ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the capacity for poetry to maintain a critical stance in respect to financialised capitalism and the manner in which the lyric subject of recent poetry has adapted to the financialisation of capitalism. It concerns the overlap between the matters, with the question of how a transformation of the lyric subject might herald a new critical power. Financialisation suggests at least two historical transformations. First, it refers to the increasing role of financial operations in corporate governance and corporate revenue streams, or as Greta Krippner defines it, a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production. The second understanding of financialisation designates the proliferation of financial practices and attitudes in everyday life. John Ashbery dramatises the dialectically intertwined processes of financialisation and deindustrialisation, or the way in which the rise of finance capital entails a wasteland of abandoned factories, decrepit infrastructure, and empty housing.
