It’s a calm and sparkling day in North London, the weather mockingly at odds with the language of gloom and panic suffusing the papers and airwaves. Money, Wallace Stevens once suggested, is a kind of poetry, and there’s been an epic quality to the epithets and prophecies with which commentators have attempted to convey the enormity of this week’s carnage. I’ve always relished fiscal terms, and my first book, Landlocked, includes a poem called ‘Super Black Thursday’ which attempted to capture the feel of late ‘80s financial mayhem:
Across the city
Terminals are ablaze with the absurd news,
The markets shooting out in all directions,
In random, jagged leaps. Your eyes are
Seized by dysfunction.
This week’s plunging graphs and uncomprehending, incomprehensible commentators suggested to me another facet of Wallace Stevens’s famous equation – despite centuries of sophisticated economic and critical discourse, money and poetry remain on some level utterly mysterious. Listening to a financial wizard trying to explain some rare form of derivative transported me back to a seminar in which some expert in avant-garde poetry tried to explain in layman’s terms the work of Jeremy Prynne. Of course, if your pension handlers had invested your all in that rare, and now worthless, form of derivative, you might want to question Stevens’s analogy. Poetry does occasionally get blamed for plunging nervy types into despondency and madness, to use a phrase of Wordsworth’s, but more often it’s seen as therapeutic, as enabling self-expression, as fomenting that precious commodity, confidence, which all those speculators have so mysteriously lost. You can see where this is going… those G8 leaders must modify their bail-out plans, the trillions on offer must be tied with an extra condition: the daily production of a sonnet, sestina, villanelle or equivalent by every city trader, from the lowliest spiv to the most exalted CEO.
— Mark Ford