NaPoWriMo Day 22: A Little Song

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Kink” by Imani Davis

• Divinations

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. What is an argument you’ve been carrying in your head lately? Try to present both/all sides of the argument in your freewrite.

Poem: “Kink” by Imani Davis

The moon assumes her voyeuristic perch
to find the rut of me, releashed from sense,
devoid of focus ’cept by your design.
I never thought restraint would be my thing.
Then you: the hole from which my logic seeps,
who bucks my mind’s incessant swallowsong
& pins the speaker’s squirming lyric down
with ease. You coax a measured flood, decide
the scatter of my breath & know your place—
astride the August heat, your knuckles tight
around a bratty vers, a fuschia gag:
you quiet my neurotic ass, can still
the loudness murmuring beneath my skull.
Be done. There’s nothing more to say.

Divinations

If you know me personally, then you haven’t heard me shut up about this poem. Sorry about that.

This poem is a sonnet. If you’re not familiar with the sonnet form, I have a whole guide through it at this link. At its core, the sonnet (Italian for “little song”) is a 14-lined poem with a “volta,” or twist, in the poem’s center that complicates or reverses an argument or idea in the poem’s first half. Traditionally, sonnets were rhyming poems in iambic pentameter. Contemporary sonnets don’t require those formal restrictions, but, if the poet doesn’t abide by rhyme and meter, I think they should still do something interesting with the form.

This poem drives me insane. It’s doing so much, and doing all of it brilliantly. On the surface, it’s a poem addressed to a lover engaged in some form of BDSM power play. But then, on a closer look, the subject is not just a lover, but also the traditional sonnet form itself, a form which demands iambic pentameter—and the poem executes this brilliantly. Look at some of those inventions of language. Swallowsong??? SO good.

So there’s this negotiation with form, a conversation with the sonnet within the sonnet itself, and the poem’s volta, not incidentally, happens at a moment of poetic orgasm. And then! And then the poem’s meter falls apart. Those last three lines abandon the iamb; the speaker submits to the form, allows it to take control, gives in to language, and even borrows a line from Langston Hughes. The speaker is told “Be done” and so the poem is, too.

It’s just so smart. The negotiation with restraint and form is something that comes from a passionate love affair with language. At the end of this poem, I find I have nothing more to say, either—just admiration for something beautiful, complex, and skillfully created.

Prompt

Write a sonnet! Your freewrite can help you here: traditionally, sonnets were structured as an argument, volta, counterargument, and resolution. But, you don’t need to be traditional with the form–just do something more interesting than a 14-lined poem. Break the rules, invent new ones, give in to the possibilities of language, just so long as you dare yourself to do something novel and different.