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The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival
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Poetics of Pop Culture and Humor
Saturday May 31, 2025 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
National Park Service - Auditorium
Four poets will share their approaches to poems with fresh and humorous takes on pop culture and modern life. Jess Yuan (Slow Render, Airlie 2024), Yena Purmasir (Viraha, Game Over Books 2022), Otto Vock, and Alejandro Lucero (Sapello Son, Bull City Press 2024) will read from their collections and share new work. These poets reflect a range of approaches in using poetic craft to illuminate the joys and messiness of living in the world today. In this reading, poets will explore how the art of lyric can be closely aligned with the art of humor. How can crafting a poem be like crafting a joke? How can a visceral poem hit hard like a punchline? What’s the best way to introduce Lady Gaga in a sonnet? This reading explores how our idea of poetics can be expanded by weaving together and borrowing language from the internet, movies, music, sports, advertising, and beyond. Join us for a reading with fresh perspectives, witty insights, and delightfully relatable poems!
Speakers
avatar for Jess Yuan

Jess Yuan

Jess Yuan (she/her) is a poet and architect. She is the author of Slow Render (2024), winner of the Airlie Prize, and Threshold Amnesia (2020), winner of the Yemassee Chapbook Contest. Jess has received fellowships from Kundiman and Miami Writers Institute, and her poems appear in... Read More →
avatar for Alejandro Lucero

Alejandro Lucero

Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and Waxwing. He lives in Baltimore, where he is... Read More →
avatar for Yena Sharma Purmasir

Yena Sharma Purmasir

Yena Sharma Purmasir is a poet and essayist from New York City. She is the author of Until I Learned What It Meant (Where Are You Press, 2013), When I’m Not There (self-published, 2016), OUR SYNONYMS: An Epic (Party Trick Press, 2022), and VIRAHA (Game Over Books, 2022). In 2020... Read More →
avatar for Otto Vock

Otto Vock

Otto Vock is a Jewish Non-Binary poet and educator from Jersey City, NJ, now residing in Somerville. Their poetry work has previously appeared in The Offing, The Plum Creek Review, and in a self-published chapbook called A Boy Pulls Out His Rib and Uses it for Lipstick. They’re... Read More →
Saturday May 31, 2025 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
National Park Service - Auditorium 2 New Liberty St Salem, MA 01970 USA

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