Poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram explores money as “a state of lack”
Poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram explores money as “a state of lack”
The title of Lillian-Yvonne Betram’s latest book of poetry came when they were thinking about what it was like to have money — and at the same time, not have it.
“Myself and all of my friends and people I know, we all have full-time jobs and we’re working, but no matter the money that we make, no matter the jobs that we have, we don’t ever make more than we owe,” Bertram said. “And so I was almost joking with myself. I was like, ‘Lillian-Yvonne, you don’t have money, you have negative money.'”
In “Negative Money,” Bertram explores themes of race, gender, indebtedness, and how all of that intersects with capitalism. Bertram, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland-College Park and director of the Master of Fine Art creative writing program there, said these ideas are from firsthand experience.
“They’re themes that I live,” Bertram said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. “What I earn or don’t earn has to do with how others see and value me, right, choosing how to value people based on things like race and gender.“
The following is an excerpt of Bertram’s titular poem.
Negative Money
So delirious from drought
my town went singing
to seeds. Those who stayed
could barely
make a Sunday choir.
Not enough juice
in the county to plump up
the memory of water,
or a single itinerant tomato.
I made the same poisoned meal.
Days like two midnights in a jar
and it takes twice as much money
to live the way a cactus
lives on air. My men took
to cards & drink as punishment
for stricken soil. The dust blew
so bad and like anyone
I made a list of names I wouldn’t mind
dressing in a child of my own.
We paid a charlatan to shoot rain
out of clouds but the dynamite
tied to kites proved more useless
than mud. Like any good charlatan,
he never returned. Enough pale misery.
Now we are poor in every corner
of the word. Not a pot
to piss in, or skin of a fig to suck on.
Excerpted from “Negative Money,” copyright © 2023 by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. Reprinted by permission of Soft Skull Press.
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