Politics & Power Quote by Howard Nemerov

A poet admitting impotence is also a poet flexing power. Nemerov’s line pretends to shrug at “political poetry,” but the shrug is a provocation: stop confusing intention with consequence, and stop grading art like legislation. The first sentence lands like a heckler in the back row of a righteous reading series. It punctures the comforting fantasy that a poem can function as a policy memo with better line breaks.

Then comes the turn that makes the quote stick. “Poetry makes things happen” is not a retreat; it’s a recalibration of what “happen” means. Nemerov draws a bright line between direct, measurable outcomes (votes, laws, revolutions) and the slower, sideways effects poems actually excel at: changing what feels sayable, re-wiring attention, planting metaphors that outlive the occasion that birthed them. Politics wants obedience from language; poetry wants volatility.

The subtext is a warning to poets and readers alike. If you write toward an outcome, you’re likely to be disappointed or, worse, to flatten the poem into a slogan. And if you demand that poems “accomplish” something on command, you’ll miss how they work: by slipping past your stated beliefs, complicating your loyalties, making you inhabit an enemy’s syntax for a moment. That’s why poetry “rarely” delivers what the poet wants. It doesn’t march; it mutates. It’s a force, not a tool.