"Nowadays, you can't turn on the TV without some talking head telling you about the economy. Yet, in a world overrun by 'analysts,' only one man has the guts, the brains, and, quite frankly, the poetry to put it all in perspective.That man is Michael Silverstein... Silverstein is a true intellectual." — Gersh Kuntzman, The New York Post

"Few people have found much to laugh about in the stock market this year. Michael Silverstein is the exception. The Bard of the Bourse can find humor in losing money, globalization and stock options." — USA Today

More Of What The Critics Are Saying
About Silverstein's Verse

 

When all sectors of the economic establishment turn up in the media with forced smiles on their faces to assure us over and over that times are still really good, and that all we need do to keep things that way forever is to go on spending and having happy thoughts, you know that the economy is moving into very, very dangerous waters.

The challenge for a financial poet then becomes how to express these fears in verse. Or, from the perspective of this web site, what great poet’s work to "restructure" in order to get across these fears. Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach would do, of course (that darkling plain). Algernon Swinburne’s Before The Beginning of Years (man as a creature who sows but never reaps) would pass muster as well. If you really want to go apocalyptic, though, you have to opt for William Butler Yeats and his always eerie and scary The Second Coming.

In my rendering (and I do mean rend-ering) of this work, I was able to retain the original meter and rhyme, and even much of Yeat’s diction. But alas, his metaphor for the biblical Evil One who "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born" was beyond me. Who but Yeats, after all, could successfully identify poor posture as the outward Sign of the Beast?

The Next Recession

Sinking and sinking in a sickening swirl
Retail sales fall short of retailer goals;
Stock prices slide, well-run businesses fold;
Massive layoffs raise unemployment fears;
A loose-lipped faith in endless growth has died
Replaced by loud cries for costly bailouts;
Good deals lack all support, while ponzi schemes
Quickly acquire devoted followings.

Surely, the Invisible Fist is clenched;
Surely, the Next Recession has begun.
The Next Recession! Just the sound of these words
With their intimations of Social Upheavals
Scares me witless! all my senses tell me that
Some long neglected institution,
A festering financial backwater,
Is inching toward the edge, the black hole point
Where lies unreel to reveal hidden deserts.
Economic cycles rule: but all know
That after ten years of smug indulgence
Investor expectations are fiercely fixed
And though still cradled in addled dreams of wealth
Wake’ning soon, a beastly age will dawn.

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