Featuring a folio of poems on “Pop Culture and Response” from Guest Editor Hanif Abdurraqib
From the Guest Editor’s Note:
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.
Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His newest release, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) was a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
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