Getting in the Way: The Architecture of Address

We who maintain a belief in the power of poetry continue to struggle against the implications of Auden’s famous statement: “poetry makes nothing happen.” As Michael Thurston observes, in the introduction to his Making Something Happen, “the line has come to summarize a set of institutional assumptions about poetry as a special kind of discourse, removed from the world of action and consequence and thus prevented from acting, prevented from having consequences.”2 Poetry is, in Auden’s formulation, sequestered: “it survives/In the valley of its making…” and “flows on south/From ranches of isolation….” It is allowed only, as Thurston observes, to effect in “indirect and mediated ways.”3