Two poets talk about the stock market
from the comments
In the comments, Dana Gioia says this about meeting A.R. Ammons.
Archie Ammons was not your typical poet. He spent years as a chemical-glass salesman before he got a teaching job. He was a down to earth Southerner.
I was at a literary festival many years ago where he was the other poet. I did my best to avoid him because I felt we had litttle in common. But one morning I went into a tiny dive for breakfast. There he was sitting in a booth alone. He waved to me so I joined him.
We had a great conversation. He was warm and friendly—not the impression I had from his often austere and impersonal poetry. We talked about the stock market for an hour.
In the two days I spent with Ammons, he never wanted to talk about poetry. (Elizabeth Bishop was the same way.) But he was a dedicated amateur investor, and he didn’t seem to have anyone to discuss that at Cornell. He even wrote me later asking my opinion on particular stocks. He liked the fact that we both had a business background.
I was glad to meet him in such an unexpected but cordial and genuine way.
I seem to recall Samuel Goldwyn of MGM went to London and met privately with George Bernard Shaw. After their meeting English reporters asked Shaw how the meeting had gone. He replied, "It was a disaster--all Mr. Goldwyn wanted to talk about was art, and all I wanted to talk about was money."
I've always thought the efficient market hypothesis was a rather poetical concept. That somehow, our collective striving gives birth to a kind of oracular entity that is indifferent to the striving of any individual investor. I mean, come on!
I'm no Goethe expert, but if Goethe were alive today I am reasonably confident he would put something in Faust about index funds.