Terrance Hayes-- "The Sexiest Poet Alive"

Do I prefer poems that are "sexy"? That mention "sex"? Compare these two, from Hot Metal Bridge's latest issue:

Dream Interpretation, Glacier by Ruth Baumann

A map drawn of the missing.
How a finger feels over the white space. 

This is the shallow weight of the unforgivable.
You suspect it’s like being born.

VS:
from THE BEDDING HABITS OF SORRY LUNATICS, part 6 By Eszter Takacs & Willi Goehring (first stanza only)

Nefertiti friendzoned me,
and I was sad for weeks.
Her body was so full in life
that I wanted her guts.
Like the 24th Virginia,
I was aroused more by trees anyways,
and charged to battle
perhaps a better person,
bloodier.

(Hot Metal Bridge is a Pittsburgh-based online magazine run by UPitt's MFAs)

These are both dense meaning-inlaid poems, all the nouns verbs phrases all sort of require a kind of preponderance. "A map drawn of the missing" "Nefertiti" "24th Virginia" "Shallow weight of the unforgivable". It's just that the second one has some sex in it. Which one pulls you in more?

I find usually sex counts. There has to be some attraction in the poem, or it's academic. Celebrity references too:

You can be so Miley to me
because the woods’ “hoodedness”
is a progression of naked women,
clamshells prominent,
kitties armed and ready
to defend state’s right
on the shores of the subservience
of metaphier to metaphrand.

  --also from THE BEDDING HABITS part 6

There's a subtle interplay between the erotic in this poem and all its dense meaning-nets. But I'm drawn in by the erotic, I think it's something I can understand...

Terrance Hayes was one of People's 2014 "Sexy Men at Work"... I was listening to NPR and an interview with Hayes came on and that's how I found out about it. Sexy poets: The Poetry Brothel, an insanely interesting group of artists if there ever was one... Emulating "fin-de-siecle" (end-of-the-century) "bordellos", the poets compose a rotating cast of "whores" who read in character, are available to be taken aside for a nominal fee for private readings, no quotes around the word reading. There's something sexy about poets, the idea of a poet, especially as much as we are willing to tie them to Modernism and Paris etc. etc.

Was John Berryman sexy? A lot of his poems mentioned sex, usually of the anxiety-bordering-on-serial-killer variety. Here's him reading. Sexy? But then again, here's a young John Berryman:

A Young John Berryman

Whoops! That's actually Nick Cave. But wouldn't you would accept and believe this if you didn't know who Nick Cave was? Poetry Brothel speaks about "seducing an audience"... Terrance Hayes seemed embarrassed by his own "Sexy Man at Work" award... he said that, departing from the lines of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, he was trying to be "see-through". So he's not seducing anyone so much as the world is reaching in for his sexy guts. But to be transparent is itself an effort.

When I saw Terrance Hayes at his book launch (for: How to Be Drawn), he was wearing two watches and had on a glorious blue suit. His haircut was impeccable, and when he read, there were audience members who would moan after every punctuating line. He's also over 6' tall. There was a definite larger-than-life effect, an aura, that made us hang on to his words... That's the thing, he gave us a reason to hang on...