Readings from Community Day Contributors and Conversation with Stephanie Burt.

Join us for a THANK YOU celebration and reception in the R&D Store as community members, MASS MoCA staff, and invited artists read hand-chosen works from Super Gay Poems. The book’s editor Stephanie Burt — a major poet, literary critic and scholar — provides introductory background to each of the selections in a fun, Pride weekend free for all!

The poems in Super Gay Poems represent the great variety of queer and trans life itself after the Stonewall uprising of 1969. They include near-sonnets, iambic couplets, and rhymed quatrains; skinny dimeters and shaped poems; chatty free verse and intentionally inaccurate translations; the demotic and the rococo. Arranged in chronological order, the selections trace queer culture’s recent evolutions. Frank O’Hara, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, James Merrill, Thom Gunn, Jackie Kay, Adrienne Rich, Chen Chen, essa ranapiri, and The Cyborg Jillian Weise — poets widely known and poets who deserve to be so — share their alienation, their euphoria, and their encounters with a protean community as it discovers new solidarities and new selves.  A treasury of aesthetic experience and insight, Super Gay Poems points protestors, political organizers, poetry lovers, and LGBTQIA+ readers toward many beautiful tomorrows.

About the Author:
Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Don’t Read Poetry. A past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she serves as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Raritan, and other publications. She is the Donald and Katherine Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.