Stevens and Ives

Insured that composition
In North America was
Not always an art apart

From the values of finance,
From the more fungible worlds
Of lives and money—that poems

And scores could survive admired,
If not remunerative,
In a state of cubicles,

In the great hegemony
Of an individualistic,
Contentious bureaucracy,

That the oxymoronic
Beasts of High Modernism
Were a feature, not a bug,

In this system embracing
Freedom as a kind of jail,
Escaping by withdrawal

Through our chambered atria
Of marbled floors in suburbs
Where the actuarial,

The calculations of risk,
Have replaced the actual.
Who actually believes this?