Overview

Stevens wrote that poems are the cries of their occasions. In ""Money Is The Muse of Contrition,"" the cries taken on varied shapes and sounds. Some echo the sonnets of Bernadette Mayer and Ted Berrigan. Some work through Stein's domestic epic, Tender Buttons and some end up as lyric meditations on the brutal vagaries of the market (""Season of mists and mellow derivatives/Time of the lighter than air."") and the intimacies of love. And though the occasions of the poems can be different, engaging politics, philosophy and the snap, crackle, pop of the everyday, they are shadowed by the financial meltdown of 2008: ""We can afford/The house but not the school/The car but not the repairs and/We need the deck we're paying/For. Well look at/That it's history."" Thick with offhand allusion and the illusions of contemporary verse, some of the poems are witty (""Possession is fully 9/10s of my life""), some are grimmer (""I hoped/Lucia would be Lulu call/Her Leah call her Ushi call/Her the ukase of my desires I'm/ Going crazy with time"") and some betray real hope (""The Messiah arrives in the shape/Of a fly he's/Not only an annoyance he's also/An advance""). In all events, whether funny or elllipticcal, they all speak of ramifications-- the ramifications of money and the ""brashest/ ramifications of mood.""

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Reviews

This collection is a succession of unabashed and guilty pleasures. The sprezzatura of Kaufmann's language, how he casually torques the personal and everyday into the realm of the metaphysical, socio-political, and ethical, and then chills us with moments of breath-stopping lyricism, surprise, or perfectly calibrated wit, leaves a reader asking ""how did he do that?"" -Mark Scroggins Where has David Kaufmann's poetry been all my life? Many of us know his essential critical writing, and it turns out that his poetry launches off the page in the same direction. These poems are beautifully made loops of terse, witty, insights into our political and intimate worlds. In other words, what's not to like?! We might have / Equity out the old / Whazzoo but cash my friend's / The problem. We are / Not liquid. We do not / Flow. We cannot rise / To the tide. These poems are one swell critique of capitalism that capitalism will find hard to swallow, to digest. -Robert Fitterman

Author Information

David Kaufmann, an eighth-generation New Yorker, attended Princeton and Yale Universities and has been teaching literature at George Mason University since 1989. He is the author of three academic monographs (The Business of Common Life [1995]; Telling Stories: The Later Works of Philip Guston [2010]; and Reading Uncreative Writing [2017]; a number of articles on literature and Critical Theory as well as close to one hundred reviews and newspaper features. His poetry has appeared in, amongst other places, Tupelo Quarterly, Flashpoint!, Drunken Boat; Glitter Pony; Trilobite and Lute & Drum. He lives with his wife. an expert in nuclear nonproliferation, outside Washington, DC.

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