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by David Kaufmann (Author)
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."
