After more than three decades of telling students that, unlike fiction, poetry is detached from the world of commerce, floating in a zone where certain pressures, including money, do not obtain, the author has begun to rethink his stance. Although poetry yields no cash in a literal sense, poets talk metaphorically about "banking" poems, allowing their writings to accrue in their notebooks, to be pulled out on a rainy day and "spent," i.e. published. Poems are pools of insight; language culled from the word horde, allowed to gather weight, to grow in value. They provide the bearer entry into a world of intellectual pleasure and emotional satisfaction. Money, says the author, is a pool of potential meaning, that can be translated into objects or experiences. But the translation must occur, the "transfer" at the heart of metaphor, whether poetical or financial. Although acknowledging that for many, money is not a metaphor; that its absence may mean hunger, or homelessness, or lack of medical care, the writer persists in his simile. Just as poets withhold meaning for as long as they can, refusing to cash in the metaphor, so the wealth of this nation lies in gold bars that nobody ever really lifts, cherishes, polishes, or spends. In this sense, concludes the author, poetry is money, and money is a kind of poetry, and people can learn something by holding both before them to compare and contrast.