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.

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.

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

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.

You know, Audrey Lord 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.

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