David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You may recall, a year or two ago, hearing news stories that Harvard University was offering a course on Taylor Swift. It had a pretty big enrollment, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt.

In The New Yorker, Burt has written seriously about comics and science fiction, but she's also considered great poets like Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver, and Burt has now put together an anthology that she calls Super Gay Poems. It's a collection of LGBTQ poetry, which begins after the Stonewall Uprising of 1969.

Stephanie Burt: There are poems where we read it and we say, "Wow, that's me," and there are poems where we read it and we say, "Wow, I didn't know that can happen. That's not me," and there are poems where we read them and we just say, "That's beautiful. That is elegant. That is funny. That is sexy. That is hot. That is so sad that I don't know why I like it, but I do," and I like making those experiences available to readers.

David: Stephanie Burt sat down to talk about three of her favorite works with our producer, Jeffrey Masters.

Jeffrey Masters: Reading the earlier poems in the book, I would have assumed that the queerness would have been more hidden and more subtle, and that's not the case at all. Audre Lorde is in the book, and this is someone who was publicly gay when there were very few people in the country who were public about their sexuality, and the poem really speaks to that, too. Can I have you read a portion of that?

Stephanie: Absolutely. This is the third stanza from Audre Lorde's fascinating poem, Walking Our Boundaries. We should produce a context here, which is that Lorde is writing about an early spring day on the house with a garden and a yard that she calls "our joint holding," which she has bought with her long-term partner. They would certainly have gotten married if they could have at that time in the '70s.

"The sun is watery warm. Our voices seem too loud for this small yard, too tentative for women so in love. The siding has come loose in spots. Our footsteps hold this place together as our place. Our joint decisions make the possible whole. I do not know when we shall laugh again, but next week, we will spade up another plot for this year's seeding."

Jeffrey: Talk about why you wanted to include this poem.

Stephanie: This poem, I picked in part because it's such a good and fairly early representation of queer, and, in this case, lesbian domesticity. This is a poem not about falling for someone and irresistibly wanting to take them to bed, but about learning to live with someone to share, not just a life, but a physical household, and, in this case, a house and a household and gardening and trees.

The context of the whole poem is that if you live with someone for months, years, decades, you're going to have moments of conflict, and it's a poem that imagines what happens after you have a fight, how to stay together, and affirm that you ought to be together. It's also, and this is something else really beautiful about this poem in particular, does something that Lorde almost always does, which is it doesn't use large, weird, fiddly words. It remains in a demotic register, but it's also very canny about how its syntax develops.

Jeffrey: There are poems in the book, too, that come out of the AIDS crisis, and I think that Paul Monette is probably one of the names that people know from that era.

Stephanie: Yes, Paul Monette is, for me, the great poet of that era. He differs from a lot of the other poets of the age of mass death in America from HIV and aids because he's such a poet of incandescent anger, and he is a poet of caregiver anger, as well as a poet who, himself, got sick and eventually passed from HIV and AIDS.

Jeffrey: This is a very intense poem. I'd like you to read a portion of it, though.

Stephanie: Sure. Monette writes about the right to be angry. No, this is not a punishment. This is the entire Reagan Administration and decades or centuries of patriarchy teaming up to be jerks and kill us. It is the fault of a cascade of actively homophobic institutions who treated the death of a generation of people, primarily, but not exclusively, men, as a joke, because gay people dying was a joke. I'm going to read you the end of this poem, which is called The Worrying. He refers to his lover, his partner who's sick, as "Raj."

"Raj, it hasn't stopped at all. Are you okay? Does it hurt? What can I do? Still, still, I think if I worry enough, I'll keep you near. The night before Thanksgiving, I had this panic to buy the plot on either side of us so we won't be cramped. That yard of extra grass would let us breathe. This is crazy, right? But Thanksgiving morning, I went the grave two over. Beside you was six feet deep, ready for the next murdered dream. So, see? The threat was real. Why not worry? Worry is like prayer, is like God. If you have none, they all forget. There's the other side, too. 12 years and not once to fret, who will ever love me? That was the heaven at the back of time, but we had it here, now.

Black on black, I wander, frantic, never done with worrying, but it's mine. It's a cure that's not in the books. Are you easy, my stolen pal? What do you need? Is it sleep? Like sleep, you want a pillow. A cool drink. Oh, my one safe place, there must be something. Just say what it is and it's yours."

Jeffrey: That is from Worrying by Paul Monette. He's one of a number of poets who wrote really powerfully about the AIDS crisis. On the opposite end of things, switching gears for a moment, one of the poems that I really adored in the book-- and this takes us up to present-day, it's a love poem, and it's called She Ties My Bow Tie by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. I asked them to read the poem for us, so let's hear that now.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi: "What you thought was the sound of the deer drinking at the base of the ravine was not their soft tongues entering the water, but my love tying my bow tie. We were in our little house just up from the ravine. Forgive yourself, it's easy to mistake her wrists for the necks of deer. Her fingers move so deftly, one could call them skittish, though not really, because they're not afraid of you. I know, you thought it was the deer, but they're so far down, you couldn't possibly hear them. No, this is the breeze my love makes when she ties me up and sends me out into the world, her breath pulled taut and held until she's through. I watch her in the mirror, not even looking at me. She's so focused on the knot and how to loop the silk into a bow."

Jeffrey: I thought it was interesting to pair this with the Audre Lorde poem because it's also about this private domestic moment. I was thinking about how just the world is a scary place right now for queer and trans people. They're being painted as perverts and pedophiles. "They're too dangerous to allow in bathrooms," and yet, what is this queer couple doing behind closed doors? In this case, it's a woman fixing her partner's bow tie before they leave the house.

Stephanie: Those are two poems of domesticity, and they're poems about the kind of safety that we can create for one another when the outside world doesn't feel safe.

Jeffrey: Totally, and this is what Gabrielle told me about writing the poem.

Gabrielle: This poem, really, to me, is one of the first poems I wrote that I feel like is really rooted in living in North Carolina. We'd come from living in this big city, and so, all of a sudden, I was back in a world where there were all of these woods and all of these pine trees. There were foxes coming up. I would look out the window and see deer in the morning. They didn't just start visiting me; they started visiting my poems. [laughs] Then I also, at the same time, had started wearing a bow tie.

It's interesting, it took coming to the University of North Carolina and my queer students and just the way they embodied their life in this place with such joy and a kind of wonder. One day, I was at Southpoint Mall in Durham, and I saw these bow ties and I was like, "I'm going to do that."

Jeffrey: I really just appreciate the geographical spread of this book. We don't hear enough about queer and trans folks in non-coastal cities.

Stephanie: America is a very big place. It is easy for people who rarely leave New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, or DC, Baltimore, Boston, or Greater LA and San Francisco to think, "Well, there are these big dark blue places of safety, and then everything else is haters with pitchforks." There are queer communities in smaller cities that people move to, some of which are in safe states and some of which are not. It means that there are purposefully rural retreats and communes and spaces of wildness for queers who want that.

It means that there are thriving suburbs and that there are thriving small cities, large towns, spaces where you can be your full self, and also be close to nature. The Chapel Hill and Durham that Gabrielle Calvocoressi envisions in this poem is one of those places where you can be close to nature.

Jeffrey: Can I ask, working on this and compiling these poems, how did that change or expand your own perspective on your own queerness and transness?

Stephanie: I love that question, and it is a challenge for me to answer because I try to make scholarly and critical work that doesn't foreground my own personal journey. Of course, it's influenced by that. That said, I think that I became more aware of the difference between feeling well-represented and feeling newly-represented or semi-represented, or unrepresented because there are aspects of my life, if I want to read poems about them, maybe I have to write the darn things because I haven't read poems that satisfy me that represent them.

In particular, poly lives where you've got multiple people, not just who you jump into bed with, but who you really maintain erotic and romantic relationships with and everybody knows about it, you can find lovely representations of polyamorous lives in science fiction and fantasy and in memoirs in real life going back a couple of decades. If you read biographies, you can find them much earlier than that, but poems adequate to poly lives have been few and far between until quite recently. There is one that's explicitly poly in here.

Jeffrey: Stephanie, thank you for the conversation. This was fantastic.

Stephanie: Let's do this again.

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David: Stephanie Burt's new book is called Super Gay Poems, and she spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Announcer: The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production--

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