On the index card with the prompt that I was writing to I had written “A poem to make your mama blush.” Granted, in the case of my own mother, any blushing would probably be done by me. (I talked about my hippie-adjacent dear mother here before.) But you get the idea.
I wrote this poem during the second week of my month-long poetry writing marathon. (Read my reflections on Week 2 here.)
Poem Context
One of the joys of getting a poem draft out the door every day is that I don’t have much time for second guessing and overthinking. That was a huge benefit in drafting this poem, especially since the subject matter of love, sex, the erotic, romance, etc. is not generally a go-to for me. I can’t say exactly why, because it’s definitely not that I’m prudish1. I think it has to do with my observation that it is rare for writing in this vein to be actually good…to say something inventive or surprising or clever, and authentic and…I don’t know, non-cringey. And I already have hesitancy around any of my writing being good enough, original enough—and definitely being something that I won’t cringe from embarrassment days or weeks or months after writing it.
But one of my hopes for participating in this Tupelo Press 30/30 Project was that I’d free myself to take some risks and just play. So for this poem I flipped to the index card encouraging myself to write a sexy poem and got to work. As an aside, I was also curious to see if I could write a poem with a theme of consent, so that became part of my brief, too.
Poemcrafting Notes
So much of poetry writing is about finding creativity through constraint—maybe constraint in style or number of lines or rhyme structure or whatever. That constraint forces you to figure out different ways to say something. An aspect of constraint for the poem “Permission” has to do with taking a page from an HR training document or New College Student Conduct Manual and making it erotic2.
I approached this by focusing on only one voice, the narrator’s. There is no back and forth with the prospective partner, though that person’s voice—and maybe request for consent—is hinted at having taken place sometime before the poem. I worked a lot on how to make the poem build…how to make it have an ascending foreplay feel, then descend to a sigh. Narratively, this became a story of not just consent, but an enthusiastic yes.
My personal assessment of this poem is that it’s a pretty good indicator that I am capable of this type of poem and should definitely explore it more. Maybe even this month as part of 30/30… ;-)
Thanks in large part to my mother-gifted copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves and to Prince, for reasons only the Controversy shower poster knows.
I assume the same challenges exist for writers trying to write sexy stuff centering on condom usage or navigating safe words.
