Embodied Writing, the erotic,

“For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” —Audre Lorde

I’ve been mulling over the words “embodied” and “somatic,” trying to find a word that might get at what I mean more precisely, while leaving enough room for the mystery of inhabiting a body. There are works of art—images, literature, film, music&&—that touch me, move me. Something visceral happens. What is that?

How do I reach for, how do I touch, via writing? And is there touch without purpose?

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire,” wrote Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.

I often teach workshops on my obsessions and what I’m ongoingly learning about (devotion, spirals, rivers & the poetic image, embodiment, etc), to deepen that study alongside others. On one hand, I’ve danced and written for decades, and have taught at these intersections. On the other, this crossing continues to elude me; I’m still refining questions, coming up with new experiments, developing my methodology. You’re invited into the experiment. I’m teaching a workshop on Zoom this Saturday, Embodied Revision, from 11am-12.30pm CT, $40-60 sliding scale. Reach out to me if pricing is a barrier. It’s a cross-genre revision session, incorporating embodied approaches/experiments. Bring a draft to revise!

There’s the fact that I write in a body—seems obvious enough, and yet..how often I relegate that work to just the head. Then there’s writing from a place of inhabiting the strange mess and sensuality of it. There are experiments and practices I turn to/conjure to for this. Some very small: feeling my feet and wiggling my toes while I’m writing. Noticing where my feet touch what surface. Their shape, temperature. Imagining I can bring breath there. Bringing attention also to my back body, along my spine, imagining I can reach back behind me with the breath. Stretching out my arms, so the noticing becomes horizontal. Because language moves in every direction. (If you’re craving devising your own somatic writing ritual/experiment, you might find this exercise from “The poem as Ritualistic Structure” in which poet Maggie Queeney builds on CA Conrad’s work fruitful.)

I don't think this inquiry can, or should, be separated from the sensual, the erotic. “The erotic is a resource within each of us…” wrote Audre Lorde in the oft-quoted “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” And I am thinking about this resource as integral to writing and revising. Isn’t the poem a site of linguistic, visual, sonic, dramatic, sensual, and intellectual pleasure? Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments) comes to mind again: “(and yet: what if knowledge itself were? Delicious?)”. Lorde goes on to say: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”

I return again & again to Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, in which she left imprints of her body in the earth with flowers, branches, gunpowder, moss, fire. Sometimes carving, burning her own form into the earth. Which we do daily. We leave a mark.

In this achy world we inhabit, I’m not sure how to let myself fully feel even a fraction of the time. The attempt seems worthwhile.