A Way of Happening | Mark S. Burrows
Poetry is a hard sell in times like ours driven by efficiency, productivity, and marketability. An oft-quoted (but under-interpreted) line from a poem by W. H. Auden puts the matter bluntly: “poetry makes nothing happen,” a claim that might find resistance among poets and their loyal readers but receive an uncritical nod among the wider population.
Of course, that was not Auden’s last word on the subject. “It survives,” he went on to write, “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.” Now, the first claim is uncontroversial: Yes, poetry does “survive in the valley of its making.” And it might be true enough to admit that “executives” would rather leave it alone as something peculiar and inefficient in a culture, like ours, driven by The Bottom Line.
Why, then, turn to poems at all? And will they survive given the rise of AI-generated programs that promise to supply forms of writing with breathtaking speed? There are shrill voices among us mesmerized by this promise who have begun to speak of the “end” of the writing life as we have come to know it across millennia.
But such dismissals miss something fundamental about what literature—and poetry—are. Writing, after all, is not simply bent on creating a “product.” It is a process of the creative life, a path of discovery—and not simply a means of production. And if such writing is not simply a means to some end, like publication, it is also true that reading is a vocation of its own.
When we read a poem or some other form of literature, we find ourselves connecting—perhaps unwittingly—with some probably unknown but just as certainly knowable person whose imagination brought that piece to life. Their experiences “flow south” to us, connecting us with a writer whose unique joys and sorrows, burdens and delights, gave shape to the work we are reading. In our encounter with their expression of that life, and our experience of it, we find ourselves as part of that “flow” which shapes us through what we hold in common amid the distinctive singularities of our lives.
We read, just as we write, to find out something essential and important about ourselves, about others, about our world. And this discovery is one we must make for ourselves, not only as writers but also as readers. For everything about the sacred realm of literature depends on the hard-won discoveries we make—story by story, line by line, and moment by moment—as readers opening our lives to writing. The work and delight of these epiphanies is what makes the reading life just that: not simply an activity, but a life.
What, then, should we say of poetry which “makes nothing happen”? Of course Auden didn’t mean this narrowly since this is a line from his memorial poem written to honor the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats. We need poems and stories that “flow south/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs” we carry. Theirs is the work of interrupting the tedium of our lives in those “raw towns” where we long, with the author, to “believe” in something that grounds our lives in depths that connect us to one another—and to what matters.
Poems are a kind of instigation for that longing. They invite us to discover depths and breadths in our lives, and the lives of others, that we might otherwise have missed. Even if we can’t exactly say why we return to them, we do so trusting that they have the power to awaken us to “a way of happening,” one that just might save us.
Mark Burrows is a poet and translator, scholar and speaker. He is well known for his academic and popular work on medieval mysticism and as a translator and interpreter of Rainer Maria Rilke's writings. He lives and writes in Camden, ME, where he is the co-founder and co-director, with Meg Weston, of the Camden Festival of Poetry. www.soul-on-sight.org
