A Political Ars Poetica

My last post was about Auden's thought that "poetry makes nothing happen," which questions seeing poetry as political or able to change the world. But this month I also noted that Juliana Spahr won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her recent collection, Ars Poeticas, a politically charged meditation on poetry’s role in what she describes as “dark times.”

“Ars poeticas" literally means “art of poetry.” Her collection takes that title from the Roman poet Horace’s foundational treatise on the art of poetry, which has inspired a tradition across cultures and languages of poets writing their own “ars poeticas” - meta-poems that are meditations on the art of poetry itself. 

Her book addresses ecological crises, the rise of authoritarian populism and the possibilities of collective care and resistance. Spahr, who is a professor of contemporary American literature at Northeastern University, follows developments across the nuclear age from the Castle Bravo nuclear bomb test in 1954 to today’s moment of crisis, species extinction, and political upheaval. In an interview, she described her book as moving into questions about poetry’s “social” role, broader utility, and even complicity in larger systems.

In “Will There be Singing,” she writes:

I thought for a while there were two sorts of poets.
Poets who write the terrible nation into existence
and poets screwing around doing something else.

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Making Nothing Happen

W. H. Auden famously asserted that "poetry makes nothing happen” in his 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”   

By writing that, Auden rejected the idea that poetry serves as a direct tool for political or practical change. Its value does not lie in changing the physical world, but in surviving as a voice for the human experience.

That sounds cynical, but it reflects his view of what art can—and cannot—do. He wrote it on the brink of World War II. He was confronting the limitations of literature in an era of rising Fascism and geopolitical chaos. Some reading this post may feel the same way about poetry in our current state of the world.

Why Yeats? Despite Yeats's lifelong political involvement and nationalist verse, Auden reflects that  "Ireland has her madness and her weather still." The poems did not change things. A poem cannot alter historical events, stop a war, pass laws, or feed the hungry. 

But Auden wasn't declaring poetry useless. Take that stanza further:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

Literary critics also point to a subtle grammatical paradox: poetry makes nothing happen. That is, art takes the invisible, intangible aspects of human existence—grief, silence, absence, or "nothing"—and transforms them into something tangible through language. And it survives.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Prompt: Balance

When I looked at the September calendar, I noticed the Autumn Equinox is on the 22nd. The first thing I thought of was being told as a kid that an egg can only be balanced on its end during an equinox due to a special alignment of the Sun and Earth during the equinox that creates a unique gravitational pull that stabilizes the egg.  It is a myth. You can balance an egg on its end on any day of the year. The equinox has zero effect on gravity or an egg's physical properties.

My second thought was about poems concerning equinoxes and balance. 

In her poem "Equinox," Elizabeth Alexander uses late-September imagery to reflect on the nature of life and mortality. The energy of the changing season, when "bees are wild and eccentric" as they fly during the last warm days of autumn.

Poems exploring balance often depict it as a delicate, active effort rather than a static state, using physical objects or shifting landscapes to mirror our inner lives.

In our model poem, "Balance" by Alice B. Fogel, from her collection Elemental, she doesn't define balance as calm or symmetry. She defines it as survival.
Balance is everything, is the only way to hold on. 
But not holding on in the way we usually mean it. Not a safe grip, but a hover. 

I've weighed the alternatives, the hold
as harbor: It isn't safe
to let go. But consider the hover,
choices made, the moment
between later and too late.

Balance is that suspended state: choices made, the moment between later and too late.

Consider how these other two balance poems define it: Balance by Adam Zagajewski, and "Balance" by Dorianne Laux.

Balance is not a static achievement but a momentary alignment, something we pass through, notice, and learn from. We don’t “arrive” at balance and stay there; we glimpse it. A period where work and rest feel proportionate, where inner life and outer obligations match pace, where identity feels neither shadowed nor overexposed. These moments are real but fleeting, and that doesn’t make them less meaningful. 

Balance can be physical, like the equinox, an egg, learning to ride a bicycle, or a woman on a tightrope at the circus. In poems, it is more often internal, such as balancing a relationship, life and work, or our emotions. Sometimes, a poem contains both, with one reflecting on the other.

For September, we are seeking poems that focus on some time of balance.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 30, 2026 

Alice B. Fogel is a former theatrical costumer and clothing refashioner who earned a BA in art and literature from Antioch College and an MFA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire.
She is the author of Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations," which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry; and Be That Empty. 
Fogel lives in Walpole, New Hampshire; works as a professor and one-on-one as an academic coach with neurodiverse students at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont; and hikes mountains whenever possible.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

In a Station of the Metro

An article in The New York Times, "These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures," suggests that Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the shortest great poems in English.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 

Petals on a wet, black bough. 

First published in Poetry Magazine in 1913, these 20 words (counting the title, which is central to the poem’s meaning) find "an echo of serene natural beauty in a hectic modern scene."

A Paris Metro station seen from a train, a bustling crowd in the rain at night, become petals on a flowering tree.

I've always liked this poem. I read it in high school. Later, I learned that Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was not only "a shrewd and cantankerous proponent of literary modernism [and Imagism], determined to shake poetry out of its Romantic and Victorian habits," but also an anti-Semite who embraced fascism, broadcasting pro-Mussolini propaganda on Italian state radio during World War II. After the war, he was charged with treason and confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C.

But in 1913...

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org