Conversation: Jo talks to Stephanie Burt

editor’s note: As you’ll read below, Stephanie Burt’s work is quite important to me, so I was delighted that she wanted to have this conversation. Although in many cases she likely needs no introduction, here are links to Burt’s wikipedia page, faculty bio, and a video of her reading a poem from We are Mermaids, her (wonderful) latest! —Jo, coeditor

January 9th, 2024, 4:38 pm (Jo asks questions)

Hi Stephanie, 

First, thank you so much for being interested in having this conversation; your work has mattered to me for years, and your voice was (is) one of the ones that's been pivotal for my finding my way into a life as some version of "a critic" (whatever that mean!). I want to start with a piece of yours that you co-wrote with Julia Harris, "Our love lasts so long: queer devotion in Taylor Swift's Folklore," which I absolutely loved when it was published and have no-joke sent to friends probably upwards of a dozen times. It's really important to me because I think the two of you get something absolutely right about how I'm thinking about queerness in Swift's music and maybe more broadly: you describe part of "what we see in Folklore" as "a particular pattern of queer devotion and queer eroticism: the cherished bond between two girls that’s not visible to outsiders (or not at first), not supposed to be erotic (but it is), not supposed to last until adulthood (but it does)." 

That language for that kind of devotion/eroticism feels so important to me, and it also feels like a way of defining the "erotic" that makes me think of Audre Lorde's formulation of the erotic (in "The Uses of the Erotic," also available in print here) as "a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling." I think I'm still thinking through what that means to me personally (this, of course, will likely be life-long, which is well and good), but for this question, I just want to use that as a springboard to ask you how your thinking about Taylor Swift has developed since you published that piece late in the summer of 2020. You'd mentioned that you were working on some more longform Swift-crit, and I would also love to hear anything you're interested in sharing about that, or about your upcoming class on all things Swift! How are you thinking about Taylor Swift's queerness (implicit or performative; I am of the camp that Swift's personal life isn't particularly relevant to this question), her erotics, her power, her lyrics and lyricisms right now in 2024? 

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Tuesday, Jan 16th, 12:15 am (Stephanie responds)

OK let's do some interviewing! I promised to send a poem or two: three are attached. Let me know which, if any, you want!

Re: Taylor, that’s a cliffside of a question. As I've learned more and gone deeper into the fandom, I'm no longer very interested in the hypothesis that Taylor is really or secretly queer, whatever that means. I am instead more interested than ever in the kinds of bonds among women, and among girls, that Taylor's music consistently celebrates (and which the liner notes to 1989TV insist she did not think we could sexualize). Those bonds are important! They are embodied. We feel them, whether or not we feel sexual about them (and many people don't feel sexual about them: some people are straight, or ace, or just not that into you, and still derive incalculable strength from the way it feels to be with someone important to them, with That Person. No smooches involved. I think it was hard for a while for people to find words for these kinds of friendships and it may still be hard for people not immersed in The Discourse: people my age used to default to Adrienne Rich's idea of the lesbian continuum, which was a very important idea in its day but now-- when used too bluntly-- feels a bit like when Mormons convert the dead. I prefer the more recent and more nuanced split attraction model: you can be homoromantic, for example, or biromantic, but heterosexual, meaning that your most important emotional attachments, the ones that sustain you, even the ones that feel romantic to you, are with women, if you're a woman, but you might prefer to smooch only men. People should get to say who they are without being told they're really something else. Even famous people. I wouldn't have put it that way a few years ago.

So IDK if this claim counts as queer or not, but yes, I am teaching and thinking and writing about Taylor at some length in 2024-- I teach a course called Taylor Swift and Her World (as in: it's her world, we just live in it)-- and one of the through-lines is this: she's very alert to how people see her, and to how much she wants to be seen. Some of her songs have a vibe that I share, a vibe with which I have a great deal of sympathy, the vibe that says you're only fully valid and fully yourself when someone's listening or watching. You're never wholly yourself if you're alone, unless you're writing music or recording music or doing something else that someone else will notice later. That's not a healthy way to feel but it's how I feel about myself, sometimes, and I think it's how she sometimes feels too-- see "Nothing New," "Long Live," "You're On Your Own, Kid," all of which examine that feeling.

Another through-line, maybe closer to your question: her love songs and breakup songs and songs about women sticking together cohere-- and it goes absolutely throughout her career or at least back to Fearless and forward to Midnights-- in making this argument: go ahead and pursue romance and erotic love and perfect days and perfect dates, if you like! pursue those things with men, if you're heterosexual! but remember not to give away your autonomy: don't go with a guy who wants to control you. That won't end well. She knows that all too well. Love isn't love if it's handing a guy your keys. Even if it does mean getting into his car. (Unless it's a getaway car. Nothing good starts in a getaway car.)

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[Correspondence-within-correspondence about accepting poems, figuring out how long of an interview-exchange makes sense, etcetera has been cut for length, but exists.]

January 24th, 2024, 8:35 am (Jo responds and asks more questions)

I love that you said “IDK if this claim counts as queer or not”—it does as far as I’m concerned!! What you’re saying about the importance of an audience (or a “someone else” - an auditor maybe even) to feeling like oneself makes a lot of sense to me, and I think that’s something I’ll have to keep thinking through for awhile. I also really like how you’ve put “people should get to say who they are without being told they’re really something else. Even famous people” - I fundamentally agree with this, and it makes me think of Sedgwick’s “People are different from each other” [note to self to find source for this] which is so true and should go without saying but actually doesn’t??? 

I’ve been thinking about how to frame my next question for you, and I think there’s a version of this question that would be essay-length (maybe this is just a different thing I need to write - classic problem, and not at all a bad one to have), but I’ll try to do it more concisely instead. I’m taking us back in time again, this time to 2013, when you wrote a review of TC Tolbert and Trace Perterson’s first Troubling the Line anthology. I ran into this piece in 2020 when I was doing some coursework on women and poetry [defined correctly, which is to say, trans-inclusive-ly], and I really appreciated some of the connections you made between what poetry can mean in someone’s life and how to think about trans lives and selves. This sentence of yours crystallizes some of that for me: “We need poetry when literal faces and bodies and circumstances are not as good as it gets: we might enjoy reading and writing poetry for many reasons, but we need it when we feel that we need figuration, need something unavailable in the literal world.” 

I love that because that is what poetry is for me, or what reading is at all. I’m still, again, working out the language for this, but what I’m wondering right now is how you’re currently thinking about the relationship between language and lived/performed gender—I’m trying not to go too Gender Studies Classroom on this one, though some of that is coming through anyway—but I’m asking this because I finally fully realized/accepted recently that I’m very nonbinary and always have been (although I still use she/her pronouns and do not care that the way I present myself means I will likely always be read as “woman” by strangers; this does not bother me, is also not wrong, and is basically irrelevant as far as what I’m thinking about is concerned), but I didn’t think I could think of that as a gender experience that “counted” because I do not experience gender dysphoria around my particular embodiment situation; I do, however, experience it about thinking. That’s something I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone talk about, though maybe I’m just not reading the right people. But I wonder if this makes any sense to you or if you have any thoughts around the way gender works as connected to syntax (maybe even prosody!?). 

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February 4th, 2024, 9:42 pm (Stephanie responds)

[Stephanie block-quotes the paragraph of Jo’s ending with the quote about something unavailable in the literal world]

Thank you? I'm still behind that claim, although I've become increasingly interested in (and I don't know the answer here yet, or rather "the answers": there's not one answer!) asking what poetry and poetics, the arts that use words and focus on words and aren't primarily about telling stories, can do that an art based on storytelling with words, or an art based on words + music, cannot do. It may be that the answer is "almost nothing!" Or it may be that the answer is temperamental: we need the arts because we need figuration, because what's already real is not enough, but those of who need page-based, words-only poetry just happen to need it because we are word people, and respond well to words.  On the other hand (and yes, I am writing about this sort of thing at length soon, if I can) it may be that page-based, words-only, reread-it-at-home poetry and poetics (going back before print culture: at least to Callimachus and Horace, if not to Sappho or Theocritus) rewards introspection and scrutiny in a way that's much harder for song lyrics and for narrative arts.

[Stephanie block-quotes the paragraph ending with Jo’s question about gender being connected to syntax and/or prosody] 

So many thoughts (starting with "people are different from each other"!). Some aspects of gender behave differently from other deep-rooted identity markers-- for one thing, we're raised to believe that gender is binary, which no one believes about, say, race or religion. It sounds like you're saying that you experience gender dysphoria when you have particular thoughts, or particular lines of thought, and that this kind of dysphoria isn't connected to your proprioception, or interoception, or tactility, or sex drive? OK: now I wonder what lines of thought, or what kinds of thought, provoke dysphoria! I'm very familiar with the idea that certain ways of thinking are gendered: do you find yourself falling into the "wrong" or into uncomfortable modes of thoughts, or ways of thinking? (Ways of thinking based on other people's desire or other people's comfort, for example, or on wanting to seem warm and accessible, all of which are gendered feminine? and which I sometimes welcome in myself, but can also overdo?)

Language-- written, spoken, or sung-- can come with so many gender markers attached. They can point in opposing or noncoincident directions, as when somebody with a vocal register like (say) mine reads a speech that's clearly written for women, or when Adrienne Rich combines curt, forceful syntax with word choice attending to women's experience ("21 Love Poems" does that a lot). Or they can all point in the same direction (as in the verse of Robert Lowell-- Jarrell: "Whoever met a girl like Robert Lowell?"-- or in Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, Please tell me you're reading Piatt?) Prosody can absolutely have gendered connections and implications, though those implications can change over history: propulsively regular blank verse has often seemed masc, or butch, for example, while irregular polysyllabic "feminine" rhymes and a lot of enjambment seem femme. Often, but not always!

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March 18th, 2024, 8:35 am (Jo responds-to-response, after some time)

I let a long time go without writing you back here, and I’m doing so now amidst the haze of other things I need to do to get this thing online (maybe the only way anything ever gets written!) - so I’m going to resist writing something sentimental about epistolary correspondence and how absolutely awake-feeling-making it was to have this conversation, though hope you know that’s true. But all I want to do here is highlight your “Often, but not always!” which I kind of want to be a little stamp that I could put on every overgeneralized claim I see about anything online or in print (my own claims most especially included) and say that, yes, the way you’re understanding the fairly-vague thing I said about non-embodied dysphoria scans; that’s something I need to think and write into more, for which there’s plenty of time. I also love that you went to the question of what makes poetry different from other media - what it can do especially well, because this is something I’ve thought a lot about, though I like it best when I get to be immersed in a poem and forget about that question (even if only for the time it takes to read) - some of your poems do this for me, and some of the ones you’ve written about in various places at various times have too. 

Leaving it there, but anyone who’s made it to this point in the interview should immediately go read Stephanie’s poems in this same volume (linked) and/or go read one of her many books. And Stephanie, truly, thank you!!!