Making nothing happen: Poetry and sabotage

What is the work of poetry in the time and space of radical cultural transformation? This essay begins by investigating the relationship between habits of expectation and habitat, ends with a line of a poem that was converted into a revolutionary slogan chanted on Tahrir Square, and gets there by juxtaposing a description of poetry’s action by W.H. Auden and a definition of the General Strike by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. A claim is pursued throughout on behalf of improbability, and more particularly on behalf of poetry’s work in allowing us to ‘perform the other side of the normal form.’