A Corporate Poet

Katherine Lederer

Katherine "Katy" Lederer is an American poet and author of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers.

Lederer is the daughter of bestselling non-fiction author Richard Lederer and the sister of world-class poker players Howard Lederer and Annie Duke. She graduated from St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where her father was on the English faculty.

Lederer later attended the University of California at Berkeley,from which she received her BA in English and anthropology. After graduating in 1995, Lederer moved to Las Vegas to study poker with her siblings, and was subsequently accepted to theIowa Writer's Workshop on an Iowa Arts Fellowship.

While at Iowa, Lederer founded the zine Explosive, which was published in a limited edition of 300 with hand-printed covers by the artist and writer David Larsen. The tenth and final issue of Explosive was published in 2006. From 1998-1999, she was the editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter out of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery . Lederer continues to publish limited-edition books and chapbooks under the Spectacular Books imprint, and also serves as a Poetry Editor of Fence magazine.

After completing her studies at Iowa in 1998, Lederer moved to New York City, where she worked for psychoanalyst Arnold Cooper. After this, she worked as a coordinator of the Barnard New Women Poets program. In 1999, she signed a contract with Crown Books to write a memoir about her family’s life in gambling.

Lederer made her poetry debut in 2002 with the collection Winter Sex. Poet D.A.Powell described the poems in the collection “as leaps of faith, fibrillating in the dark world with a kinetic energy that rises out of erotic desire.” Her memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers was published in 2003. It was chosen as a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was named a Best Nonfiction Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and one of eight Best Books of the Year by Esquire Magazine..

From 2002 to 2008, Lederer worked at a quantitative hedge fund in midtown Manhattan, which provided much of the inspiration for the pieces in her most recent poetry collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf. The title of both the book and the opening poem is taken from the second half of Goethe’s Faust and describes paper money. Other poems in the collection reference the works of John Kenneth Galbraith, Nietzsche and Edith Wharton

From an excerpt

For the past six years, Lederer, who is thirty-six and holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has worked at D. E. Shaw, one of the world’s largest hedge funds, with thirty-six billion dollars under its management. The other day, in her apartment in Prospect Heights, she recalled her decision to take the job: “Everyone I knew in the poetry world was pretty confused, like maybe I had gone crazy.”

She had already published a volume of poetry and a memoir, “Poker Face,” which describes her coming-of-age in a family of gamblers (her siblings Howard Lederer and Annie Duke are two of the world’s best poker players). Still, facing her thirtieth birthday, she was bouncing between illegal sublets and living on part-time jobs and peanut-butter sandwiches. “I wanted money,” she said.

At first, Lederer’s two lives—the creative and the corporate—remained separate; she was another one of New York’s day jobbers, leaving her writing each morning to toil in “pristine white hallways,” as a line from “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” puts it. Meanwhile, her fortunes rose along with the fund’s; she became vice-president of recruiting, earning a salary that was “multiples of what many creative-writing professors I know make.”

Then, in 2004, she spent a month at Yaddo. For reading, she took along study materials for the Series 7 stockbroker’s exam, as well as books by Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. “Veblen talks about poetry as being similar to Latin, useless and a waste of time,” she said. “It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.” Still, Lederer said, she was struck by the metaphors he and Galbraith used. “The language is gorgeous,” she said. “Like Edith Wharton and Dorothy Parker, Galbraith is witty and sarcastic.” She started to crib phrases like “dead-level,” “squirrel wheel,” and “immiseration of the masses” for her verse.

The results were the beginnings of “The Heaven-Sent Leaf” (BOA Editions), whose title takes its name from a passage in “Faust” describing money. The book explores not just economic bubbles but metaphysical bubbles—the highs and lows of love, religious ecstasy, and aesthetic rapture. In “The Flower of Life” (the title is from Wharton), Lederer writes:

Today, from the bridge, the East River is sparkling. The money is swirling around the tall buildings like tides or like tithes, And I wonder, does anyone swim in
this river, I wonder, does anyone pray?

The poems are tense and flinty (a review in Publishers Weekly praised their “viscous push-pull between money and Eros”). From her insider’s vantage point, Lederer said, she could see that this most recent bubble was bound to explode. “It was in the air three years ago. Like, at work everyone knew,” she recalled. “Even I could tell it was going to happen. I wondered, why would people trade if they knew the bubble would burst? That’s what the whole book is about.”
“Intimacy,” probably the first love poem to cite the nineteen-eighties junk-bond king Michael Milken, describes Milken’s “pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart.” Lederer said she views Milken as a “Gollum-like” figure. “He was a creative genius, the way that he packaged debt,” she said. “In finance, that makes you Mozart. Ultimately, however, that was also his downfall.”

Just before Labor Day, Lederer left the hedge fund, though she continues to do freelance recruiting for financial firms. She is now on a twenty-eight-city book tour. (She’s paying for it herself.) Still, she said, she hasn’t been writing much. “I’ve been watching my 401k go up and down.”

From an interview

Tess Vigeland: We've all witnessed a financial boom and one spectacular bust. It is the stuff of drama -- but, poetry? Katy Lederer is a poet who did indeed find inspiration in high finance. Lederer worked for six years as a hedge fund recruiter in New York. She recently left and now has a book of poems out. It's called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Welcome to the program.
Katy Lederer: Thanks so much for having me.
Vigeland: How did you come to write about high finance and money?
Lederer: I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and I was basically just doing my poet thing until I was about 30 and I just wanted security and health insurance, and I applied to work at a hedge fund. And while I was there, you know, I obviously learned a lot about finance and ended up writing about it.
Vigeland: Your book is called "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" and we had one of our producers read a bit from the title poem. Let's take a listen.
Marketplace Producer:
The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.

Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.
Vigeland: So "The Heaven-Sent Leaf" -- we're talking about money, right?

Lederer: Yes. That comes from Goethe's "Faust" actually, and it's basically a description of paper money.

Vigeland: The printing of money is certainly a big topic right now as the Fed does a lot of it.

Lederer: In the Goethe, actually what happens in this scene is that an emperor is having economic problems and Mephistopheles says, 'why don't you print these contracts based on the gold that's under the ground in your kingdom that hasn't yet been discovered?' And in a way this is an interesting version of a futures contract -- an I.O.U. -- highly relevant and obviously goes to show you, as I think people have realized, these bubbles have happened throughout history and, you know, you want to hope people are going to learn from this one.

Vigeland: So, how is it that you find money poetic?

Lederer: You know, one of the answers to that question is that money is so un-poetic; it's kind of the opposite of poetry, and as opposites will do, it kind of jogged the other side of things for me. You know, in that kind of very un-poetic space, it sort of inspired me more in a way than being, let's say, in a lush garden or I don't know, a more cliche poetic space.

Vigeland: I detect a little bit of cynicism in some of your work here. Where's that coming from?

Lederer: One of the things actually I studied in college was anthropology, so I couldn't help but bring that a little bit into the hedge fund environment. So, this isn't my natural environment and certainly I had some skepticism; I'd been trained all my life to be very suspicious of that kind of environment and to feel that even if good people go into finance, you'll be corrupted, right. It's like Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" -- you could be a great person and you get that ring of power and you become a slimy, slithery preacher, and you know, you have to kind of keep that ring, that money a little bit separate from yourself or else you will be taken over by it.

Vigeland: Well Katy Lederer, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for sharing your poetry. The book is "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." Thanks so much.

Lederer: Thank you.

Katy Lederer poems

Intimacy
These three bridges, like the brain, lit up and heading out toward Brooklyn.

I am slumped in the cab, thinking heady thoughts of heady things.
Like an ostrich. Or like an intellectual thriller.

For example, "Den of Thieves," in which the arbitrageur Michael Milken is at first

defined by a health ambition that later in the story turns to plot-driving greed.

It's as if his most natural desire to do good had over many years metastasized, crackling

over the phone lines, hiding out in the backseat of his de riguer black limousine, via

messenger across the Park, his pulmonary conscience pumping darkly in his greedy heart...

Like a toddler hiding grimly in a closet or a hamper.

Or like the king who fled the palace on the hill that's now ablaze.

Which explains, I guess, the fighter jets that circle overhead.

The surfeit of broadband, as well as this beautiful bed now bereft of our lowly ambition.

I'm lying here, there's no one else, and the flowers that you've given me are wilting in the Slurpee cup.

There is ambient noise.

Noise of jet planes,

Desire.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf

The speculation of contemporary life.
The teeming green of utterance.

To feel this clean,
This dream-eclat.

There is, in the heart, the hard-rendering profit.
As if we were plucking the leaves from the trees.
Let us think of the soft verdure of this spirit of this age as now inside of us and swollen

by spring rain.
To imagine oneself as a river.

To imagine oneself as a stretch of cool water,
pouring into a basin or brain.

And if one knows one is not free?
One crawls from the back of the head to the river.

And places one's pinkie oh so cautiously in.

Brainworker

To learn to keep distance.

To learn to keep drear managerial impulse from the animal mind.

Along the dard edge of this reason. Along the dark edge of this mind's little prison, inside


of its bars now a silky white cat.

Howling.

Crawling in its little cage.

Inside of its cage is the bright light of disease.

To learn to be an animal. To learn to be that primal.

To know who will slip you the fresh dish of milk.

To long for your manager's written approval.

So soon am I up for my year-end review?

The moon above settles into its shadow.

I am howling at you.


That Everything's Inevitable

That everything's inevitable.

That fate is whatever has already happened.

The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.

In this world, I am the surest thing.

Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.

Please insert your spare coins.

I am filling them up.

Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.

But yet, I am a vatic one.

As vatic as the Vatican.

In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum

I am waiting, like an animal,

For poetry.