UC Irvine

The Social Life of Poetry explores the social function of poetry and its construction as a discursive category. The author proposes that we understand poetry as a register of communication: a widely recognizable way of using language that is context-dependent, made and remade in practice, and used to signal social and cultural alignments. While categories like genre or sociolects offer prescriptive taxonomies premised on pre-existing discursive features, register provides a tool to track language practices in flux and in formation. Approaching poetry as a register helps us see it as a rhetorical intervention in social space that can be used to trace communities in the process of coming into being. Studying an archive that spans across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the U.S., The Social Life of Poetry attends not just to the poetry that appears in chapbooks and anthologies but also to that scrawled on bathroom stalls and shared on Instagram. These analyses suggest that poetry is a way individuals and communities use language to imagine alternative ways of being in the world.