The Houthi zaamil-- chanted dialect poetry-- constitutes the backbone to the Yemeni armed group’s local conscription and international media campaigns. These recorded poems are accompanied by a montage of battle scenes and hundreds of comments on social media platforms such as YouTube and Telegram, where they enjoy millions of views in Yemen and transregionally. In areas under Houthi control, poems play in public and private spaces: the marketplace, homes, and at special occasions. The Houthis intend for these poems to recruit fighters and tune the public’s response to current events, such as a recent air raid or ongoing battle. Yet they enjoy popularity among diverse audiences, including those who resist the Houthis. While there is a general consensus among political analysts that the zaamil is an essential weapon for the Houthis, this paper resists the tendency to reduce them to propaganda. Instead, it takes a dialogic approach to build a theory of the Houthi zaamil in conversation with the literary form and Yemeni interlocutors. Part one of this paper is a close, comparative reading of a Houthi zaamil from January 2022 and 1960s folk zaamil. Reflecting the paper’s method, the folk zaamil genre is distinctly dialogic. It features poetic exchanges for specific occasions, historically performed among Yemeni tribes to exchange views during a dispute, welcome guests, and motivate fighters for battle (al-Ḥārithī 2004). Anthropologists characterize it as persuasive rhetoric and a form of moral discourse in the public sphere (Caton 1990; Miller 2004), while Yemeni literary scholars typify it as an artistic expression of communal, tribal feeling and ideology (al-Baraddūnī 1998; al-Shāmī 2007). This paper argues that the Houthi zaamil shifts the discursive emphasis of the genre from tribal to religious, a marked departure from the folk zaamil. Part two argues that the Houthi poems’ power can only be partially attributed to this discursive shift. Instead, the poetry’s other formal features, such as rhythm and melody, interact with individual agency, gender and sociopolitical position to locate them in an economy of affect (Ahmed 2004). Research is based on structured conversations with Yemenis living in Sanaa, Cairo, and Aden and an analysis of social media interactions with the poetry. It prioritizes bringing dialogue with those experiencing the poetry into conversation with literary analysis. Results shed light on poetry’s role in broader sociopolitical movements, especially poetry similar to the Houthi zaamil, such as the Gulf shayla and poetry of Hezbollah and al-Qaeda.