Suggesting Meaning

I came across a poem online today, at Anti-, by Amit Majmudar. It's called "Money Shots" and begins with the following lines:

Money grows the way stars die, and stars die
the way hearts beat: white-dwarf systole, red-
giant diastole keeping the flow
of capital as capillaries lined with the same
porous silk as a day trader's pockets.

Of course, I don't read much current poetry, so I don't know exactly what's in fashion, but as someone who enjoys responding to literature, I thought I'd post a few remarks. I'll admit up front that this is a sort of reader-response sort of response, in the sense that I'll go through my impressions upon first reading the poem.

The poem begins with an intriguing simile that joins money and stars together in a temporal consideration. I found myself drawn in by this first comparison because it stretches the vast distance between an everyday earthly object (money) and the vast and almost unimaginable distances of space. Such a divergence of scale provokes a defamiliarizing response. But for me, a defamiliarizing response provokes a careful examination. I try to slow down and figure my way through it, and that's when things started to break down.

Majmudar attempts to elicit a feeling of growth and decay, a sense of cycles. And he succeeds on that level. But the comparison doesn't work as well when he shifts to the "flow / of capital." Money might "flow," but it seems a poor description to suggest that the violent explosion of a nova is a "flow." Furthermore, the "capillaries" through which this ejecta is said to flow don't really exist in a galactic system like blood vessels and capillaries. Also, the violence of the stellar reference is not fitting with with the "porous" sense in which money flows through the "day trader's pockets."

In short, this simile is merely suggestive. Similes cannot be exact, of course, or they would not be similes (they would be equivalences). But Majmudar does not seem to strive for a more complete comparison. He appears to want a glancing blow rather than a more traditional comparison. I don't think this is a result of a writer who is unwilling to take better care with metaphor and simile. Instead, it feels as if the thinner, less complete comparison is actually the desired strategy.

The next line provides an example: "Time is cyclic. Come again? Crime is cyclic." He plays with sound in substituting "crime" for "time." But he doesn't develop a contrasting view of time and crime; instead, the sound allows movement. One idea flows into the next, but in sound rather than in conceptual connection. This is enough to sustain the poem's movement.

Majmudar returns to the use of stars at the end of the first section: "these men in pinstripes are the stars, / the heartthrobs money loves, the actors who make / money's heart go boom-bust: lub-lub: nova." I appreciate the return to the heart/star comparison because it gestures toward a resolution, but he misses a full connection in the traditional sense. Are the men really the stars? The stars are supposed to be the hearts, but now they're the men? These (clearly shifty) men are best characterized by a heart metaphor? But they're so clearly distasteful. Does the money then really love the men, who are heartthrobs? I could see that the money loves the men, but the men now are stars, which are money. It's all so confusing. It seems that a lust rather than love metaphor would have worked better. And if money loves pinstriped men, why do they have porous pockets?

My point here is that the poem is bouyed more by the suggestion of meaning than it is by meaning. A series of glancing blows provides a kind of movement that perfect or locked metaphr does not. As long as the reader is held aloft by this movement, poetry like this can succeed. I'm not so sure that I'm one of those readers, however.