Economics of Love

On Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another"

Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another” is what we might call a formula poem. But oh boy: we should probably stop before we start. Because aren’t all poems formula poems? Isn’t the whole damn art of poetry in the resonances that this-or-that mildewy trope or ragtag adage gains from the inflection of its formula—its meter, its music, its breaks, its pauses, its variations off a limited toolkit of sounds and rhythms? What I mean is, isn’t a poem just the practice of making and breaking patterns? And if so, isn’t the formula just that pattern, the context that gives well-worn words their meaning?

To put that another way, when a great poet deploys some poor misbegotten word like “laryngitis” or “sputum” within a formula which makes us recognize its resonances across the words of the poem, which lets us appreciate how it resolves or fails to resolve the sonic structure we’ve built up in reading, hasn’t the poet used formula to achieve that most poetic act of all—letting us see something (a word, an image) for what it’s not, but what it could be? Isn’t it formula that lets us see how one word, as Koch would put it, may hide another?

So let me be clear. When I say “formula poem,” I mean something more akin to a magical laundry list, a continual substitution of disparate variables within a prefixed sentence or phrase, one so universal that it can make sense of whatever random words you throw into it. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is one example (a list of widely unrelated things she’s lost), and Joe Brainard’s “I remember” is probably the archetype of the formula poem (a list of widely unrelated things that he remembers). In both, the formula serves to hide a seeming lack of narrative, direction, or structure at all, while tackling immense emotional despair as though it were merely one ingredient in life’s cookbook—masking pathos with math proofs to try to try to try to get those emotions to make sense, to seem sensical, or just to dilute their sensory impact.

As if we could.

***

I’m supposed to be writing about tech and crypto and the economy here, but it‘s hard right now—partly because I’m building shit and doing less broader research than usual, partly because I’ve made the fatal mistake of having a personal life recently, and partly because the state of tech and crypto and the economy is fairly boring for the first time in years. You can say we’re in a tech bear market in an otherwise perfectly-puttering economy, but there’s no real insight there beyond the honest recognition that in the day-to-day affairs of empires rising and falling, sometimes lots of things happen, and sometimes not much happens at all. Not much is happening right now at all. On the surface.

The question is what’s hidden.

***

Let me put that another way.

I’m curious: can a love poem that has nothing to do with the economy teach us something about the economy anyway?

***

Koch’s formula is in his title, though it takes a line before he says it outright in his poem. “In a poem, one line may hide another line,” he starts, “As at a crossing, one train may hide another train.” We notice this second line hiding the title of the poem is hidden behind the first line warning us that it hides another, and we might pat ourselves on the back for being so clever as to notice Koch’s cleverness. It feels good to be a good reader.

But Koch is about to leverage his analogy to mock the rules of this readership. Just as we should wait to cross a track until we’ve seen one train go by, lest it hide another, “so when you read/ Wait until you have read the next line—/ Then it is safe to go on reading.” The tone is arch: wouldn’t it be funny if you could die from misreading a poem, the way you could die from misreading a train track? Wouldn’t it be funny if poetry had the high stakes of, say, public transportation? Wouldn’t it be funny if poetry mattered?

As the poem takes off, we might notice that it reads as something of a deconstruction of the formula poem itself. How absurd, it winks at us, to imagine all of life’s vagaries and vicissitudes reduced to mannerism. Are you in love with a woman? Well, “one sister may conceal another,/ So, when you are courting, it's best to have them all in view.” That means you, bud: you better throw her family into a lineup so you can make sure she’s not hiding a superior sibling.

But because this is a poem founded on logical inversions—on doppelgangers, alternatives, and switcharoos—Koch is careful to invert the premise. Women too must take stock that their dream man be not hidden by “one father or one brother.” Beware, ladies: behind every shlub might lie a Casanova, “As words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas.”

And here let’s pause to note two unexpected developments, inversions of their own.

1. The moral of this wayward tale has changed. We were told to be careful about hidden doubles that could kill us (trains, lines of poems); now we’re told to be careful about red herrings that do the hiding. “Hiding” no longer means what it used to. At first, it meant something like “fatally concealing something terrible,” but now it means something more like “serendipitously guiding us to something better.” It is a tension between presenting and representing, between presence and representation. Is the point to see what’s already around us? Or to see what isn’t, a dream world of gods represented and cloaked by their drabber counterparts of real-world humans?
   
   The final line of the poem will give us a definitive answer when you, the reader, are “hit by” the next train. “It can be important/ To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there,” Koch tells us, the readers he just assassinated, but his own ending hides the meaning of the most of the poem—the whole point of reading, of digging for subtext, is to find what isn’t there at all.
   

2. Because look: Koch is once again comparing this act of hiding-and-revealing to the act of writing-and-reading poetry itself. This started as a willfully dumb analogy mocking art’s impotence by warning us the next line of poetry might kill us. But it’s now become something actually dangerous: a smart analogy. “Words stand in front of objects, feelings, and ideas,” representing them by concealing them, supplementing them, replacing them. Words are just shitty boyfriends reminding us of their matinee idol brothers, their ideas they’re supposed to embody. But of course in reminding us of their underlying objects, feelings, and ideas, what they really remind us of is the absence of all three. All we have is ink on the page.

Our magical formula of “one x may hide another” serves, like language itself, to evoke a lesson in being present while reminding of absence. The more attuned a poem is to the real world, the less we ourselves can grok that world while reading.

***

There aren’t many great poems about the economy, which makes some sense. It’s not that popular imagination expects poems to be lovely abstract evocations of feelings at odds with data-driven depictions of humans as cogs in a giant financial machine: after all, what is economics done well but a way to abstract how people feel? I’ll oversimplify for a moment. The real issue, I suspect, is that in some sense the base unit of a poem is an analogy—the implicit comparison between objects, sounds, and lines we project onto a poem’s gaps—and an analogy is, fundamentally, an anti-economic equation.

What I mean is that while economics traditionally concerns the kind of equations that let us see how one thing can be reduced to another in a consistent value system (five apples can equal a dollar, or higher interest rates can equal lower inflation), analogies are concerned with the kind of equations that frustrate our attempts to reduce objects to any external value system. The job of an analogy, if you like, is to compare two things precisely to show how irreducible they are to numbers or even language—to anything outside themselves. 

This is not an original thought. In “A-9,” one of those rare great economy-poems, Louis Zukofsky puts Marx’s Das Kapital into verse precisely to counterpose the function of economics with the function of poetry:

An impulse to action sings of a semblance
Of things related as equated values,
The measure all use is time congealed labor
In which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To goods created; integrated all hues
Hide their natural use to one or one's neighbor.

When we use labor-time to value our world entirely in terms of exchange-value on a market, we reduce each object to a comparable number that abstracts away all resemblance to what a thing is actually like. But when we use poetry to see the resemblance between things, we can actually better see them for what they are because we no longer “hide their natural use.” These are two very different types of formulas.

Simple enough. But Koch, I think, is interested in a kind of analogy that goes further, that performs its own breakdown as a formula at all, that shows that ultimately two objects are irreducible to each other.

***

The whole point of self-help guides, we know, is to provision us with magical formulas into which we can throw our lives. But what prevents Koch’s formula from quite crossing into the treacly terrain of advice-column bromides is not only his self-mocking tone—it’s the tension of the formula itself that we never quite know what it means. Are we supposed to pay more or less attention to what the world furnishes around us? Are we supposed to appreciate the world as it is, or rather read it for deeper, hidden significances that make us question how good it was in the first place? Are we supposed to marry the one brother, or the other?

Who, exactly, are we supposed to fall in love with at all?

Still, this tension is what makes the formula even more universal, more applicable to any situation we want to plug-and-play in its phrasing. “In love, one reproach may hide another,” Koch offers, and after all, who hasn’t had a fight with a partner over an absolute non-issue that was symptomatic of deeper agitations, that was nothing more than the most accessible vehicle for us to vent?

Likewise, the formula teaches us that the world is analogies all the way down: “One bath/ may hide another bath/ As when, after bathing, one walks out into the rain.” You bathe, just as the world bathes; your routine might turn out to be the routine of the cosmos too. “One evening may hide another, one shadow, a nest of shadows./ One dark red, or one blue, or one purple—this is a painting/ By someone after Matisse.” One evening may hide another that hides the fact it’s not an evening at all, but a Matisse painting—which is also to say that like its twin “belie,” the word “hide” may actually mean to reveal. 

And here we can pause to note that the comic tone has dissipated in what looks, increasingly, like a memory poem: a list of all the things Koch is reminded of when he looks at one thing and realizes that it hides some mental association beyond his control. But it is not just that, of course. It’s also a remembrance of all the lives that could have been led, that weren’t, that were hidden under the guise of the one life we managed to lead. For a moment, Koch’s memory veers into 1st person, only for a line: “We used to live there, my wife and I, but/ One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.” His life hides her, her imprint, her memory, because memory is simply the revelation of the deaths hiding in open light within our lives.

I want to try that last point again. We can pause to note that the comic tone has dissipated in what looks, increasingly, like a love poem. Because when we let our humdrum surroundings trigger our minds into remembering all the things that aren’t there, what will those things be except traumas, loves, or in the case of a lost partner, both at once?

***

So rich in tensions, contradictions, and inversions is this formula that we can slot in it our lives. And that means that yes, if you like, you can extrapolate all these lessons onto the strange, transitional time we live in—a moment where my own country, the US, appears irrevocably on an economic and political decline in the macro-picture while doing better and better day-to-day. Oh, the economy is good? Well, one economy may hide another, you know. But ah, the economy is actually bad? Well in that case, remember that one economy may hide another. And tech developments? And crypto cycles? And presidential races? Don’t get distracted, or do. Each may hide another.

***

But isn’t there a deeper question about the economy here: of what it means to swap one thing for another? And isn’t there a deeper question of whether this is even possible in either a marketplace or a poem? After all, Koch’s poem is in some sense an extended analogy about analogies, or rather about the the failure of analogies: the failure to reduce one thing to another through metaphor, the failure to reduce one person to another through our feelings about them, the failure to reduce any given word to the object it’s supposed to describe.

This could describe Koch’s overall mission. For example, when Koch writes in the opening line of “The Allegory of Spring” that “The blossoming cherry trees were quarreling,” we might imagine all sorts of scenarios of tussling branches and rustling leaves and erupting colors, or we might surmise the poet’s own anxious mood in projecting a quarrel onto the classical image of serenity itself. We will probably not imagine that the two trees are actually squabbling with each other, and when the poem informs us that well, ahem, they are, we’ll still be tempted to take this development as metaphorical in some way: surely, the trees must represent something other than this way-too-literal story of bickering barks. “The blossoming cherry trees were quarreling” is poetic because we know the blossoming cherry trees were not quarreling, and this gap leaves space for our imagination. A good analogy is, at its heart, a formula concerned with its own failure.

Similarly, the formula at the heart of “One Train May Hide Another” is not just a formula about analogies themselves, those literary devices for hiding one thing in another, but a formula that continuously breaks down as it takes on different meanings and we discover that objects can only hide—can only be compared to—themselves. The more meaningful analogy, you could argue, is in the tacit comparison between all the variables Koch plugs into this formula of things hiding themselves, but these juxtapositions also frustrate our desire for comprehension: why does “one person’s reputation” lead to “one dog”? The formula’s failure is, in some way, what makes the poem poetic.

Of course, it’s something of a stretch to say that any of Koch’s own formula-frustration has anything to do with economics, particularly in a poem that seems concerned with everything except labor, class, and finance. We remember that Koch, like many other writers of his generation using formulas to generate stories and phrasing (Perec, Calvino, and the Oulipo group), was working to deconstruct algorithms in an era that was beginning to operate off of them in every area of civic life. So if there was an animating specter hanging over “One Train May Hide Another” when Koch published it in 1994, it was less likely the economy than the computer—that machine for processing any variable algorithmically to generate meaningful results.

Still, though. Koch’s poem is a poem about misreadings (who among us has not mistaken one brother for another?) and one that encourages us to misread it at every step, so I’d like to engage in this potential misreading. And I’d like to argue that the poem does tell us something profound, that when we can only see how one thing hides itself, equals itself, we realize how our world is ultimately irreducible to the value systems inherent in our language. In that sense, the most poetic line we could ever write is “thing = thing.”

And I’d like to argue that this has everything to tell us about love and economics alike—and what it means to love at all in this economy.

But I should admit to you, before going further, that this is a somewhat personal question.

***

It’s a generational thing, I guess, to use personality templates like astrology or Myers-Briggs to determine what kind of hero we are in work and love: loyal, brave, charming? To each their own. I personally find these a hell of a lot less useful than basic attachment theory, which is eerily accurate at predicting our actions based not on Our Own Big Character Traits, but how we think others see us.

In attachment theory, it’s not our character, but our perception of how others perceive us that determines how we interface with the world: are we overeager for their attention and intimacy or scared of it? And that’s important because unlike Heroic Traits, we can actually change our attachment style—with the right mix of time, therapy, and psychedelics—by changing our perception of ourselves at its core.

In my case, I’m in the fairly toxic category of Fearful Avoidants, the one that’s both anxious (wanting others to like us) and avoidant (wanting to run the moment they do). At the heart of Fearful Avoidance is our dual need and fear of vulnerability. We crave intimacy but dread rejection, force connection but flee commitment. We get close quickly and pull away just as fast; we know the people we care about will eventually reject us, so we preemptively reject them instead, priding ourselves on our independence while really playing a children’s game of red hands. We’re anxious when our partners are avoidant and avoidant when our partners are anxious, so we try to maintain relationships where we hold power as a protective mechanism—we only feel safe when we know our partner needs us more than we need them. 

And this is why we love to hook up with any stranger who can give us validation without the threat of emotional stakes, but we prefer to friendzone the people we truly love and want to be close to our whole lives: we don’t want to hurt them as we know we will, or make ourselves vulnerable to their eventual rejection.

In short, we see life as a giant emotional wager in a game we’re addicted to but know that over multiple rounds we’ll lose. So every time we win a small hand, we fold, because we know we’d lose everything if we kept playing. Our relationships last a few months, and when we’ve won the validation we wanted from people who like us more than we like them, we leave. We don’t believe we can be good in a relationship, and so that belief sinks us and ensures we can’t.

My larger point, though, is that we view the world economically. We believe we have to earn love from others, stake our emotions, increase our demand by making ourselves scarce. We try not to text back faster than the people we love, lest our availability diminish our worth. We see body counts as metrics of desirability because quantity is reassuring and quality terrifies us. And we see our own emotional value as an economic equation: (how much we’re needed by someone else) - (how much we need them).

On the rare occasions we get rejected, we plunge into despair, not because we necessarily care about the other person, but because our emotional-economic value is in the red. This is why to love others is to risk disaster: we’ve bet our emotions on a relationship, and we stand to lose it all. We know that to have something means a constant anxiety of losing it, so we’d rather not have it at all—at least that way we can live in hope, rather than fear.

And at the heart of our broken love lives lies something like the American Dream: the belief that without any intrinsic worth, we have to accrue our value through hard work, actions, and achievements. Praise is something we win, preferably from those who reassuringly reject us for the same reasons we reject ourselves. Romance—well, romance is simply the contractual process by which we earn rights to each other emotionally and physically by putting one another in each other’s debt.

You get where I’m going with this. Yes, yes, our attachment style is a product of our past relationships, a retroactive attempt to protect us from the things that have hurt us in the past by projecting their wounds on the world around us. But one of those relationships, maybe the relationship that defines how we see ourselves more than any other, is our relationship to the economy—an economy that tells us our worth can be scored, ranked, and publicly regarded. It’s why we still trust movies that the way to fall in love is to go on some trauma-bonding adventure together, to put in the work to earn each other’s trust in the face of danger, and then to own each other’s protection for life. We believe love is earning the right to possession—and if you don’t want to possess someone else, are you even in love at all?

At least we Fearful Avoidants are scared of that economic equation’s cost.

***

I am being self-serving, even self-aggrandizing here, vainly attempting to tell myself that when I face rejection and lose the people I love, it is, somehow a victory that I made myself vulnerable and didn’t blink first. Even this pride in my own vulnerability is an attempt to hide from it and its attendant pain.

As the dude said, one feeling may hide another. 

***

I’m sorry—I guess I got a bit off-track. One train of thought hides another, as they say. I was talking about—sorry—I was talking about Kenneth Koch. And I was saying I think he wrote a love poem.

“One love may hide another love or/ the same love,” Koch writes near the end. “As when ‘I love you’ suddenly rings false and one discovers/ The better love fingering behind, as when ‘I'm full of doubts’/ Hides ‘I'm certain about something and it is that’.” The falseness of our phrases in one context can reveal their truth in another: your doubts about one person you claim to love may make you realize your true love for another.

Or is that what Koch is saying?

Because: what does it mean to say that one love may hide the same love? That we don’t realize that love until we say the words of affirmation? That we don’t realize that love until we say the words of rejection and realize how false they are? Or simply that the love of a friend may hide the fact that this is, in some ways, the most romantic love of all?

Like some kind of Biblical Wisdom Book, “One Train May Hide Another” is the kind of poem that can only answer its questions with more questions, and we start to realize that Koch was right: the real question of the poem is how one line hides another, how one association leads to the next. And so we look to the next line, to see how this one thought hid another.

What do we find? Koch’s musing on love—his last in the poem—transitions into full mysticism. “And one dream may hide another as is well known, always, too. In the/ Garden of Eden/ Adam and Eve may hide the real Adam and Eve./ Jerusalem may hide another Jerusalem.” The implicit question here, for a certain kind of structuralist reader, is what these juxtapositions are hiding: what does hidden love have to do with hidden dreams have to do with Adam and Eve?

Or more simply, what the hell does this all mean? I honestly don’t know, and that lack of understanding is, frankly, part of what moves me about these lines. But we might notice that Koch is using his formula to continually undermine what the formula actually signifies: in the case of love, we no longer are faced with one thing hiding another of the same thing, but one thing hiding its opposite, in a way that’s a bit hard to parse. How could “I’m full of doubts” mean “I’m certain”? The logic of this all-too-logical poem has turned illogical, mystical, dream-like, and so we follow this illogical logic into a section that’s quite literally about dreams and mysticism.

Or is this too neat? This is probably too neat. Really, all I actually want to reflect on here is Adam and Eve as the original lovers, mythic stereotypes of two sexy bodies enchanted erotically by the prison of debt in which they cage each other, each owing the other for maintaining their secret sins. But what if we were to actually meet these two archetypes of erotic shame in person, for a coffee? If the beginning of the poem was concerned about our dull reality hiding mythic options within, we’ve now reversed course as we see that our myths hide an all-too-human reality. Jerusalem of the book hides Jerusalem of the social-political realities of our world.

Only when we stop seeing each other through myth do we grasp something real in all its awkwardness and intimacy. But of course myth—including that great myth, the myth of ourselves as economic units—doesn’t just shape how we see things; it shapes how we act and who we become too. Our reality will, inevitably, betray the myths that made us, and this is why one identity must always hide another.

I have no idea if Koch would agree with any of this of course, or if it’s remotely what he intended.

But does that matter?

***

Bear with me.

Because in a way, I really do think “One Train May Hide Another” is a poem about the economics of love—of that ever-teasing prospect of swapping partners, exchanging them in the marketplace of romance for a better option, of telling ourselves that we can always do better by replacing one lover with another. And of course, this whole notion is betrayed by the poem’s rupture into 1st person vulnerability at the exact halfway point of the poem, 32 lines in with 32 more left to go:

We used to live there, my wife and I, but
One life hid another life. And now she is gone and I am here.

The love is irreplaceable. Everything else can serve to remind the poet of this relationship, hiding it in the daylight of mundane affairs, but nothing can take its place. Love marks a failure of representation: a thing so irreducible that it can’t be represented by another thing at all. 

To track the three depictions of love in Koch’s poem is to track a deepening, as well as another inversion. First, we are facetiously told to swap shitty siblings for better ones to find love; second, we are mournfully told that Koch’s life hides that of his dead wife; third, we are mystically and somewhat surreally told that one love can hide itself, as our recognition of its failure may in fact be a recognition of its success. We learn to settle in the midst of our own frustration. We move from swapping to not-swapping, from trading to losing to staying. And in the grip of doubt, we find certainty. It is, in some ways, a miracle.

For the whole poem has broken itself now, as we’ve shifted tonally from the all-too-neat logic of fungible siblings at the start to the mystifying, mystical illogic that doubt equals certainty by the end. In the beginning, one lover equaled another; by the end, one lover doesn’t even equal themselves. And this is, in some ways, a lesson on love itself—that our words, our logic, our frameworks will all fail it. Love is just love.

And this is why I think “One Train May Hide Another” is such a potent poem about the economics of love—precisely because it doesn’t seem to be about either one at all. The poem’s own economic system of endless exchanges begins to fumble as we realize that its own meaning isn’t in its clever slogans, but in the aleatory associations between memories that weave the poem together. One thing can never take the place of another, but it can recall its absence. And this is, in some ways, a new definition of love: the thing we can’t help but recall when we think about anything else.

And.

So accustomed are we to thinking about love as an economic equation—the power we have over others, the worth they bring to our lives, the value they have on the market in case we can exchange one sibling for another—that when we do encounter this kind of love, the kind that’s irreducible and associational rather than quantifiably fixed, we may not even know to call it love at all. To even recognize this as love would, perhaps, require us to inhabit a completely different economy than the one we’re accustomed to: one based not on the extractions of ownership, on all we can get from the people we possess, but on the radical delights of sharing not only our food and homes and books but memories, thoughts, and moments in the day. Collaborative finance and regen economies might point us to what this love looks like, a love where we excitedly see the world through each other’s eyes rather than just our own.

Perhaps.

The point, in any case, it’s a circular economy, and maybe that’s the real reason I’m drawn to Koch’s poem. Because it depicts a swirl of ideas, each traded in for the next, endlessly associating the banal and the divine without any system to value each except within its own terms. And the fact that the association they continually return to is love might tell us more than anything those lines about love have to say. In the end, Koch shows us, love is just whatever our thoughts keep coming back to, whoever we want to share our thoughts with—a flitting point in a circular economy, somewhere off the axis of self, staring off the edge of reason. One that lets us see ourselves out of space and out of time, for just a moment, as part of a bigger tapestry’s mess.

— David Phelps
June 13-June 22, 2023