The deeps the agencies of money spring from are as mystical, as unavailable to analysis and definition, as are those of poetry, and the surface operations of both money and poetry spell out into such vast systems of differentiation and similitude, that I feel excused, in a short piece, to confine my attention to a single thread or axis through these complexes; I mean, the transformative agency of these two.
Societies formed or founded on altruistic or utopian fictions (poetic fictions) often prove temporary, and not just societies, but causes coming out of pure good and tending toward pure good seem often shallow, unworkable, or forced, and are almost always in deficit, and in need of pure contribution. There is little transforming in such systems: the good is made good or better. A reality underlying altruism is made clear in a recent poem of mine:
Resolve
We must work
in the spirit
of unity and
cooperation; I’ll supply
the unity and
you supply the
cooperation.
Nonimpositional liveliness comes from the so-called negative emotions. Societies in which the members are allowed to devise systems answering to greed, competition, fury, repression, egotism are generally fully energized. The agencies of money answer and enable the tendencies of “negative” feelings so as to provide transformative possibilities potentially and usually strengthening to the whole society, some imbalance and exploitation unavoidable, of course, but correctable.
Poetry, I think, plays a similar role, moving the feelings of marginality, of frustration, of envy, hatred, anger into verbal representations that are formal, structuring, sharable, revealing, releasing, social, artful. These negative situations, truly and appropriately represented, alert our sympathies for and knowledge of misfortune and terrible isolation so that we can act individually toward real situations and real people, where the rhetoric of altruism is nearly mindless automatism.
Money, like poetry, though inexhaustibly entertainable and entertaining, has its limitations, of course. Where there is little money, there is unrealistic expectation. Money is direly sweet where it is needed and a boring abundance where it is not needed. Poetry dances in neglect, waste, terror, hopelessness—wherever it is hard to come by. But too much poetry, or what passes for poetry, sickens the stomach. In the reconciliations of opposite states, in the uninhibited negotiations between states that money and poetry facilitate, we have cultural systems that give nothing up as negative and that transform what is negative into useful and meaningful parlances.
“Making Change” first appeared in Epoch 38, no. 2 (1989): 138-39.