SOURCE: “Time and Money: The Poetry of David Ignatow,” in The University Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, Spring, 1968, pp. 211-13.

In the following essay, Contoski traces images of money in Ignatow's poetry, presenting it in terms of the poet's cosmology.

Europeans know an American saying that summarizes our country for many of them: time is money. They may not know the saying in English, but it is readily translatable into any language and remains one of America's chief contributions to the culture of the world. David Ignatow, perhaps because he is a businessman himself, is particularly sensitive to the role of money in our society, and his treatment of money makes him one of the most American poets of our time.

In one of his poems he sets the reader in a long line of people that do nothing but pass money, a dollar bill to be exact, from...