I started publishing forthrightly gay poetry in 1975. However, I do not write about sex, and I dislike it when other poets do. Old fuddyduddy.

That's odd, Tim. I just assumed that all of your hunting poems were about sex.

Oh, so that's what a feeney is!

Nemo

This thread has many twists, but the mention of Emily reminded me of something I've often thought.

Reticence is the circuitous way to full disclosure, hence the most erotic route of all.

Emily knew. “tell it slant…success in circuit lies" – this is how to touch people, how to provoke the physical arousal she describes in that famous letter:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way".

That’s no virgin comment! That’s living holy in the body.

Cally

Not even a kiss, Timmy?

Mary, we've had our differences in recent months, but this had me in stitches.

Reserve and reticence can result from so many different causes that they are hard to read accurately. They can come from emotional coldness, from prudishness, from shyness, from timidity, from privacy, from secretiveness, from hauteur, from humility, and so on. Their relationship to sex is complicated. I find banter to be very sexy, for instance, but indirectness is part of its essence. Like Cally, I find Dickinson's poetry to be very passionate, almost painfully so, but I think it is the extreme restraint that her writing observes that makes the emotion more piercing. On the other hand, I also like Catullus, Martial, Sharon Olds, and other writers who are direct and even graphic in their language. Is one allowed only to like one approach and not the other?

Susan

Let's see, I like (legal) ouzo and (legal) red wine. And ginger ale. I like the word reticence because it gently embraces my name. I distinctly favor the fair gender and I could never be celibate, but I don't think genuine celibacy (male or female) has to be creepy. Am I deviant enough? Not by half, I bet. But I get published now and then by all sorts of people, some of whom live here. (Eeek.)

Where did I go wrong? Should I try for something hauteur?
Send replies to Standard_Deviant@lol.com.

Well, I have to keep Good Catholic Girl syndrome (not just reticence, shame!) in check for the sake of the work. Be reticent in "real life," if it suits your temperament, but remember that it's the poet's job to illuminate the human predicament -- and what is the human predicament if not enfleshment? But no doubt I repeat myself from earlier threads.

And there's lot's of erotic and juicy metrical poetry. Aren't we all looking forward to Hot Sonnets?

That sounds a bit deviant right there.

Doesn't true craft engender reticence and encourage subtlety and perhaps result in beauty no matter what the subject matter? And craft and intelligence can be as present in Free Verse as in Formal. It's the cancerous profusion of bad Free Verse that's harming poetry just as the florid growth of out-worn sentiment and empty form did a century ago. It is obviousness, not sex, that is the enemy of art and culture (as proved by Bill's mini-essay).