ABSTRACT
The author was already reading poems by Sandro Penna in the Paris-Orly airport while the author was waiting for his/her flight to Rome. The author means his posthumously published collection, Peccato di gola, a gathering of twenty-six characteristically short homoerotic poems that were initially drafted as passages in letters sent to a man named "G". Penna wrote straightforwardly about his acts, imagined acts, and desires at a time when many of his contemporaries, notably Montale and other Hermetic poets, favored syntactically and lexically more intricate and more convoluted poetic forms. He took risks not only because of his homoerotic themes but also because of his poetics, which might seem simplistic in contrast to most modernist poetic strategies. Although Penna emphasizes meter and sometimes uses rhymes, he is not primarily seeking aesthetic effects or, at least, "poetic beauty" in any common understanding of the concept.
