“Super Gay Poems”

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. 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.

And 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. Super gay poems. It's a collection of LGBTQ poetry which begins after the Stonewall uprising of 1969.

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 could 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.

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