One of the most immediate ways to query the political stakes of poetry is to consider the context in which one encounters a poem. Take for instance Abel Meeropol’s antilynching poem “Strange Fruit.” In the 1937 issue of the Marxist labor magazine New Masses the work is an article of working-class allyship and protest, whereas the more popular musical rendition, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, underscores the elegiac quality of the work, emphasizing a connection between jazz and Black folk traditions of social mourning. In certain instances, poems use extraliterary markers to indicate the circumstantial conditions out of which they arise; these are commonly referred to as framing devices. In his succinct comment on “The Literary Frame,” John Frow defines the frame as the material and immaterial border that “surrounds a text and defines its specific [literary] status and the kinds of use to which it can be put” (26). The frame includes the material boundaries of the books’ two covers, the blank space encircling the text and even the silence that marks the start and conclusion of a public reading. But it also includes the immaterial boundaries that communicate the generic and historical particularity of a given work, thus generating what Hans Robert Jauss has called our horizons of expectation. These horizons are cued by such seemingly extra-literary elements as the poem’s date of composition (occasionally stamped at the bottom of the page), the author’s name, the work’s title, the publishing house, as well as the dedicatory material. Taken together these inscriptive settings carry major implications for how we derive meaning. Yet we often overlook them in our rush to privilege content. When accepted uncritically, the frame fulfills its principle duty, to present the separation of literature from everyday life as uncontested and natural. Like any border concept – silence, for instance – when we pay attention to the frame, the ideological biases constructing the border come into view. Each framing occasion provides the receiver with the opportunity to consider the occluded relationships of production and exchange that underpin the creation and reception of a poem. Attending to the frame acknowledges the poem as an ongoing series of events, with each iteration carrying the potential to reroute its meaning. It is for this reason that practitioners of socially attuned innovative poetries have made it a perennial habit to call attention to the frame in order to relax its authority.