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I would like to address the issue that Melissa raised in class about not liking the differiniation that calling the poetry of this week "Lesbian love poetry." Julia pointed out that by calling these poems "Lesbian love poems" we were implying that all other poetry was, by definition, heterosexual and, therefore, exclusive. These two thoughts made me think about the way in which I have always been directed to study Shakespeares' sonnets: by dividing them into two groups, those written for/about his female lover and those written for/about his male lover. There has always been a major distinction in my mind about the division of these poems, mostly because those that he wrote for/about his male lover always seemed so much more passionate than those for his heterosexual partner. If Shakespeare was more passionate about his male lover, then why did he feel the need to write sonnets to his female counterpart? Then I thought that perhaps, as Anne mentioned in class Rich's reaction to heterosexual women reading her poetry to their partners, that we are getting bogged down by how we should catagorize the poems and not about the content. Passion, I think, is a concept that transcends the arbitrary lines that society has drawn between hetero- and homo-sexual love. As Anne described Stein's poem as "sexy" in class, I wondered whether it really mattered whether or not the poem was about two women, two men, or one of each. If a poem really is "sexy," can't we catagorize it as just that and leave the hetero- and homo- out of it?