- Come up with a list of words you explicitly associate with sex. Come up with a list of words you associate with sex but are not explicitly evocative of it. Take notes on the difference between these lists.
- Think of an intimate, transformative, erotic moment that occured between yourself and someone(s) whose name(s) you never learned.
- Think of yourself at your most embodied. What was your relationship to language at that moment. Freewrite about it.
Think of yourself at your most disembodied. What was your relationship to language at that moment? Freewrite about it.
- Draw a detailed map or diagram of sites of sex or sexual possibility. Then write as fast as you can for seven minutes uninterrupted.
- Taking cue from Delany’s piece, create two columns. On one side, write out a time from which you refrained from speaking. On the other, write a dialogue from memory, as accurately as you can, transcribing the last intimate encounter you had with a stranger.
PROMPT SET 2:
- Using your list of explicit/not explicit sexual language, take a blank sheet of paper and write a poem that spans the page and utilizes all the words you brainstormed.
- Citationalism emerges through and facilitates smutty encounters.
a. Lou Sullivan cites gay novelists Jean Genet and John Rechy in his dirty talk.
Write a scene of smut that is citational—name dropping or quoting at least two authors/texts.
b. T Fleischmann and their geographical sprawling network of lovers can track their flirtations through a passed around annotated copy of Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red Times Square Blue.
c. r. erica doyle cites the Marquis de Sade as a touchstone of her personal mythology of sexual development.
- Feel free to use and quote the packet with abundance.Use the map or diagram you drew of your sexual psychogeography to generate a poem.
- Write a pornographic passage that does not include sex. For example, consider the erotics of burning the american flag in Lou Cornum’s piece. This can also correlate to the words and freewrites you generated during the first set of prompts.
- Drawing inspiration from Dodie Bellamy's Cunt Norton or Cunt-Ups, create a spliced work of smut. Dodie used messages from her personal life; feel free to use your writings from the first prompt, or any other text you’d like. Here's a link to a virtual cut-up machine, or, if you feel so moved, create a cut-up with paper and scissors!
Instructions for creating a cut-up with paper and scissors: “The method is simple...Take a page... Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 ... one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different--(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)--in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem.” from LeRoi Jones, ed., The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (NY: Corinth Books, 1963).
- Create a literal “smutty valentine” be it a physical object, a video essay, or erotic soundscape, with your crush or your beloved in mind.
- Feel free to continue pursuing/sculpting any of the prompts from part 1 if you are so moved.