Law & Humanities Blog

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The Public Uses of Poetry Posted: 24 Apr 2012 02:15 PM PDT Tom Clark, Victoria University, has published Public Poeisis: Theorising Contemporary Civic Uses of Poetry in Australia and the United States. Here is the abstract. Uses of poems and extracts from poems for ceremonial or ritual purposes within civic discourse reveal the inherently aesthetic nature of all political language. We can read in these civil and stately appropriations of poetry a desire for validation or embodiment of the aesthetic qualities of the events they embellish, and of the public and political agendas those events carry. This paper argues that poetry as public language reveals how public language is poetry.