“Super Gay Poems”

Summary

The New Yorker Radio Hour: “Super Gay Poems” Episode Summary

Introduction

In the July 1, 2025 episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, titled “Super Gay Poems,” host David Remnick engages in an insightful conversation with Stephanie Burt, a renowned professor and literary critic from The New Yorker. Stephanie Burt has curated an anthology named Super Gay Poems, which celebrates LGBTQ poetry spanning from the aftermath of the Stonewall uprising in 1969 to the present day. The episode delves into the selection of poems, the representation of queer lives, and the evolving landscape of LGBTQ poetry.

---

Stephanie Burt’s Super Gay Poems

Stephanie Burt introduces Super Gay Poems as a comprehensive collection that highlights the diverse experiences and emotions within the LGBTQ community. She emphasizes the anthology's aim to make various emotional landscapes accessible to readers, whether they see themselves reflected in the poems or discover new perspectives.

Stephanie Burt [01:15]: “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... and I like making those experiences available to readers.”

---

Discussion on Selected Poems

Stephanie Burt and producer Jeffrey Masters (Gabriel Calvo Caressi) discuss three standout poems from the anthology, each reflecting different facets of queer life.

a. Audre Lorde's "Walking Our Boundaries" ([02:19] - [04:53])

Stephanie Burt highlights Audre Lorde’s poem “Walking Our Boundaries,” which portrays lesbian domesticity with profound intimacy and realism. The poem captures the essence of living together, managing conflicts, and nurturing a shared life.

Stephanie Burt [03:32]: “... 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...”

She underscores Lorde's ability to use simple language while crafting a deeply emotional and syntactically rich narrative that conveys the complexities of long-term relationships.

b. Paul Monette's "Worrying" ([05:35] - [07:19])

The conversation shifts to Paul Monette, whom Burt regards as a pivotal poet of the AIDS crisis era. Monette’s poem “Worrying” encapsulates the intense emotions of caregiving and the pervasive fear during the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Stephanie Burt [05:01]: “Paul Monette is, for me, the great poet of that era. He’s a poet of incandescent anger...”

Monette’s raw portrayal of love and loss, combined with his anger towards the societal neglect of the AIDS crisis, offers a powerful commentary on the period’s struggles.

Stephanie Burt [05:35]: “... this poem is called the Worrying. He refers to his lover, his partner, who's sick, as Raj.”

c. Gabriel Calvo Caressi’s "she Ties My Bow Tie" ([08:34] - [10:02])

Gabriel Calvo Caressi presents his own poem, “she Ties My Bow Tie,” which celebrates a tender domestic moment between a queer couple. The poem serves as a contemporary counter-narrative to the external hostility faced by queer individuals, showcasing the sanctuary found within personal relationships.

Gabriel Calvo Caressi [08:34]: “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...”

Burt connects this poem to Lorde’s, emphasizing themes of safety and intimacy amidst a hostile external environment.

Stephanie Burt [09:43]: “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.”

---

Themes Explored

a. Queer Domesticity

The episode highlights how queer poetry often delves into the nuances of domestic life, portraying relationships and everyday moments with authenticity and emotional depth. This focus challenges stereotypical representations by showcasing the richness of queer personal experiences.

b. Representation of Queer Lives Outside Major Cities

Stephanie Burt discusses the geographical diversity represented in Super Gay Poems, highlighting queer communities in smaller cities and rural areas that are often overlooked.

Stephanie Burt [11:14]: “America is a very big place... there are queer communities in smaller cities... closer to nature.”

This inclusion underscores the universality of queer experiences, affirming that vibrant LGBTQ communities thrive beyond the well-known metropolitan hubs.

c. Polyamory in Poetry

Burt touches on the anthology’s exploration of polyamorous relationships, noting the scarcity of poetic representations until recently.

Stephanie Burt [12:43]: “...poly lives where you've got multiple people... poems adequate to poly lives have been few and far between until quite recently.”

This discussion highlights the anthology’s role in broadening the scope of LGBTQ poetry to include diverse relationship structures.

---

Conclusions and Reflections

Stephanie Burt reflects on how compiling Super Gay Poems has deepened her understanding of representation within poetry. She acknowledges the gaps in existing works and expresses a desire to see more inclusive and varied portrayals of queer lives.

Stephanie Burt [12:43]: “I think that I became more aware of the difference between feeling well represented and feeling newly represented...”

The episode concludes with an appreciation for the anthology’s contribution to LGBTQ literature, celebrating its role in providing visibility and voice to a wide spectrum of queer experiences.

Gabriel Calvo Caressi [11:05]: “I really just appreciate the, like, geographical spread of this book.”

---

Final Thoughts

The “Super Gay Poems” episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour offers a compelling exploration of LGBTQ poetry, emphasizing its role in reflecting and shaping queer identities. Through thoughtful discussions and poignant readings, Stephanie Burt and Gabriel Calvo Caressi illuminate the anthology’s significance in capturing the emotional and cultural landscapes of the LGBTQ community.

Transcript

[Sponsor Voice]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

[Stephanie Burt]

Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

[Sponsor Voice]

Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[David Remnick]

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 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.

[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 Remnick]

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

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

You know, reading the earlier poems in the book, I would have assumed that the queerness would have been more. More hidden and more subtle. And that's not the case at all. You know, 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 read a portion of that?

[Stephanie Burt]

Absolutely. Okay. 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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

Talk about why you wanted to include this poem.

[Stephanie Burt]

So 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. And the context of the whole poem is that if you live with someone for months, years, decades, you're gonna 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. It 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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

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 Burt]

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 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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

And so this is a very intense poem. I'd like you to read a portion of it, though.

[Stephanie Burt]

Sure. So Monat 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. And I'm going to read you the end of this poem, which is called the Worrying. And 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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

And so that is from Worrying by Paul Monette. He's one of a number of poets who wrote really powerfully about the AIDS crisis.

[David Remnick]

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

[Sponsor Voice]

If you're a fan of the thought provoking storytelling in the New Yorker Radio Hour, we think you'll love the Moth. Every week on the Moth podcast, real people tell their stories live on stage.

[David Remnick]

Have people really thought about the fact.

[Sponsor Voice]

That, you know, with genetic testing, we're looking at the end of family secrets? To hear people talk about their lives in their own words, whether their stories are funny, heartbreaking, vulnerable, or sometimes all three. Follow and listen to the Moth wherever.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

You get your podcasts 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, it's a love poem and it's called she Ties My Bow Tie by Gabriel Calvo Caressi. And I asked them to read the poem for us. So let's hear that. Now.

[Sponsor Voice]

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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

I thought it was interesting to pair this with the Audre Lorde poem because it's also about this private domestic moment. 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. You know, they're too dangerous to allow in bathrooms.

[Stephanie Burt]

Right.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

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 Burt]

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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

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

[Sponsor Voice]

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, you know, living in this big city. And so all of a sudden, like, I was back in a world where there were all of these woods and all of these pine trees. There were foxes, like, coming up. There were. I would look out the window and see deer in the morning. And they just. They didn't just start, like, visiting me, they started visiting, like, my poems. And then I also, at the same time, 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. Just like, the way they embodied their life in this place with such, like, joy and the kind of wonder. And so one day I was at South Point Mall in Durham, and I, like. And I saw these bow ties, and I was like, I'm gonna do that.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

You know, I really just appreciate the, like, geographical spread of this book. We don't hear enough about the queer and trans folks in, like, non coastal cities.

[Stephanie Burt]

America is a very big place. It is easy for people who rarely leave New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, or, you know, dc, Baltimore or 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. And the Chapel Hill and Durham that Gabriel Calvo Caressi envisions in this poem is one of those places where you can be close to nature.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

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

[Stephanie Burt]

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. And 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.

[Gabriel Calvo Caressi]

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

[Stephanie Burt]

Let's do this again.

[David Remnick]

Stephanie Burt's new book is called Super Gay Poems and she spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Bottin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barsch, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

[Stephanie Burt]

Packages by Expedia. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to package flights, hotels and hammocks for less.

[David Remnick]

Expedia Made to Travel NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.