THE POETRY OF POP CULTURE

Popular culture has long held my attention—not as spectacle alone, but as a living, shifting force. I am drawn to the speed at which its winds change direction, and to the ways those shifts are increasingly shaped—if not driven—by social media influencers. What once moved through institutions now moves through individuals, carried in voices that are immediate, visible, and constant.

Like the platforms that propel it, popular culture hums. It flickers, loops, repeats itself in rhythms both urgent and hypnotic. It resists stillness. It moves through us in fragments—images, sounds, gestures—assembled and reassembled in real time.

There is poetry here.

Not always in language, but in rhythm, in intention, in the shaping of what is offered and received.

Screenshot from the feed of Sonja Norwood's Instagram, @wickdconfections

Consider Sonja Norwood, reconstructing lost Black recipes with a playful irreverence that belies the depth of her work. She moves through history not as a distant archivist, but as an active participant—reanimating traditions that once lived in kitchens thick with conversation, care, and improvisation. What she offers extends beyond instruction. It is an act of cultural retrieval, a refusal to let memory fade quietly into absence.

Or Lynae Vanee Bogues, seated with her tea, delivering political analysis with clarity that cuts clean through the noise. Her cadence is measured, her tone assured. She names systems, untangles corruption, and grounds her insight in rigorous study, including her Master’s training in African American Studies. In a digital environment that rewards speed, she claims space for deliberation. That pause—intentional, steady—becomes its own form of poetry: the poetry of understanding.

These women, and others like them, occupy a space that resists easy categorization. Education, influence, and entertainment are not separate lanes but interwoven strands—a braid that holds both substance and accessibility. Knowledge travels not only through facts, but through tone, gesture, and timing. Entertainment becomes an entry point rather than a distraction. Influence becomes an invitation.

Come closer. Stay a moment. Learn something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWbLRJ5Plts

In this way, popular culture reveals itself as a living text—continuously written and rewritten, shaped by those who refuse to wait for institutional permission to speak with authority. It is a space where knowledge is not diminished by accessibility but expanded through it. Where voices historically positioned at the margins move to the center, carrying with them both story and scholarship.

This shift holds power. It also demands discernment.

The same mechanisms that elevate meaningful content can just as easily amplify the hollow. The scroll does not differentiate between what nourishes and what merely occupies. It asks only that we continue. And so the responsibility shifts, in part, to us—to how we choose to engage, to what we allow to settle, to what we return to.

The question, then, is not whether popular culture holds value, but how we encounter it. Do we move through it passively, allowing it to dissolve as quickly as it appears? Or do we pause long enough to recognize when something deeper is being offered?

Creators like Norwood and Bogues compel that pause. There is a gravitas in their work that invites us to linger, to take in what is being offered—to let it settle, like cornbread soaking up pot liquor, absorbing flavor, memory, and meaning in equal measure.

To lean into popular culture in this way is to recognize that it is not only spectacle. It is also memory in motion. It carries what we choose to give it—and what we refuse to let go.

And in its most resonant moments, it does what poetry has always done: it shapes meaning from movement, and invites us to see ourselves—more clearly—within it.

Screenshot from Lynae Vanee's Instagram feed, @lynaevanee

Vivian Phillips, Founder + Board President,