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, a financial writer whose lyrical stanzas
 about the state of our economy have earned him the title of "The Poet
 Laureate of Wall Street" (from his publicist, of course, but it still
 counts).

"I actually would've preferred `The Bard of the Bourse,' but it wasn't up
 to me," the self-deprecatory writer joked the other day, showing off a
 copy of "Songs of Wall Street," his nifty little collection of 65 of the
 world's greatest poems (they're the ones on the left sides of the page)
 and his financial parodies of them (they're the ones on the right
 sides).

In Silverstein's hands, Joyce Kilmer's immortal ode to nature, "Trees,"
 becomes an ode to the safety of government-issued bonds, "T's."

Where Kilmer wrote, "I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as
 a tree," Silverstein's parody begins, "I long for life that's worry
 free, so T-bills are the play for me."

And where Kilmer concluded that "Poems are made by fools like me, but
 only God can make a tree," Silverstein pays homage to a higher power in
 his final line: "Junk abounds that's triple-C's, but only Sam can issue
 T's."

Silverstein, 60, said he has always loved poetry, but his profession --
 he's been everything from the dean of New England solar energy writers
 in the 1970s (hey, that was no small feat in the `70s) to an editor at
 Bloomberg's Markets magazine -- has kept him away from his quill and
 parchment. (And he actually lives in Philadelphia, far from his Muse.)

But every once in a while, scanning the financial wires for stories,
 economic news easily lent itself to parody, just as when a drop in the
 value of the Euro prompted Silverstein to pen a parody of Walt Whitman's
 famous poem, "Oh Captain, My Captain!"

INDENT THIS STANZA!!!!

Oh, Euro, my Euro! Your time has fin'lly come,

You've withstood all your critics flacks, their doubting scoffs are done.

The franc's a ghost, the lira's toast, the deutschmark's just a mem'ry

Around the globe thy name is hailed, in circles monetary.

But surprise! `Prise! `Prise!

You're still pris'ner of the Fed.

Because they keep the dollar strong,

Euros fall like lead.


UNINDENT!!!!

Even though he writes jokes, Silverstein is a true intellectual. In just
 a few minutes of conversation, he dropped the name of a Swiss novelist
 I'd never heard of, used words like "ethos" and "venality" without
 blushing and said -- and this is a direct quote -- "Emily Dickinson is
 the Vincent Van Gogh of American letters."

I wasn't nearly smart enough to understand the connection (although I do
 know that every Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow
 Rose of Texas," which, in my eyes makes her the "Mitch Miller of
 American letters" rather than the Vincent Van Gogh).

Poetry parodies are a time-honored literary tradition in their own right.
 Plato was parodied in his own day. Shakespeare, too. But until
 Silverstein, no one was doing poetic parodies of our age's true poets:
 the Ron Insanas and the Money Honeys of the world.

"I realized that the best way to make it to the top of your field is to
 invent it, so I invented it," Silverstein said.

The book hits all the usual suspects in these market-focussed times: John
 Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" becomes Silverstein's
 "On First Hearing of the World Bank's Boners"; John Donne's "Death Be
 Not Proud" becomes "Debt's No Dark Cloud"; Shakespeare's "Shall I
 Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" becomes "Shall I Declare Thee to the
 IRS"; Wordsworth's "The World is Too Much with Us, Late and Soon"
 becomes "Globalization's Coming, Too Damn Fast"; and Elizabeth Barrett
 Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" becomes "Where Went My Money?"

But you don't need an MBA to understand the surprising insights in
 Silverstein's financial commentary or even get the jokes (although it
 can't hurt when he starts talking about Fibonacci numbers, call options
 and those triple-C junk bonds).

In fact, if you want, think of Silverstein's book as the ultimate piece
 of conceptual art. After all, here's a guy whose joke poems are
 published in the same volume as the greatest poems in the history of
 Mankind.

Not bad for a guy who once rhymed "unless we muff it" with "old Warren
 Buffet" and "Nasdaq booms" with "stock chat rooms."

--30--

email: gershny@yahoo.com