Seeing Milwaukee Through the Lens of Poetry: A Literary Ethnography

• In Event: 4328 - Section on Sociology of Consumers and Consumption Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 1: Artistic Production and Consumption

Abstract

Literature does not emerge without social influence. Rather, it results from the interaction of the writer with their milieu. While authors and readers have traditionally used books as the main platforms of production and consumption of poetry, there is a long tradition of newspaper poetry in the United States that remains partially unexplored in sociology. Drawing on poems published in two alternative Milwaukee newspapers between 1967 and 1973, along with extensive archival and historiographical data from that period, this article examines poetic representations of the city’s social, institutional, and urban dimensions during a period of accelerated change and over-time change in focus and discourse. In addition, this article focuses on the extent to which those representations and over-time variations are driven to specific characteristics and/or transformations of the urban and social milieu of the city. Results derived from this study show a wide variety of ways in which poems represented that period in Milwaukee’s history. Also, it finds that in periods of intense social mobilization, poets’ perspective tends to be more collective than individual and poetry’s content more socially oriented. Finally, this study finds that the urban landscape and public space play a central role in the production of poetic representations. Additionally, this study analyzes the implications of platforms of distribution and consumption in the social dimension of poetry.

Author

• Antonio Paniagua Guzman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee