Leslie,
Your comment about the idea that female poets should put "nude" in the title certainly rang a bell with me. I have felt for a long time that the general expectation is that a book of poetry by a woman will be a kind of psychic striptease. I have gotten the impression that writers like Millay, Plath, and Sexton were aware of that expectation and played along with it, with varying degrees of reluctance, while others like Bishop seemed to resist the pressure for self-exposure.
The desire to gawk at someone else's pain or passion may seem voyeuristic, and yet at the same time, we're all prisoners of our own heads, and poetry offers one of the rare opportunities to get inside the mind of someone else, which can be a step toward empathy. I originally was rather conflicted about revealing private emotions in a poem. But then I realized that there is always another layer under the one you take off. Within every revelation is another layer of privacy. No matter how many layers you shed, no one will "understand" you because they can never see it all.
Susan
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