poetry makes nothing happen

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,
A way of happening, a mouth.


(from 'In Memory of WB Yeats', by WH Auden)


Is this true? And if it is, does that mean that poetry, and by extension, literature, is useless?

In my QLRS bio, i wrote that i have 'an unreasonable conviction that literature matters'. That was a few years ago, when the certainty that it matters - somehow, in some secret, inexplicable, unreasonable way - was still there. i think i've lost that certainty over the years. It's difficult to see how poetry has any kind of place in the public world of busy executives, politics, earthquakes, business, finance, politics, war, crime, justice, busy executives, hurricanes, educational programmes, politics, tsunamis... With so much that needs doing, that needs real, hands-on action, it's hard to see how literature can contribute in any way except as a 'mouth' (and a rather ineffectual one at that), as something that merely 'happens' and 'survives', of no relevance to anyone except the few who continue to read and write it.

For quite some time now, i've reconciled myself to what seems the rather absurd situation of loving something that i know ultimately does not matter, of being good at something that is, in the larger scheme of things, useless. It's become an almost existential thing, this: this conviction that what i do really matters very little to anyone besides myself, but that somehow in doing what i love i'm being and becoming the person i was made to be, and that the fact that it matters hardly at all to anyone else was not really an issue at all.

Lately, i've started voicing these thoughts out loud, to friends and colleagues. And i've been - comforted? gratified? - by the earnestness of the responses i've received, from people from all academic disciplines and professions. There is something terribly... touching, if i may use that word, about non-Lit-people explaining why they think literature matters. No matter that the arguments basically revisit old ground that i've gone over before. It helps to hear it from others who do not have a vested interest in the matter.

i won't list all the pro-Lit arguments here, because i'd like to know what you, Gentle Reader, think of this. Do drop a note in the comments if you have anything at all to say about this question, whether it be an answer, or perhaps even more questions.


And in the meantime, here is what award-winning Brit author Jeanette Winterson thinks:


"I go to poetry the way some people grab an espresso; for an energy shot, a hit of warmth, and to clear my head.

I never go out without a poem – usually in my pocket, always in my head, and I try and learn some poetry every week. This is as good as a crossword puzzle for mental agility, and in times of stress it is better to be thinking, ‘Though much is taken, much abides,’ than ‘Sneeeze-catcher, (12)’, although I think the Sneeze Catcher might figure in my next book for kids.

We are in a good time for poetry. Strangely, the soundbite and snapshot culture has worked in poetry’s favour. People like something short and vivid. Poetry readings are a big success story, partly because poets tend to be much better performers than novelists, but also because listening to a series of shorter poems read out loud, allows the mind to concentrate, while refreshing it through the change of theme and tone and rhythm.

Above all, the mind is not fixed on following the plot, which is a left-brain activity. A poem activates the right-brain, and just allowing the brain to swop hands, as it were, for a time, provides relief.

Almost everything we do is left-brain work. Poetry should be subsidised by the NHS on the grounds that it is one of the few things in our mad world that offers a counter balance. One-sided people need help – poetry, like music, is the help we need.

On my website I feature a Poem of the Month - whatever it is I fancy, and this is the most visited and re-visited spot. I had an email from an oncologist last week, who tells me that while he is sitting late night in the hospital waiting for test results, he often looks at the poems on my site, and they seem like friends to him, in the long low hours.

The comfort of poetry is very real, but poetry is not a painkiller; it is a cure. Where there is no cure, poetry helps us to live with the problem. Poems don’t hide things, they reveal things about ourselves, they ‘put into words things difficult to think’, (Dante), and this difficult thinking won’t mask the trouble for a while, like an aspirin for a headache, but it will work to bring out the grief, the pain, the confusion, the mixed feelings, the anger, the impotence. We talk about being ‘lost for words’, about ‘having nothing to say’, but the poem finds the words, and has something to say, which is why poetry is worth our time.

Making time for poetry is making time for a different rhythm and a different understanding. Now that we are obsessed with factoids, docu-drama, reality TV, confessionals, live footage, 24 hour rolling news, we are forgetting that truth often lies elsewhere too – in what we can imagine, in what we can invent.

The wonderful Irish poet Eavan Boland has just issued her New Collected Poems, and there is a striking reminder of what poetry is and does in First Year, (2001)…I am writing this / not to recall our lives / but to imagine them.

Poetry always bears witness, but it is witness of a different kind to the front page of The Times. Only by imagining our lives can we fully understand them, or re-make them. Recording them is not enough.

This is not to say that we have no need of history, or politics, or daily news – of course we do, and poetry that is made separate from life is not poetry at all. But the poet speaks differently to the historian or the politician or the journalist. The poem itself has other work to do. In a world drowning in useless information, poetry returns us to what is meaningful. The poem acts a pocket of air in an upturned boat.

To the bean counters and economic gurus, a poem looks like the most useless thing on earth. It is not a money machine, you can’t sell it to Hollywood or use it for product placement. You can’t say long it will take to make, or how long it will last, (how maddening in an economy that depends on throwaways, that a poem can last forever). The poem, by its very nature, questions the dominant values of our world, and as William Carlos Williams put it, ‘it is hard to get the news from poems / but men die miserably every day / for lack of what is found there.’ "


(from http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/index.asp)
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