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My Own Personal Conflict
The Last Poet on Wall Street follows a gifted young poet who trades his idealistic dreams for the wealth and glamour of 1980s Wall Street, forcing him to confront the costs of ambition, status, love, and growing up. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
My own personal conflict between ambitions to be a writer and pursuing a career on Wall Street.
What drew you to the contrast between the worlds of poetry and finance?
I have inhabited both worlds. My love of poetry developed in high school, where I won the Creative Writing Cup, and I later took poetry writing and literature classes at UVA. Coming from a family of businessmen, I was also drawn to finance, earning an MBA from Wharton. While at Wharton, I entered a poetry contest held by the Academy of American Poets, where James Dickey was a judge.
After Wharton, I landed a job on Wall Street while simultaneously enrolling in Columbia University’s MFA program in Creative Writing (Poetry). I was only there for a semester, but it was long enough to get me fired from my finance job—perhaps making me the last poet on Wall Street!
The conflict James experiences between poetry and money is something I lived. I still wonder if I was trying to have my cake and eat it too. Maybe I should have taken the plunge to be a writer right after college; that question haunts me to this day.
How did you balance James’s selfishness and flaws with his more perceptive and tender qualities?
The most memorable fiction characters require complexity. James’s mother had a profound influence on him, pushing his intellectual pursuits and instilling a sense of being special, which sometimes manifested as arrogance. However, her love also engendered his tender qualities, seen in his interactions with Lark’s AIDS-afflicted cousin and his love for Sarah, who understood his complex personality. The James who wrote her that poem is the one she loved.
Conversely, James’s mercenary side arose from witnessing his father’s failures as a farmer, leading to sports betting and later commodities trading. Success in New York brought out his worst traits—transforming him from a reserved, sensitive lover of high ideals into an arrogant, greedy, and overly ambitious person. That side of him had to be destroyed for him to become a better person. My hope is that readers relish his comeuppance while seeing enough good in him to hope for his redemption.
If you could ask readers one question after they finish The Last Poet on Wall Street, what would it be?
I would ask readers if they saw enough good in James by the end of the novel to say, “Amen.” If addressing the readers not as readers but as persons, I would ask if what they love is the same as what they desire. Imho, when those two things differ, then suffering results. Sooner or later, you learn who you are. The sooner you learn that, the less tragedy in your life.
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The two start a hedge fund and get rich quick. James seeks to take advantage of all that Manhattan has to offer, partying and club-hopping with a crowd of social climbers, financiers, artistes, fashionistas, and euro-trash aristocrats, 80’s beautiful people. But lover-of-poetry that he is, James can’t forget Sarah. She, his fading literary aspirations, and a graffiti artist named Michel Baptiste will haunt him as he scales Manhattan’s canyons of avarice.
Michael Goodwin brings to living color the rollicking and flamboyant 1980s Manhattan. And what better place and time to explore themes of greed, love, and a young man’s search for himself?
The Last Poet on Wall Street
Michael Goodwin’s The Last Poet on Wall Street is a coming-of-age novel set against the money, ambition, art, nightlife, and social climbing of 1980s New York. At its center is James Alexander, a gifted young poet from Tennessee who gives up a Yale fellowship for commodities trading with his wealthy college friend Lark Campbell. That choice opens the door to spectacular profits, an expensive apartment, Italian sports cars, glamorous parties, and a Manhattan crowd where artists and financiers seem to be chasing different versions of the same thing: recognition. Goodwin makes James’s transformation the real story. He arrives in New York still carrying poetry, Sarah, his family, and an idealistic sense of beauty with him, even as he grows increasingly fluent in money and status. The novel is explicitly framed as fiction about Wall Street, coming of age, finance, relationships, and love, and all of those threads stay tightly connected throughout James’s rise and fall.
What makes the book especially interesting is the way James’s love of poetry keeps rubbing against his appetite for success. Early on, he and Sarah are young idealists talking about reviving poetry, and James’s own poem “Autumn Turning” ends with the idea of continually returning to oneself. That idea quietly becomes the architecture of the whole novel. James keeps reinventing himself as trader, millionaire, social insider, lover, and would-be movie producer, but the earlier version of himself never disappears. The finance scenes have genuine momentum, particularly when James and Lark make and lose staggering amounts of money in short bursts, yet the book is just as interested in what happens after the adrenaline fades. James repeatedly reaches a moment of triumph only to discover a strange hollowness underneath it. That tension gives the novel more weight than a simple story of Wall Street excess. It’s about a young man trying to decide whether achievement can tell him who he is.
Goodwin also has fun with the sheer weirdness of the era. His Manhattan is crowded with debutantes, aristocrats, hedge fund clients, artists, models, club regulars, hustlers, and people whose identities seem partly invented for the evening. The scenes can be flamboyant and funny, with James moving through them as both participant and observer. In that respect, the book reminded me most of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both novels treat New York as a giant machine for producing appetite, status anxiety, spectacle, and self-invention. Wolfe spreads his satire across a large social ecosystem, while Goodwin keeps returning to James’s divided inner life, particularly the tug between his literary sensibility and his growing hunger to be someone important. There’s also a touch of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City in the clubs, drugs, late nights, and emotional disorientation, but Goodwin gives his protagonist a more philosophical temperament. James can be ridiculous, selfish, perceptive, wounded, and unexpectedly tender within the same stretch of pages, which makes his unraveling feel personal rather than merely symbolic.
The closing movement is the strongest part for me because the book eventually brings its concerns about money, family, ego, art, memory, and mortality into the same space. After the fortune and the social identity collapse, James is forced into a much simpler encounter with himself. By the final pages, he reaches something he describes as a kind of equanimity, and the ending turns toward the possibility that losing the identity he constructed might be the beginning of a more genuine one. Goodwin resists turning that realization into a neat conversion. Instead, James is only beginning to understand what’s happened to him and how much ego he still has to dismantle. The final image is wonderfully ordinary: food, evening light, gratitude, and the recognition that something can be mysterious, nourishing, and good in the way a good poem can be. The Last Poet on Wall Street reads like a novel about appetite in all its forms, and about the difficult work of figuring out which hungers are actually your own.
Pages: 318 | ASIN : B0GHSRSFG6
