Non-erotic poetry (that is, Poetry)

[NivKay]

Hi all,

I’ve been on Lit for a bit now. I’m no seasoned Lit veteran, but in the few years I’ve been here, I’ve had immense fun. I write short fiction, but before Lit wrote lots of poetry, though I’ve only published one erotic poem here.

I’ve always found it difficult to write erotic poetry. Narratives are fine. And I think it’s because with prose, you could inject a sense of the experiential into the writing, blending time and metaphor to tease out the intricacies of emotion.

But with poetry, I find the articulation of any kind of sensuality or eroticism forced, clichéd, almost absurd.

Franz Kafka wrote once that he found metaphors to be problematic because they could never quite capture what he wanted them to capture, and Kafka was a giant of a literary genius!

I seem to struggle with this, in particular with poetic expression of the erotic.

I wonder if any of you feel this struggle as well? What do you do to avoid the pitfalls of cliché in erotic poetry?

I’ve decided to submit for publication some non-erotic poetry, being hesitant to do the same with my attempts at erotic poetry.

Just wanted to put it out there and have a conversation, about this or just poetry and poets in general..

N

 

[Annelih]

I think it might be that poetry is not expression, but emotion.
Let me explain. When you begin from the intention of expressing (read ‘transcribing’) emotion onto paper, you’re already consigning your metaphors to a distancing. This is what Kafka meant (I love his work - so pained, so tortured. Who doesn’t love a tortured soul!).

But when you write poetry, you’re not transcribing. You’re emoting.

I’ve not published many on Lit. I don’t usually write erotic poetry. But I have 3 on Lit, as YOU well know (thank you for liking them), but write these when I’m horny, and I find the words that way. It’s a process. I write the needs the desires. I write the sensation. Like a diary entry. Then I take those words, like shape them, like you would a block of clay.

So, basically, I start with emotions, raw, unedited, unadorned. Then I sculpt.

 

[NivKay]

That’s interesting. So you’re saying poetry is more visceral, a moment caught just when it happens.. I like that..

 

[Angeline]

Great thread Niv. I'm interested to see what folks have to say. Annelih I read your erotic poems and really enjoyed them. I'm glad to have met your poetry.

I've been at Lit a very long time and read a ton of erotic poems, most of them imho mediocre or worse. For me, the more graphic the poem the less interesting (usually). When you get super descriptive you're a) telling, not so much relying on image and metaphor and b) not letting the reader's imagination do the heavy lifting. I think a good poem (erotic or not) engages a reader, makes them try to picture what's happening, to absorb through sense memories. If I do all the work for them, telling everything that's happening, it's not so interesting. Of course there's always exceptions to the rules, but mostly graphic erotic poems don't really reach me.

Otoh you don't want to be so vague readers haven't a clue what you mean. So there's a balance between narrative and poetic. And that's where tools like image, metaphor, double meanings, careful line breaks, etc., can take a poem to the next level. Well one tries lol. I've failed more than achieved with erotic poems. A few like Bibliobliss and the poems I wrote as Eleanora Day have worked well, I think.

This one is probably my favorite though, written years ago.

She Stoops to Conquer

She stands before him
eyes cast down,
a sleeveless dress her
long arms bare
skinned silken flesh.
She's close enough
for him to breathe her
fragrant hair, smooth
and fresh, her eyes
cast down.

Essence of a lemon grove,
Palermo warm and green
the top note fades
to tangy ocean taste
below the musky forest
elemental woman
earth is powerful her eyes

cast down the knowing
smile curving her lips,
points teasing fabric shifting
arc of hips she stands
before him still,

her offering a fury
barely under check
and parting lips her breath
soft whisper answers

yes.
***********


And then there are great famous erotic poems like this one by Kim Addonizio.

 

[WCSGarland]

I've got a few non-erotic, or mostly non-erotic poems written over the years that I've self published. In my description for my ebook, I state:
Poetry is no doubt an attempted distillation of a moment in time, an interlude. In as much as we are all present in the cosmos right now, cosmic pretty much sums up the location of the present moment in time. This collection of some 50 odd moments, distilled into anthology form, is offered up in the hopes that the whimsy contained will remind you of one or more of your own cosmic interludes.

 

[Tzara]

I think it might be that poetry is not expression, but emotion.

I agree that is largely true about lyric poetry, but not so much about narrative poetry or something like light verse. Erotic poetry would most often be lyric in nature, I would expect, so I pretty much agree with that statement.

I've been at Lit a very long time and read a ton of erotic poems, most of them imho mediocre or worse. For me, the more graphic the poem the less interesting (usually).

I would also agree with Angie's comment about graphic vs. more nuanced erotic poems. One of my favorite Lit poets who is, unfortunately, no longer here used to distinguish between what she called "erotic" and "pornographic" poems, much like the distinction Angie makes. I think, though, that whether a poem is or is not erotic in the dictionary sense ("relating to or tending to arouse sexual desire or excitement") has something to do with who wrote it, who is reading it, and other contextual variables.

For example, if someone I was sexually attracted to wrote me a quite graphic poem of the type Angie is talking about (containing lines like "I want your cock deep inside me" etc. etc.), I would likely find it quite arousing even if I didn't think it was especially good poetry. On the other hand, reading a similar/identical poem by someone I wasn't interested in wouldn't do much of anything for me as I wouldn't have any emotional investment in the message.

There is also the problem of a poem that is ostensibly about sex (perhaps even graphically so) but which is really about something else, like this one

The Sisters of Sexual Treasure
Sharon Olds

As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs. The men’s bodies
were like our father’s body!

The massive​

hocks, flanks, thighs, elegant
knees, long tapered calves—
we could have him there, the steep forbidden
buttocks, backs of the knees, the cock
in our mouth, ah the cock in our mouth.

Like explorers who have​

discovered a lost city, we went
nuts with joy, undressed the men
slowly and carefully, as if
uncovering buried artifacts which
proved our theory of the lost culture:
that if Mother said it wasn’t there,
it was there.

Source: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004)
​

Yes, the poem is about sex but it is just as much or more about Olds' relationship with her mother and her rejection of her mother's values/example/teaching.

So is it an erotic poem? I dunno. Kinda sorta not?

 

[NivKay]

I don’t think this was an erotic poem, which in my mind, is primarily concerned with the moment of sexual intoxication, or however else you’d like to put it. But it is certainly about the aesthetics of eroticism. They’re is certainly an eroticised worldview of the young version of the speaker, an eroticism that defines how a young person, male or female, would see the world, the world full of possibility, and in that sense, we see an eroticisation of being human, the eroticisation of desire.

And you’re right, this is more about discovering agency, an experiential world opening up for a young mind, a discovery of a different landscape - the male body is dissected here, reduced to its parts, neutralised, deconstructed.

I think you’re right ultimately, that it depends on the reader. The author is metaphorically dead, once the last word is written. The reader’s interpretation takes over then.

I would love to see a poem that could blend the poetic with the erotic. I don’t see many on Lit. @Annelih has lovely pieces, but perhaps I’m biased? We’ve known each other in a previous life (am I allowed to go there Anneli?)

But it seems to me that the two - the poetic and erotic are very distrustful of each other

 

[WCSGarland]

But it seems to me that the two - the poetic and erotic are very distrustful of each other

I think that depends more on the author than on the subject as a whole. And like any and all stories published here on Literotica, Non-Erotic category excluded some do and some do not stir people with arousal.

 

[NivKay]

And then there are great famous erotic poems like this one by Kim Addonizio.

I just read this poem! Oh goodness! Thank you for pointing me in this direction. This was awesome!
Yet this poem strikes me as being more than just the erotic. It's about pain, and a deep despair that comes from being part of a woman in a world that doesn't very often treat women well.

This line:
"I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want."

I see this as a resistance to a world that doesb;t give her what she wants.

Christ! Goosebumps...love this...Thank you, @Angeline

 

[NivKay]

So this poem was sent back:

On a solitary day in June,
At the mouth of Winter's gentle death,
Cinnamon Jones opened her eyes.
A flight of long screams
Occasioned her birth,
And Barossian bottles disguised themselves
As November so as not to arouse suspicion.
With nectar from the stars, the midwife
Salved her mother, and her father
Sowed bonfires upon the doorstep
Of naked imagination.
Sinister capes ascended the steps,
Bearing roses of black gunpowder.
The family's dogs howled in tunnels of silence
And the town sang a dirge
For the blasphemies to come.

On a suspended day in November,
At the height of murderous Summer,
A thousand little trees of blood
Moistened her dewy thighs,
And Cinnamon gushed obsidian passion
From her throat, crossed herself
In decapitated prayers.

When the aimless herd spoke with a scalpel of flames,
They found her gray, wakeful flesh.
The Constable acknowledged her tangled beauty

This was why:

Literotica is dedicated to healthy fantasy exploration in fiction. While we do accept submissions with graphic violence, we don't accept "snuff" or "vore" - i.e. death & extreme torture with the aim of titillation and gratification, sexual or otherwise. We generally do not accept submissions of nonconsensual sex in which the "victim" gets absolutely no sort of thrill or enjoyment from the acts, or is seriously and /or permanently physically harmed/abused/maimed/killed and the death is eroticized.

They saw the erotic in this poem. Or at least thought this was eroticised... I give up!

 

[NivKay]

So much to respond to...and I will when I can...but just wanted to say a big thank you to @WCSGarland @Angeline @Annelih @Tzara for participating in this thread.

 

[Annelih]

We’ve known each other in a previous life (am I allowed to go there Anneli?)

That's far enough, in my opinion...

 

[Annelih]

I agree that is largely true about lyric poetry, but not so much about narrative poetry or something like light verse.

I'm not so sure. If we are thinking about Epic verse - Homer, Milton, and the like, then yes. But Epic verse seems to be a kind of early form of narrativising. With the advent of the novel, much later in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, something happened here, a kind of divergence, where poetry, even the monologic 'narrative poems' of Robert Browning, tended to be distilled into a precise moment. Sure, stories are everywhere, narrative being an essential part of creative expression.

But that's not what I meant. Even in the narration of a, say, Lover's monologue about how he gave his Porphyria exactly what she had desired, the 'narrative' is sharpened to the moment of his having killed her, happy as Larry, revelling in the moment of pure freedom because, he says, "Even God has not said a word." Poetry is emotion, the pure unadulterated moment where emotion becomes itself the story.

 

[Annelih]

Annelih I read your erotic poems and really enjoyed them. I'm glad to have met your poetry.

You're very kind to say so...I've been reading/not reading some of yours. I'm too afraid of them. Because they melt me.

 

[Annelih]

Great thread Niv. I'm interested to see what folks have to say. Annelih I read your erotic poems and really enjoyed them. I'm glad to have met your poetry.

I've been at Lit a very long time and read a ton of erotic poems, most of them imho mediocre or worse. For me, the more graphic the poem the less interesting (usually). When you get super descriptive you're a) telling, not so much relying on image and metaphor and b) not letting the reader's imagination do the heavy lifting. I think a good poem (erotic or not) engages a reader, makes them try to picture what's happening, to absorb through sense memories. If I do all the work for them, telling everything that's happening, it's not so interesting. Of course there's always exceptions to the rules, but mostly graphic erotic poems don't really reach me.

Otoh you don't want to be so vague readers haven't a clue what you mean. So there's a balance between narrative and poetic. And that's where tools like image, metaphor, double meanings, careful line breaks, etc., can take a poem to the next level. Well one tries lol. I've failed more than achieved with erotic poems. A few like Bibliobliss and the poems I wrote as Eleanora Day have worked well, I think.

This one is probably my favorite though, written years ago.

She Stoops to Conquer

She stands before him
eyes cast down,
a sleeveless dress her
long arms bare
skinned silken flesh.
She's close enough
for him to breathe her
fragrant hair, smooth
and fresh, her eyes
cast down.

Essence of a lemon grove,
Palermo warm and green
the top note fades
to tangy ocean taste
below the musky forest
elemental woman
earth is powerful her eyes

cast down the knowing
smile curving her lips,
points teasing fabric shifting
arc of hips she stands
before him still,

her offering a fury
barely under check
and parting lips her breath
soft whisper answers

yes.
***********


And then there are great famous erotic poems like this one by Kim Addonizio.

I just read Eleanora Day's Amante...I have no words...I do have sensations swirling though...Good ones, electric ones...

 

[Annelih]

So this poem was sent back:

On a solitary day in June,
At the mouth of Winter's gentle death,
Cinnamon Jones opened her eyes.
A flight of long screams
Occasioned her birth,
And Barossian bottles disguised themselves
As November so as not to arouse suspicion.
With nectar from the stars, the midwife
Salved her mother, and her father
Sowed bonfires upon the doorstep
Of naked imagination.
Sinister capes ascended the steps,
Bearing roses of black gunpowder.
The family's dogs howled in tunnels of silence
And the town sang a dirge
For the blasphemies to come.

On a suspended day in November,
At the height of murderous Summer,
A thousand little trees of blood
Moistened her dewy thighs,
And Cinnamon gushed obsidian passion
From her throat, crossed herself
In decapitated prayers.

When the aimless herd spoke with a scalpel of flames,
They found her gray, wakeful flesh.
The Constable acknowledged her tangled beauty

This was why:

Literotica is dedicated to healthy fantasy exploration in fiction. While we do accept submissions with graphic violence, we don't accept "snuff" or "vore" - i.e. death & extreme torture with the aim of titillation and gratification, sexual or otherwise. We generally do not accept submissions of nonconsensual sex in which the "victim" gets absolutely no sort of thrill or enjoyment from the acts, or is seriously and /or permanently physically harmed/abused/maimed/killed and the death is eroticized.

They saw the erotic in this poem. Or at least thought this was eroticised... I give up!

I don't think this eroticises death or gore. I think the moderator needs an education.

 

[Annelih]

So I wrote a poem..

A few months back.. and just left it, to come back to it.. but I never did.

It’s still untitled..

There must be a world
Where there are no mirrors,
Nor the sound of twisted sighs,
And women’s cries and other horrors.

There must be a place
Of embossed moons
Smiling feebly into the corners of the evening,
And sad spectres fiddling with tablespoons.

And in the midst of all this,
Cocooned in a monastic kiss,
Floundering like an abyssal miss,
I wait sightless, spotless, tongue-less

There is a kind of eroticism here, though it may not be an erotic poem.

 

[WCSGarland]

So I wrote a poem..

A few months back.. and just left it, to come back to it.. but I never did.

It’s still untitled..

There must be a world
Where there are no mirrors,
Nor the sound of twisted sighs,
And women’s cries and other horrors.

There must be a place
Of embossed moons
Smiling feebly into the corners of the evening,
And sad spectres fiddling with tablespoons.

And in the midst of all this,
Cocooned in a monastic kiss,
Floundering like an abyssal miss,
I wait sightless, spotless, tongue-less

There is a kind of eroticism here, though it may not be an erotic poem.

That could easily go either way from there. Do, continue! Write more of it. Whether erotic or not, that is a wonderful beginning!

 

[Angeline]

So I wrote a poem..

A few months back.. and just left it, to come back to it.. but I never did.

It’s still untitled..

There must be a world
Where there are no mirrors,
Nor the sound of twisted sighs,
And women’s cries and other horrors.

There must be a place
Of embossed moons
Smiling feebly into the corners of the evening,
And sad spectres fiddling with tablespoons.

And in the midst of all this,
Cocooned in a monastic kiss,
Floundering like an abyssal miss,
I wait sightless, spotless, tongue-less

There is a kind of eroticism here, though it may not be an erotic poem.

This is lovely. I especially like "And sad spectres fiddling with tablespoons," which made me think of Prufrock's coffee spoons line and added that dark, foggy vibe. It feels more sensuous than erotic to me and left me wanting more. I want to know what happens next.

 

[Angeline]

So this poem was sent back:

On a solitary day in June,
At the mouth of Winter's gentle death,
Cinnamon Jones opened her eyes.
A flight of long screams
Occasioned her birth,
And Barossian bottles disguised themselves
As November so as not to arouse suspicion.
With nectar from the stars, the midwife
Salved her mother, and her father
Sowed bonfires upon the doorstep
Of naked imagination.
Sinister capes ascended the steps,
Bearing roses of black gunpowder.
The family's dogs howled in tunnels of silence
And the town sang a dirge
For the blasphemies to come.

On a suspended day in November,
At the height of murderous Summer,
A thousand little trees of blood
Moistened her dewy thighs,
And Cinnamon gushed obsidian passion
From her throat, crossed herself
In decapitated prayers.

When the aimless herd spoke with a scalpel of flames,
They found her gray, wakeful flesh.
The Constable acknowledged her tangled beauty

This was why:

Literotica is dedicated to healthy fantasy exploration in fiction. While we do accept submissions with graphic violence, we don't accept "snuff" or "vore" - i.e. death & extreme torture with the aim of titillation and gratification, sexual or otherwise. We generally do not accept submissions of nonconsensual sex in which the "victim" gets absolutely no sort of thrill or enjoyment from the acts, or is seriously and /or permanently physically harmed/abused/maimed/killed and the death is eroticized.

They saw the erotic in this poem. Or at least thought this was eroticised... I give up!

First off the poem is excellent, so much rich evocative imagery. I don't get "erotic" from it. It appears that whoever checked it read "dewy thighs," (and a few other phrases), categorized it as erotic, decided it's a snuff poem and rejected it. Ridiculous imo.

I post my poems here on the forum. I haven't submitted any for publication here for many years. I trust the forum participants to give me honest, thoughtful feedback and I don't care about votes. For every person whose vote is an honest reaction there are multiple votes because someone does or doesn't like you...or their friend submitted a poem on the same day and they like them more, etc. It's a seriously flawed system. I love Laurel and this forum that has been my home so long but, at least for poetry, I prefer sharing poems here.

 

[Tzara]

I'm not so sure. If we are thinking about Epic verse - Homer, Milton, and the like, then yes. But Epic verse seems to be a kind of early form of narrativising. With the advent of the novel, much later in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, something happened here, a kind of divergence, where poetry, even the monologic 'narrative poems' of Robert Browning, tended to be distilled into a precise moment. Sure, stories are everywhere, narrative being an essential part of creative expression.

But that's not what I meant. Even in the narration of a, say, Lover's monologue about how he gave his Porphyria exactly what she had desired, the 'narrative' is sharpened to the moment of his having killed her, happy as Larry, revelling in the moment of pure freedom because, he says, "Even God has not said a word." Poetry is emotion, the pure unadulterated moment where emotion becomes itself the story.

Well, I was thinking about (near) contemporary narrative poetry—e.g. Anthony Burgess's Byrne, Kenneth Koch's Ko; or a Season on Earth and The Duplications, or Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. The first three are long poems in ottava rima and the last is in Onegin Stanza. All of them of course have emotional moments, but their thrust is narrating a story. The Burgess and Seth works could be (and often are) labeled "verse novels," but to me that does not somehow make them not poetry.

Part of the problem is that the term "poetry" is really difficult to define. Are prose poems poetry or fiction? (The same piece might be labeled either way, depending on where it is published or who is talking about it.) Is concrete poetry (e.g. Richard Kostelantez's "Tribute to Henry Ford" or Mary Ellen Solt's "Forsythia") or other experimental verse forms (e.g. Jackson Mac Low's "Call Me Ishmael") "poetry"? They certainly don't seem (to me anyway) to be "the pure unadulterated moment where emotion becomes itself the story."

But obviously we have differing concepts about what "poetry" means. Which is OK.

And now I'll shut up about it as it is rather off topic for the thread.

 

[NivKay]

First off the poem is excellent, so much rich evocative imagery. I don't get "erotic" from it. It appears that whoever checked it read "dewy thighs," (and a few other phrases), categorized it as erotic, decided it's a snuff poem and rejected it. Ridiculous imo.

I post my poems here on the forum. I haven't submitted any for publication here for many years. I trust the forum participants to give me honest, thoughtful feedback and I don't care about votes. For every person whose vote is an honest reaction there are multiple votes because someone does or doesn't like you...or their friend submitted a poem on the same day and they like them more, etc. It's a seriously flawed system. I love Laurel and this forum that has been my home so long but, at least for poetry, I prefer sharing poems here.

Thank you for that response. I’m not going to follow up, because ultimately it doesn’t really matter..
But I’ll do that from now, post on the forum..

 

[NivKay]

Well, I was thinking about (near) contemporary narrative poetry—e.g. Anthony Burgess's Byrne, Kenneth Koch's Ko; or a Season on Earth and The Duplications, or Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate. The first three are long poems in ottava rima and the last is in Onegin Stanza. All of them of course have emotional moments, but their thrust is narrating a story. The Burgess and Seth works could be (and often are) labeled "verse novels," but to me that does not somehow make them not poetry.

Part of the problem is that the term "poetry" is really difficult to define. Are prose poems poetry or fiction? (The same piece might be labeled either way, depending on where it is published or who is talking about it.) Is concrete poetry (e.g. Richard Kostelantez's "Tribute to Henry Ford" or Mary Ellen Solt's "Forsythia") or other experimental verse forms (e.g. Jackson Mac Low's "Call Me Ishmael") "poetry"? They certainly don't seem (to me anyway) to be "the pure unadulterated moment where emotion becomes itself the story."

But obviously we have differing concepts about what "poetry" means. Which is OK.

And now I'll shut up about it as it is rather off topic for the thread.

If I may weigh in.. actually I’m not weighing in, but just to say that I think it would be nice to have conversations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the topic, but which may have generated from that topic. A kind of écriture féminin , rather than a logocentric one…
So please .. discuss away!!

 

[Annelih]

So,

More non erotic poetry (that is, poetry).

I called this Yesterday’s Pain.

Yesterday’s pain walked with me to the pier’s edge.
My hand in hers, we walked in silence -
What else could we say?
- the pier stretched endlessly into the ocean.

At the edge, yesterday’s pain whispered - I cannot repeat her words - secret things,
Meant only for my ears, moulded to my skin; I wore them like a moonlit shawl.

Wrapped in its insistent embrace, yesterday’s pain bade me catch the approaching wave, whose song only one other
could sing as well.
It was cold, murky, it pulled me in.

Yesterday’s pain no longer visits. At times I hear her sweet voice
at the edge of the pier,
But the cold depths
drown my calls to her.
Nor is there any need.

 

[WCSGarland]

So,

More non erotic poetry (that is, poetry).

I called this Yesterday’s Pain.

Yesterday’s pain walked with me to the pier’s edge.
My hand in hers, we walked in silence -
What else could we say?
- the pier stretched endlessly into the ocean.

At the edge, yesterday’s pain whispered - I cannot repeat her words - secret things,
Meant only for my ears, moulded to my skin; I wore them like a moonlit shawl.

Wrapped in its insistent embrace, yesterday’s pain bade me catch the approaching wave, whose song only one other
could sing as well.
It was cold, murky, it pulled me in.

Yesterday’s pain no longer visits. At times I hear her sweet voice
at the edge of the pier,
But the cold depths
drown my calls to her.
Nor is there any need.

Kind of a touch of cosmic irony... thanks for sharing.