Volume 120 Summer/Fall 2025 Guest Editor’s Note

Guest Editor’s Note: Pop Culture and Response

When I was young, I cherished the Sunday paper, which had an increased heft to it when compared to the lightweight black-and-white issues that would come during the week, only the front page in color and little else. More specifically, I cherished the comics page, vibrant and alive, as if the characters had lived an entire week without me and in the rush to tell me about it, the world became colorful. But! Even more specifically than that! I cherished! Deeply! The magic eye game, which would appear in the center of the comics page, every Sunday, and which would appear with questions: can you see the cat? Can you see the apple?

For those uninitiated, or perhaps not old enough to recall, the trick was that you pulled this image, largely made up of a stitched together set of colors that do not appear to be anything beyond that, close to your nose, and you stared at it for a while. And through your staring, as you started to pull it away, the colors would transform, take a different shape, become The Object Underneath.

What I loved most about this wasn’t exactly the transformation of the colors into The Object, but beyond that, what I loved was that once you saw the object, once it materialized through your looking, you couldn’t see anything other than the cat, or the apple, or whatever delight was hiding underneath. You offered your close attention as a kind of call, and as a kind of response, you were granted something new, something unexpected, something that you couldn’t shake, even if you wanted to.

This was the first time that I felt convinced that what I set my attention on mattered. That I might gain something valuable out of my looking. That if I, for example, stared at the sky long enough, I could make meaning out of loss, or at least I could convince you, reader, that there is meaning to be made out of loss, out of one cloud tearing itself apart from another, which might grant you warmth, momentarily, but at a small cost of loss.

When I was asked to edit this folio, to go through a mass of beautiful poems and do the painstaking and weirdly kind of heartbreaking work of selecting a strong handful, I set out to do the work thinking of “Call and Response” in the traditional sense that I touch on most, as a person who loves music, who thinks about music and writes about it constantly. I was considering it in the way(s) of the black church, wherein the choir responds to an action, or a call. Or I was considering it in the way(s) of soul music, in the way of, say, “Shout,” – the most traditional form. Someone makes a sound, and then passes the responsibility on to you. You did not create the sound, but you hold it, even temporarily, and you have a duty to return it. This is what I like about the sonic call and response. It is, of course, on its face, a communal action. But it is also teaching a listener, or anyone engaging in the practice, a lot about what it is to be gifted something and then to immediately let it go.

But the more I dove into this glorious work, and read poems that, yes, did use singers as a frame, but also used visual art, and video games, and sound, and the natural world, I realized that my approach here could and should be best aligned with the same eagerness and curiosity I took to that magic eye game on Sundays as a child. Because, I think, in the sense of ekphrasis, you are not necessarily given the call. You find it, you unearth it. Sometimes on your own. And then the duty, the obligation changes. You don’t have to depart from it with any urgency, if you don’t want to. It gets to stick with you, to live with you. The response does not have to be a single action. The call, the object of one’s affection or central interest, can hover, unchanging, and live alongside you, the poet, the grand responder, and you get to reshape it as many times as you want. It is, like in the magic eye trick, where you see what lies underneath, and you can’t unsee it. And yes, that is one single object, but you get to extract as much meaning from it as your heart desires. You don’t have to put it down, you don’t have to urgently push it back to someone else. Your time with the object is endless, and it – I think – will endlessly reward your looking, your close attention, if tended to well.

It was a gift to spend time with such brilliant work, and I hope everyone who encounters it enjoys it as much as I did. I found these poems to be at times delightful, at times funny, at times tender, and at times devastating. But what I loved about all of them was that the poets who wrote these poems didn’t spend time on explanation, didn’t spend time on justification for their obsessions. The poems were an invitation into a world, and once you are in it, the responsibility is on the reader to say I have all I need. I can find my way around in this world, with gratitude. 

—Hanif Abdurraqib