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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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

Prompt: Letters Never Received

I was teaching Melville's story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which concludes with the revelation that Bartleby used to be a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington DC. Melville uses this setting as a metaphor for mortal hopelessness, misdirected communication, and loneliness.

I thought I knew of a poem about a dead letter office, but I could not find it. What I stumbled upon was the brief anonymous text here.

I found the letter I never gave you
and wondered if anything
would have changed if I did.
The paper felt lighter than I remember,
like time had taken some of its weight away.
I read it again
and so who I was back then
ready to be honest,
just not brave enough to follow through.

I don't know if it was intended as poetry, but it seemed to be a poem the way it appeared online. And that got me thinking about letters that are never received or never sent.

I thought of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

There are a variety of epistolary poems in the form of letters but the ones that interest us this month are ones that never were sent or received. The reasons why vary. Here are a few examples

"Letter to N.Y" by Elizabeth Bishop is a letter you couldn't send.

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you are pursuing:..

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann:
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?

It is about gun violence and school shootings, and the title and opening lines invoke Miłosz’s poem “Dedication”, both poems attempting to bridge historical atrocities with modern, senseless acts. Who is it addressed to? All of us.

A famous letter poem is Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors in her rejection of male control.

Looking at her poem led me to her poet husband, Ted Hughes. His poem about a letter and his correspondence with Sylvia is contained in "The Last Letter." (More about that here)

For our September issue, we are looking for poems that are letters never sent or never received, or poems about letters never sent or received. They might be in the form of a letter, but that is not a requirement.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31 

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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