An Erotics of Poetry
Workshop and research presented as part of The Erotics of Knowing, Field Studies
My personal interests, interpersonal practices and intellectual pursuits have long circled themes of the erotic. There was a time in which I listened to Audre Lorde’s essay Uses of the Erotic daily, as I came to embody an expanded definition of the erotic that included the banal as well as the intellectual: a re-membering of the realms of body, heart and mind.
Increasingly, the most charged part of my erotic life exists in my inner world: the world of thoughts, feelings and phenomena, and by extension, the planes on which I reproduce those experiences: the page. Through this medium of exchange, my inner world encounters the inner worlds of others. Being touched by writing goes through the skin, penetrating deep parts of being. Ideas articulated can move through time, multidirectionally.
Sensuousness and sensitivity to one area is not containable. Erotics as poetics is a perspective and practice that invades all areas of life: the personal, political and practical.
For The Erotics of Knowing, a five-day Field Studies programme exploring embodied and relational forms of knowledge, I developed An Erotics of Poetry, a workshop and piece of research asking how we might re-imbue thinking with sensuality, pleasure and touch.
I do not believe the erotic excludes the mind. As much wisdom as there is in re-centring the body, I don’t think we can expel the mind so easily. There is something to be explored in the internal encounter of mind meeting body, and in the ways these qualities, not actually separate but perhaps ontologically severed, experience one another.
What are the synonyms for knowledge? Intelligence, logic, data, wisdom, meaning. What are the synonyms for erotic? Sensuality, carnality, pleasure, touch.
How do we re-imbue our thinking with sensuality, pleasure, touch?
Perhaps poetry offers one way through. Not by abandoning thought, but by sensitising it.
The workshop attempted to put these propositions into practice. A long sheet of paper ran through the centre of the space, populated by a series of material objects. Participants moved through immersion, encounter and immediate perception, touching objects with the hand/mind and recording what arose before following sensation into association, memory, language and internal objects.
The paper became a collective field of contact: objects, bodies, words, drawings and associations accumulating through encounter. Rather than beginning with interpretation, we began with contact, asking what kinds of knowledge might emerge when sensation itself is allowed to organise thought.
An Erotics of Poetry was written through the development of the workshop and formed its conceptual and methodological ground. It brings together a series of propositions around the poet, the tender mind, systems of jouissance and sense-making, followed by the five-part method used in the workshop.
A Special thanks to Jospeh Kohlmaier who is the brilliant and tender human behind Field Studies, for the conversation we had to develop these ideas and for the safe space created to experiment.