An essay about history, war, and the value of making art
In one of his finest poems, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, written in the shadow of war in Europe, W. H. Auden writes famously that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, a phrase that has often been taken as an admission of art’s essential uselessness. But there is another way of reading those words.
Poetry makes nothing happen because, like all art, it is creative. It makes nothing into something: that is what creation means. The intangible, inexplicable poetry of Auden and of Yeats whom he is commemorating, did not exist before they spoke. It exists now, though they do not. They made ‘nothing’ happen. Nothing became something because of them.
from ‘Making Nothing Happen’
Making Nothing Happen v.2 (03/22) is based on a talk originally given on 3 September 2016, at the 5th Anniversary of Tandem, in Berlin; the original text was published on the programme website. This version was published in April 2022 at https://miaaw.net
François Matarasso 