A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship has a unique way of putting together poetry and sociology:

Poet Moten is working on a project titled “Hesitant Sociology: Blackness and Poetry.” The work was inspired, he said, by a piece written by W.E.B. Dubois, the African American sociologist and civil rights activist, called “Sociology Hesitant.”

Moten is a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book “The Little Edges.” He was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry.

“I’m looking at poetry as a sociological exercise,” Moten said. “What I want to do is take on the term ‘sociology’ not as an insult or slur, but as a badge of honor, and be able to think that literature in general, at its best, is a sociological enterprise. Poetry is a form of rhythmic or syncopated sociology.”

One area of literature or writing that is often linked with sociology involves novels, particularly ones that provide social commentary or deeper portrayals of social life. Poetry could get at similar themes but in different forms – perhaps with a different rhythm as noted above.

The Dubois piece referenced here ends with this:

That there are limits is shown by the rhythm in birth and death rates

and the distribution by sex; it is found further in human customs and laws,

the forms of government, the laws of trade, and even in charity and ethics.

As, however, we rise in the realm of conduct, we note a primary and a

secondary rhythm. A primary rhythm depending, as we have indicated, on

physical forces and physical law; but within this appears again and again a

secondary rhythm which, while presenting nearly the same uniformity as the

first, differs from it in its more or less sudden rise at a given tune, in accor-

dance with prearranged plan and prediction and in being liable to stoppage

and change according to similar plan. An example of primary uniformity is

the death rate; of secondary uniformity, the operation of a woman’s club;

to confound the two sorts of human uniformity is fatal to clear thinking; to

explain them we must assume Law and Chance working in conjunction—

Chance being the scientific side of inexplicable Will. Sociology, then, is the

Science that seeks the limits of Chance in human conduct.

“Law and Chance working in conjunction” sounds like it could lead to fruitful creative interpretation.