Social poetry

Social poetry is poetry which performs a social function or contains a level of social commentary. The term seems to have first appeared as a translation from the original Spanish Poesia Socíal, used to describe the post-Spanish-civil-war poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s^[1] (including poets such as Blas de Otero). Later, José Eduardo Limón, for example, has used it to describe Mexican-American Chicano poetry in Texas during the same period.^[2] Elsewhere, others have used the term to describe English-language poets such as W.H. Auden^[3] and George Bernard Shaw.^[4] Boston University has recently offered courses in “the social poetry of Central America.”^[5]

More recently, John Stubley has made use of the term as part of the Centre for Social Poetry.^[6] Stubley expands the idea to include what Owen Barfield describes as poetic “effect”^[7] – which distinguishes between the poetic form of words on a piece of paper, and the poetic effect of a “felt change of consciousness”.^[8] Stubley explores this poetic effect or experience as it occurs between human beings (socio-poetic experience), together with all that they can turn their minds and hands to in relation to the organisation (i.e., "poeticisation"^[9]) of social life.^[9] He attempts to create spaces that give expression to imaginations of objective realities at work within the human and social organisms, thereby opening up the way to individual and social transformation.^[9]