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Poetry's role in queer visibility: in conversation with Stephanie Burt
Stephanie Burt, the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University, has edited a new, remarkable anthology titled Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall (Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press). Each of the 51 poems in this collection is followed by lucid, reflective, and insightful commentary by Burt, who sheds light on the transformation of queerness over the decades since 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots, which marked an important chapter in the history of the gay rights movement both in the U.S. and across the world.
In this interview, Burt shares not only the motivation behind collating this work but also discusses how the poems in this collection illuminate the shared queer futures that one had imagined ever since Stonewall, that quintessential moment in the history of transfeminism. Edited excerpts:
Q: Anthologising is as much an art of record-keeping and celebrating, as it is of making selections based on constraints. What are some of the challenges you faced in putting together this book?
A: As with most such projects, I ended up sad about the poems and poets I had to leave out. Maybe that sadness ended up as the biggest challenge. In practical terms, I had to work to catch up with the eras and kinds of LGBTQIA+ poetry written and published before I was old enough to read it, during the 1970s and 1980s, to ensure I had not left out anything crucial.
A few discoveries startled me, because in a just world, I would've known all about them already: Melvin Dixon, for example. Not so much a challenge as a lot of work I knew I'd have to do, and a lot of work I loved doing: finding more poems and poets written and published entirely outside the U.S. alongside poems about international diasporic experience. Stephanie Dogfoot (Stephanie Chan) is another example.
Q: Given that these poems were written at a time when the world was more difficult to negotiate as a queer or trans person, I could see the secretive codes in which several poets told their histories, transforming acts of violence and lovelessness into literary devices. Your views?
A: You're not wrong, although the closet, the maintenance of open secrets, and the need to protect an identity probably had much more influence on the queer poetry written beforeStonewall — on the generations of Hart Crane, W.H. Auden, [and] perhaps Langston Hughes. Super Gay Poems begins with a Frank O'Hara poem ('Homosexuality'), published only in 1970, about queer lives as open, easily detected, and supposed secrets, about the risks that we take in order to feel loved. The next poem after that one (Judy Grahn's 'Carol, in the park, chewing on straws') has to do with coming out, with watching a lesbian announce, unmistakably, the shape of her life. Wonderful poems can arise from fears and codes, but also from self-disclosure and pride.
Q: Can you reflect on the legal pushback against queer and trans people, the campaigns to take away their rights, and how the written word, poetry in particular, stands as a resistive force towards them?
A: The farther we go, the more visible more of us get, and the clearer it gets — to cisgender people, to straight people, to people in or near positions of power — that we're just living our lives, that we can't go back, that we're not a threat to them … [and] the harder it gets for sociopaths, bigots, and opportunists to hurt us.
Cisgender gay adults found legal protection in the U.S. after they found some cultural acceptance because people in power knew gay men and lesbians personally. It's one thing to outlaw a scary weird 'other'. It's quite another to tell your sister, your daughter, or your best friend's wife that you want to pass laws that could make them miserable, expose them to violence, or (especially in the case of trans children) kill them. I do think more visibility, sooner, helps keep us safe.
Literature, writing, and poetry — the shortest and most easily circulated of all literary kinds, maybe of all the art forms — have a part to play in that visibility. It shows us that we've got a history. That we're not just a trend. That we're certainly not alone.
The interviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and cultural critic. Instagram/X: @writerly_life
