Alumni Gazette
UR BOOKS: Federman writes his poems from his home in Livingston, N.J., not far from the Words bookstore in Maplewood, owned by Jonah and Ellen Zimiles. Jonah is the son of Herbert Zimiles ’56M (Res), ’56 (PhD) and Leontine Slavin Temsky ’56 and the brother of Eric Zimiles ’73, whose daughter is Justine Zimiles ’12. (Photo: Shannon Taggart)Late last fall, as Wall Street crumbled and Washington floundered, Todd Federman ’77 sat calmly at his desk turning panic into poetry. “The marketplace was so depressing,” he recalls, “that I said, ‘There’s got to be a book in there.’” As it turns out, that book was Rhymes For Turbulent Times—a collection of humorous poems about the nation’s economic woes that Federman published this spring.
Only a few years ago, Federman was immersed in the financial world he now views so playfully. During the ’80s and ’90s market boom, he worked on Wall Street trading stocks and bonds. But in 2006, after 25 years in finance, he was ready for a change. “I had a nice run there,” he says, “but it was the right time to leave.”
Unleashed from Wall Street, he found himself drawn to teaching, private investing, and poetry. Inspiration for the latter struck last October thanks to an unusual muse: a New York Times op-ed piece on subprime mortgages. “It talked about how every player along the way had to do something wrong, and it reminded me of that old children’s rhyme, ‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly,’” he says. “Something about it inspired me, so I sat down and wrote a poem called ‘Subprime,’” modeled after “Old Lady.”
For his next composition, Federman revisited his undergraduate pursuits—not the math and economics classes that primed him for Harvard Business School and Wall Street, but rather his stint as a poet. “I’ve always enjoyed writing poetry, and the first poem I ever had published [“A Christmas Dream”] was in the Campus Times in December 1976,” he says. More than 30 years later, he followed up with “The La$t Word at Christmas.” Both poems were inspired by “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and each chronicled the end-of-year madness he observed around him. In 1976, that meant desperate students cramming for finals; in late 2008, it meant plummeting portfolios and faltering banks.
Last December, the Wall Street Journal featured excerpts from “Subprime” and “The La$t Word” in a front-page article on meltdown-inspired poetry. Encouraged by the national recognition, Federman spent the next few months penning more than 60 amusing poems about 401ks, Bernie Madoff, and other timely topics, then selected 50 for the self-published Rhymes for Turbulent Times. He says his readers range “from anybody who’s sick and tired of reading that the market’s down again to a lot of Wall Street types. I’m just trying to bring a little light-heartedness to the whole subject.”
Though he’s not banking on a sequel to Rhymes, he admits “it could happen.” In the meantime, he pens economy-themed poems in his Livingston, N.J., home while working as a private investor.
As for his Wall Street days, “I don’t feel like I’ve given anything up,” he says. “There’s always a possibility I’ll get back into it, but with the current environment, it doesn’t look too realistic right now. Wall Street jobs have changed dramatically, but I’m not writing it off entirely. I never say never.”
Molly Petrilla is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer.
