“Super Gay Poems”

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Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 It had a pretty big enrollment, to say the least. And that course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And Bert 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.

Speaker 2 There are poems where we read it and we say, wow, that's me.

Speaker 2 And there are poems where we read it and we say, wow, I didn't know that could happen. That's not me.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And I like making those experiences available

Speaker 2 to readers.

Speaker 6 Stephanie Burt sat down to talk about three of her favorite works with our producer Jeffrey Masters.

Speaker 2 You know, 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.

Speaker 2 You know, Audrey 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 speaks to that too.

Speaker 2 Can I read a portion of that?

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Okay, this is the third stanza from Audre Lorde's fascinating poem, Walking Our Boundaries.

Speaker 2 We should produce a context here, which is that Lord is writing about an early spring day

Speaker 2 on the house with a garden and a yard that she calls our joint holding, which she has bought with her long-term partner.

Speaker 2 They would certainly have gotten married if they could have at that time in the 70s.

Speaker 2 The sun is watery warm.

Speaker 2 Our voices seem too loud for this small yard,

Speaker 2 too tentative for women so in love.

Speaker 2 The siding has come loose in spots. Our footsteps hold this place together as our place.

Speaker 2 Our joint decisions make the possible whole.

Speaker 2 I do not know when we shall laugh again, but next week we will spade up another plot for this year's seeding.

Speaker 2 Talk about why you wanted to include this poem.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 this poem I picked in part because it's such a good and fairly early representation

Speaker 2 of queer and in this case lesbian domesticity. This is a poem not about falling for someone and

Speaker 2 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 and a household and

Speaker 2 gardening and trees. And the context of the whole poem is that

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 how to stay together and affirm that you ought to be together.

Speaker 2 It's also, and this is something else really beautiful about this poem in particular, it does something that Lord almost always does, which is it doesn't use large, weird, fiddly words.

Speaker 2 It remains in a demotic register, but it's also very canny about how its syntax develops.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Paul Monette is, for me, the great poet of that era. And he differs from a lot of the other poets of the sort of age of mass death in America from HIV and AIDS

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so this is a very intense poem.

Speaker 2 I'd like you to read a portion of it, though. Sure.
So Monette writes about the right to be angry. No, this is not a punishment.

Speaker 2 This is the entire Reagan administration and decades or centuries of patriarchy teaming up to be jerks and kill us.

Speaker 2 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, men, as a joke, because gay people dying was a joke.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to read you the end of this poem, which is called The Worrying.

Speaker 2 And he refers to his lover, his partner, who's sick as Raj.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so that is from Worrying by Paul Monet.

Speaker 2 He's one of a number of poets who wrote really powerfully about the AIDS crisis.

Speaker 6 Poet Stephanie Burt talking with our producer, Jeffrey Masters, with more to come.

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Speaker 2 On the opposite end of things, switching gears for a moment, one of the poems that I really kind of adored in the book, and this takes us up to present day.

Speaker 2 It's a love poem, and it's called She Ties My Bow Tie by Gabrielle Calvo Caresi. And I asked them to read the poem for us, so let's hear that now.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Her fingers move so deftly, one could call them skittish, though not really because they're not afraid of you. I know.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 Her breath pulled taut and held until she's through. I watch her in the mirror, not even even looking at me.
She's so focused on the knot and how to loop the silk into a bow.

Speaker 2 I thought it was interesting to pair this with the Audre Lorde poem because it's also about this like private domestic moment.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I was thinking about how just like the world is a scary place right now for queer and trans people. You know, they're being painted as perverts and pedophiles.

Speaker 2 You know, they're too dangerous to allow in bathrooms. Right.
And yet, what is this queer couple doing behind closed doors?

Speaker 2 In this case, it's a woman fixing her partner's bow tie before they leave the house.

Speaker 2 And 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. Totally.

Speaker 2 And this is what Gabrielle told me about writing the poem.

Speaker 8 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.

Speaker 8 We'd come from, you know, living in this big city. And so all of a sudden, like I was back in a world where there were

Speaker 8 all of these woods and all of these pine trees. There were foxes like coming up.

Speaker 8 I would look out the window and see deer in the morning. And

Speaker 8 they just, they didn't just start like visiting me. They started visiting like my poems.

Speaker 8 And then I also at the same time,

Speaker 8 had started wearing a bow tie. And it's interesting.
It took coming to the University of North Carolina and my queer students and the way,

Speaker 8 just like the way they embodied their life in this place

Speaker 8 with such like joy and a kind of wonder. And so one day I was at South Point Mall in Durham and I like,

Speaker 8 and I saw these bow ties and I was like, I'm going to do that.

Speaker 2 You know, I really just appreciate the like geographical spread of this book. We don't hear enough about like queer and trans folks in like non-coastal cities.
America is a very big

Speaker 2 place.

Speaker 2 It is easy for people who rarely leave Connecticut, New Jersey or DC Baltimore or Boston or

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There are queer communities in smaller cities that people move to, some of which are in safe states and some of which are not.

Speaker 2 It means that there are purposefully rural retreats and communes and spaces of wildness for queers who want that.

Speaker 2 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. And

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 2 Chapel Hill and Durham that Gabriel Calval-Caresi envisions in this poem is one of those places where you can be close to nature.

Speaker 1 Can I ask, how did

Speaker 2 working on this and compiling these poems, how did that change or expand your own perspective on your own queerness and transness?

Speaker 6 I love that question,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 it is

Speaker 2 a challenge for me to answer because

Speaker 2 I try

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 make

Speaker 2 scholarly and critical work

Speaker 2 that doesn't foreground my own personal journey. Of course, it's influenced by that.
That said,

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 became

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 2 aware of the difference between

Speaker 2 feeling well represented

Speaker 2 and feeling

Speaker 2 newly represented

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 I haven't read poems that satisfy me, that represent them. In particular,

Speaker 2 poly lives, where you've got multiple people, not just who you jump into bed with, but who you really

Speaker 2 maintain erotic and romantic relationships with, and everybody knows about it.

Speaker 2 You can find

Speaker 2 lovely representations of polyamorous lives in science fiction and fantasy and in memoirs in real life going back a couple of decades.

Speaker 2 And if you read biographies, you can find them much earlier than that.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 poems adequate to poly lives have been few and far between until quite recently. There is one that's explicitly poly

Speaker 2 in here.

Speaker 2 Stephanie, thank you for the conversation. This was fantastic.
Let's do this again.

Speaker 6 Stephanie Burt's new book is called Super Gay Poems, and she spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 6 That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening.
See you next time.

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