Early Persian poets and critics conceive of binary generic categories, bounded largely by topical or modal concerns: madḥ (panegyre, an epideictic mode) and ghazal (lyric mode, love poetry); hazl (a facetious, possibly obscene mode) and jidd (a serious, high-minded mode); hijā’ (invective, a topical genre) and rithā’ (eulogy, a topical and occasional genre). Two twelfth-century poets of the eastern Persian-speaking lands—Majdūd b. Ādam al-Ghaznavī, better known as Ḥakīm Sanā’ī (d. 1131?), associated with the Ghaznavid court in Ghazna and with Sufi circles in Nayshāpūr and Sarakhs; and Muḥammad b. ‘Alī Nasafī, better known as Sūzanī (or Sōzanī, d. 1173?), associated with the Qarakhanid court in Samarqand and the Burhānid Sadr of Bokhara—bring interesting innovations to the genre history of Persian. Sanā’ī’s dīvān preserves the first large body of Persian ghazals that survive to us, and crystallizes the ghazal as a fixed-form genre of poem; once defined as a structure (7 to 14 lines, with a maṭla‘ and a takhalluṣ line), is thereafter no longer necessarily confined to the thematic of love. Sūzanī, meanwhile, provides us the first large body of Persian hazliyyāt (facetiae), many of which rely upon a sexually aggressive and vulgarly transgressive vocabularly (his pen-name means the “prickler” or “needler,” though praise qaṣīdas and some ghazals are also attributed to him). The oeuvre of both poets includes obscene poems, few in Sanā’ī’s case, a plethora in Sūzanī’s, and illustrate a range of the lexical and semiotic conventions for the expression of amorous (ghazal, ‘ishq), erotic (būs u kinār, mujūn), playful (muṭāyibah), satirical (hajv), and invective exchanges/flyting (naqā’iḍ) of poetry. This paper explores the generic modes and moods in which Sūzanī and Sanā’ī deploy erotically charged or aggressively sexualized vocabulary to better understand the relationship between generic horizons of mood and lexical and thematic development, including when we can expect sexual descriptions to be erotically (hetero- or homo-erotic), when humorously, when obscenely, and when aggressively employed. Because Sūzanī explicitly imitates or ridicules some specific poems of Sanā’ī, and because both poets compose poems in the same mode of social satire combined with praise of a patron (Sanā’ī’s Kār-nāmah-yi Balkh, and Sūzanī’s stand- alone muṭāyibah or hajv qaṣīdas, which combine, e.g., satires of wine kegs with praise of a patron). It also speculates about the patronage circumstance for vulgar or obscene poems, and the degree to which they were disseminated and imitated at different geographically remote Persophone courts.