SOURCE: “Time and Money: The Poetry of David Ignatow,” in The University Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, Spring, 1968, pp. 211-13.

Europeans know an American saying that summarizes our country for many of them: time is money. They may not know the saying in English, but it is readily translatable into any language and remains one of America's chief contributions to the culture of the world. David Ignatow, perhaps because he is a businessman himself, is particularly sensitive to the role of money in our society, and his treatment of money makes him one of the most American poets of our time.

In one of his poems he sets the reader in a long line of people that do nothing but pass money, a dollar bill to be exact, from one person to the next. The title is appropriately “For One Moment.”

You take the dollar
and hand it to the fellow beside you
who turns and gives it to the next one
down the line.

The world is round, and the line extends over oceans and mountains like a belt around the earth. Like people in lines everywhere, these people wait, and while they wait there is no real communication between them. Eventually the dollar comes back (not a dollar, but the dollar), but by the time it does, the reader's hair is gray and his legs weak from long standing. Like people who spend their lives at conveyor belts, he has wasted his precious time standing in line waiting to handle a dollar and pass it on. If time is money, money is also time.

This money-time relationship pervades his poetry. He advises the reader to get a shine because “it might lead to money.” Another poem begins, “Keep the money coming in,” and “The American” starts off on the same note.

And they came begging for money
with scorn, proud of their own past
where money had no part.

So does “I Want”:

I'll tell him I want to be paid immediately.
I'll sue him, I'll tear down his place,
I'll throw a fit, I'll show him whether
he can make me miserable.

And his titles themselves reflect interest in the business of making money: “Mr. Mammon I,” “Mr. Mammon II,” “The Errand Boy I,” “The Errand Boy II,” “The Manager,” “The Professional,” “The Paper Cutter,” “The Orange Picker,” “The Salesman,” “The Business Life,” “The Vending Machine,” and “About Money.”

In contrast to the order of a world where business goes on as usual, Ignatow presents poems which I would call fantasy or science-fiction poems, poems in which the apparent order of the business world is violently overthrown. The head of a woman floats outside the poet's window. As a man walks down the street, his head splits into four parts. New York is overrun by soap foam. A man is confronted by masks; he tries to get away. A mask falls and he hears weeping. Night People vanish. Shaking and roaring, telephone poles fly into the air. Someone says his life is ruined and beats his head to a bloody pulp on the sidewalk in front of the reader. A third hand, invisible, grows in the center of man's body near the heart. And in “News Report,” in the best science-fiction tradition, he sets a monster loose.

At two a.m. a thing, jumping out of a manhole,
the cover flying, raced down the street,
emitting wild shrieks of merriment and lust.

Such disorder is reflected by many of the people in his poetry, people who have no definite place in a business society: strangers, bums, criminals, and poets.

Have you just stabbed a man to death? Live.
Are you a thief? Prosper.
Do you sell dope? Be well.

(“Tick Tock”)

Their actions are violent and grotesque. A man is knifed in the stomach. The reader pursues the poet with a club, and the poet turns on him, threatening to knife the reader in the groin. And the poet revels in gruesome detail. He speaks to a dead woman who has a green face and green eyes. With clinical accuracy he notes the actions of a horse shot by a policeman (“the head / leaping up from the ground / and dropping”) and describes a chicken's guts (“the green bile and the bloody liver”).

Moreover, the poet's techniques are well suited to such clinical notation. His poems are short and to the point, like business letters. He avoids rhetorical figures and words that might be construed as “poetic.” His best poems present a whirlwind sequence of events with no overt emotional comment. In “Night People” the subjects disappear as if by magic:

No one will speak
and no arm be raised
in a gesture, as they vanish.

And when he looks for his mother, the poet is confronted by the same sudden passage of time.

I looked for her in the cellar.
I looked for her in bed, and found her in her coffin,
bothering me at last.

(“Bothering Me at Last”)

At worst his poems have a flatness of diction and a forced violence, although even the bad poems have the merit of being short and not exhausting the reader's patience.

But the poet himself has little patience. He sees the terrible waste of business and the violence of people cut off from the social order; yet the offers few alternatives. He sees everything from the point of view of eternity, a mysterious eternity that offers him no consolation for his sufferings. When his mother shouts at him to put things in their place, he comments ironically:

                    The sky is blue
and empty. In it floats
the roof across the street.
What place, I ask her.

(“The Sky is Blue”)

Even when God talks to the poet, as He does in a number of poems, He offers small consolation. In one poem He is pathetically human, as if He were also overwhelmed by the reality He created.

                    I saw Him standing,
his hair long, face exhausted, eyes sad
and knowing, and I bent my knee
terrified at the reality,
but he restrained me with a hand
and said, I am a sufferer like yourself.

(“The Rightful One”)

In the course of the poem references to God change from capital letters to lower case, though the poet changes back to capitals when the Rightful One has gone. However, elsewhere God is utterly foreign.

God said, Have you finished my thinking?
Now think yourself into stone
And I will lift you
And set you upon a mountain.

(“God Said”)

Thus Ignatow's world, like Ignatow's God, is ultimately irrational—at least to man. In “No Answer” the poet says he has learned to love without explanation, but throughout his poetry he is never really at ease. He is unhappy that he is not God. Reason is powerless as money against the relentless advance of time. In a senseless world he can only note the violence and hope, as in “On Walking into a Dark Alley”:

I will fade into the shadows
the purpose of which I trust
God knows.