Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

Does poetry make anything happen?  According to W.H. Auden, poetry makes nothing (my emphasis) happen.

     You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
     The parish of rich women, physical decay,
     Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
     Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
     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.

                -- "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden

So then, according to Auden, poetry just survives. Hmm. Is that all poetry is and does? But Auden was referring primarily to Yeats and Ireland, right? IDK, after a poetry performance last week featuring Donovan Colleps, No'u Revilla, Moi Self, I got to thinking and asking--primarily wondering--

• Why do I write poetry?
• For whom do I write poetry? Is it for me, for others and, if so, how many others?
• What do I want my poetry to do?
• Is my writing intended to show or to enact? If so, what am I hoping it to do?
• Can language affect and effect the world? (I know for certain the answer is yes to that question)
• Or, does poetry merely survive like a super-resilient, antibiotic-resistant, bacterial-infection-spawned bug?
• Should survival, aka publication, be the pragmatic end goal of poetry? My gut says no, but my brain leans yes on that question.

But back to Auden.  If poetry makes nothing happen, the underlying premise then is that poetry should make something happen. On the level of an action or an event, I concede that poetry is rather passive.  Although some of the poetry readings, (i.e. poetry slams) are not passive, most poets are not stage poets or actors or performers, and I don't fault page poets for that. Some of us are just not ham-it-uppers. If poetry makes nothing happen, where is all the action situated? In prose? In film? In interactive art?

A blogger, sarangij, notes the distinction between prose (active) and poetry (passive).  He states, "This is a distinction that we have made normative--the contrast between the narrative schema of prose as opposed to the associative and relatively a-logical schema of poetry. Meaning in poetry is less ideologically contrived and more of a fluidity. Poetry is less causal and thus more eventless compared to prose."  A-logical? What? Poetry has a lot of logic and purposeful craft!  Sarangij needs to go see a poetry slam, preferably a youth poetry slam, specifically the poets at the Hawai'i Youth Speaks event if he thinks poetry is passive.

Which brings me to the categorization of poetry.  Lately, I've been obsessed with a quirky desire to label, box in, categorize and sort my and others' poetry.  My latest need was to try to categorize Terrance Hayes' Lighthead.  I think this desire began when I first encountered William Blake in a Romantic poetry class 32 years ago.  I had the hardest time reconciling him with the other Romantics, nor did he fit neatly with the preceding period's neoclassicists nor the following era of Victorians in the sub-category aestheticism and decadence. As with other passive aggressive tendencies and ADHD proclivities, I will get over my categorization phase.  But for now, I want to categorize last week's poetry performers and poetics. If you missed it, then hey, you missed out. Take a look at the flyer to get an idea of what we tried to do with our poetry.

I have great admiration for the work my Documentary Poetry classmates, No'u and Donovan. Every time I hear Donovan's sea horse poem, I find something new and inspiring. Donovan's poetry makes me want to be a better observer and listener.  No'u is such a cerebral poet, brave in pushing boundaries and bold in her creativity in  abstraction and honesty. Her work is a poet's poetry. Then there's Moi Self.  In our eros statements, the first interweaving of our poetry which addressed what we tried to do with our words, I said I wanted to "gather the all the pieces, throw them up in the air and see how they landed." I was referring to words I found in statistics, newspaper articles, first person accounts from inmates and correctional officers and bureaucrats,and my attempt at using the poetic language of transcendence.  I knew what would land; I wanted to see how the words would be received.  I couched the impersonal with the personal by giving statistical contexts first.  Here are the numbers that I hoped the audience would find not only informative, but resonant in a political way.

In addition to the demographics, I wanted to show that Hawaiʻi has been exporting inmates, like many other states, to the detriment of families and communities and budgets.  99% of inmates will serve their sentence and return to the community.  Why are we sending them out-of-state in increasing numbers and eating the social and economic costs.  If a child whose parent is incarcerated is 3x more likely to end up in prison, aren't we encouraging the intergenerational cycle to kick in by further separating the families? Aren't we also sending away jobs that could be kept here?  I wanted my poetry to do something, and these were the kinds of questions I hoped my words would engender. 

Yeah, yeah, some of you are probably saying, "Good. Exile them. Banish them and throw away the key."  To that, I respond with, "You probably already know them--they are your neighbors, your relatives, your high school classmates, your co-worker's cousin.  What good will it do for them to come back and be [re] leased without any transitional programs or ties to the community?" 30% of the population sent away?  No other state has that high a rate.  I wanted to use the poems to show that we cannot operate in a vacuum when it comes to Hawaiʻi's incarcerated population.  $66 million spent sending them away just last year alone.  And sent to small towns in the middle of nowhere, in the heart of the boonies. They have been sent to:

Below are some demographics of the female offender population. I'll give you one guess as to why the numbers almost tripled from 1990 to 2000.  Hint: drugs.

So I read a poem called "I Name Myself" as the final attempt to humanize, historicize, contextualize, put a face on it because they are just not numbers approach to my poetics.  Yeah, okay, so I wanted to appeal to not only women, mothers, children, I wanted to the audience to see their place in the scheme of the prison industrial complex.  You know, like in terms of Althusser's ideology and State apparatuses, Marx's means of production and commodification of goods, and to rethink how we treat each other as human beings. I forget who said this, but I also had this quote in mind while creating the presentation, "It's hard to think out of the box, when thinking is the box."

And finally, the cover of my chapbook below.  At the end of the reading, the founder of the Brown Bag biography series George Simpson asked if he could have a copy of my chapbook.  I told him I had only made one chapbook and I had given it to my teacher Susan Schultz last semester.  But I said I would gladly make one for him just because he wanted one.  In conclusion, I want to tell W.H. Auden that in this case poetry made something happen, so much so that someone wanted to have a book of these poems.