a term specifying how many lines
you can quote from copyrighted poetry
without having to pay the publisher.
If you go over fair use, you're supposed to pay.
And the opening thing that Wallace Stevens
says in this poem is a quote from Wallace Stevens.
And I guess you also need to know that Wallace Stevens is
no longer alive.
OK, "Money."
"I am I because my little dog knows me.
Wallace Stevens says money is a kind of poetry.
So I offered to trade him Tennessee, States, and Water
Works for Boardwalk and Park Place and the four Railroads.
He thinks he'll pass.
Do it, I say, and I'll quote you.
Do, says he.
Mesdames, one might believe that Shelley lies less in the stars
than in their earthly wake, since the radiant disclosures
that you make are of an eternal vista, manqué, and gold,
and brown, an Italy of the mind, a place
of fear before the disorder of the strange,
a time in which the poet's politics
will rule in a poet's world.
Yet that will be a world impossible for poets,
who complain and prophesy, in their complaints,
and are never of the world in which they live.
Yes, he says.
Gorgeous.
I'm throwing in Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
Go on.
I can't, I say.
But do, says he.
Fair use, I say.
But all use is fair to one such as I, says he.
Con-tin-u-e.
No, I say.
11 lines.
Any more and I'll have to write to Vintage, which I really
don't want to do.
But that's nothing, he says.
11 lines out of 187.
He says, I'll give you Marvin Gardens, Ventnor, Atlantic.
That was the present, the poetic present tense,
a nonfinancial play space, overheard.
Money has tenses.
It has absolute meaning in the present, no past,
and its future meaning, interest rates,
reflects the degree to which the future is expected
to resemble the present.
Writing has tenses.
The past tense makes the most money--
novels, reporting.
The future is for prophecy-- crop forecasts,
pennant predictions.
The present continually has to borrow credit.
I am I because I say so and my little audience knows me.
Wow, says Basket.
Wow, wow, wow.
How much money does it cost to know
that Basket was a series of dogs owned by Gertrude Stein?
Nothing now.
I give-- I will give Basket the following bone.
All past tense.
There once was a man, a very poor poet,
who used to write poems that no one read.
One evening, after working all day on an especially poor poem,
he fell asleep in despair at the sterility of his imagination
and the bleakness of his chances of making it as a writer.
He had just typed the lines, 'The sky was mauve and as far
away as a $10 bill.'
He awoke with a start.
The dim light from a small full moon
was shining down at a 45-degree angle
on his hands and the typewriter keyboard.
He had slept two or three hours.
Instinctively, he looked up to the page.
It was his last piece of paper, but it was gone.
The moon shone on the bare roller.
Then he saw the page beside the typewriter.
He must have taken it out before he dozed off, he thought.
When he picked it up to put it back in the typewriter,
he noticed a small slip of paper sliding off the top.
Money!
He stood up and snapped on the light.
A real $10 bill, green and crisp.
He felt elated.
His first reader, a realist who nevertheless
appreciated his metaphors or similes or whatever they were.
Real money!
Still inspired, the next morning he
bought The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
and two pieces of paper.
That evening, he wrote a careful 20-line poem
and went to sleep expectantly.
The next morning, nothing.
He put the last piece of paper in the machine and began a poem.
'The girl took $20 from her mother's purse.'
It was followed by 49 more lines describing an approach to sex
and the experience of alienation.
It ended, 'Dew beaded the windshield.'
Sure enough, the next morning there was a $20 bill on the page
and a check mark next to the final line,
which he took to mean 'good.'
He went out and bought Ulysses and The Words and, confidently,
a single piece of paper.
One was all he would need.
Late in the afternoon, he popped open a Bud
and began to type away cheerily.
He waited until he was 2/3 of the way
to the bottom of the page before mentioning the sum of $40, which
of course, he received the next morning, the two 20's
placed neatly on top of the page lying beside the typewriter.
There was no check mark, but he didn't mind so much.
He did have a slight headache from the beer.
Needless to say, he made lots of money.
The check marks were irregular and, in truth,
not all that plentiful.
Many of what he thought of as his best passages
remain checkless, while some of the low watermarks
apparently went over well.
But he was pretty stoic about it.
He was always paid in cash, even when he mentioned sums
in five figures.
One day, when his library was almost complete,
he had bought My Life and Vice that afternoon.
He felt a strange stirring in his stomach
or teeth or forearms.
He couldn't pin it down.
He wanted to shop.
He grabbed the $1,600 from the night before,
stuffed it in his billfold, and went out
to find a grocery store and an electronics store.
Food and TV, why not?
He was productive, well off.
His work was read.
Why not relax?
His first stop was The Good Guys.
He had a long talk with a salesman about the makes.
It boiled down to Mitsubishi versus Sony.
He was naive, but the salesman was there to help.
He decided on a Sony.
He wasn't going to get remote control,
but it was part of the package.
How was he going to pay?
Cash, he said.
He worried that it would draw a funny look, but it didn't.
He reached into his pocket.
And to his horror, the bills he saw in his billfold
were Monopoly money--
two orange 500's, four yellow 100's, and four blue 50's.
He looked at the salesman, whose hair he
noticed was exceptionally neat.
The poor poet thought of the sheet of white paper
waiting for him in the roller.
He had been thinking of getting a computer sometime soon.
But now he just wanted to get out of the store
and relate to the somber physicality of the typewriter.
He had already waited a couple of seconds too long to pay.
He gave the salesman an orange 500.
Where are you parked? the salesman
asked, as he handed the sales slip and the bill to a woman
at one of the cash registers.
Oh, said the poet, truly at a loss.
I didn't bring a car.
You can pick it up tomorrow, said the salesman.
Just bring your sales slip.
Wow, says Basket, but only one wow.
I ask him about Gertrude.
He says, she wrote for money too.
Every word."