Poetry: The Greatest Taboo – Eroticon 2013

♦ At the weekend I went to quite probably the event of the year, speaking as a sex blogger/erotic writer anyway. Eroticon 2013. When I’ve finally wrapped my head around the whole thing (and recovered), I’m going to do a general post about the event and the sessions I attended and so on and so forth. Until then, I’m going to write two or three posts showing you some of the more interactive elements I participated in over the weekend. First from Ashley Lister‘s poetry workshop, then from KD Grace‘s “finessing sex” session and then Kristina Lloyd‘s “threads of woo” one. At least.

Creative writing 4 : Breaking the greatest taboo in sex writing: poetry writing : Ashley Lister

Described as “an exploration of creative writing using short poetic forms to encourage writers to focus on unfamiliar aspects of language and unfamiliar approaches to getting words on paper”, this poetry workshop was exactly that. We were given five-minute blocks to attempt to rush out poems of various types in order to get use to think about words in different ways to the ways we think about them in prose: rhyme, rhythm, syllable count, mouth feel, etc.

It was very interactive indeed, something I didn’t quite feel up to on Sunday what with being tired and ill, but I think I soon got into the swing of thinking differently about language. And, since it makes a good blog post and gives you a sneak peek into what I come up with in a panic, I’d thought I’d share my little poems that I wrote in the session.

The Clerihew

The blogger Blacksilk
Writes sex right with the rest of her ilk
Toy reviews, pictures and dabbling in fiction
You can mark her out by her Cornish diction

The Haiku/Senryū

Poetry writing
How this flowing form mirrors
The curve of your thigh

Breath draws in, holds tight
Then rushes out, shuddering
You gasp a moment

The Limerick

There once was a woman from Wales
Who preferred to fuck girls over males
She said, “It’s a punt
But there’s plentiful cunt
And I’ll go back to the cock once that fails”

And those are the poems I wrote in the session! At various points the very jovial Ashley would ask us to share our poems with the class, as it were, which of course got me quite nervous. But I needn’t have been!

To my absolute delight (and these are moments I shall endeavour to remember a long, long time) I actually got approving gasps and compliments for both my senryū (even the one I thought was a bit rubbish) and a straight-up round of applause for my limerick! From a room largely composed of writers! A couple at least of whom I know to have high standards. I may have actually beamed.

By the end of the session, I think we were all convinced not only of our ability to give poetry a go (although, in my case, poetry is something I’ve dabbled in a few times before), but also of its use in writing prose. It makes you consider words differently and choose them carefully and I’m certainly going to be writing little poemlets here and there more often in order to improve my writing in general. Especially the haiku/senryū form because it’s a little more suited to being used erotically rather than bawdily.

Anyway, I hope you liked my five-minute offerings and this little glimpse of one of the more interactive sessions of Eroticon 2013. And, hey, why not join in? How about writing your own clerihew/haiku/senryū/limerick in the comments! ♦