Erotic poetry: what it is and how to write it

What erotic poetry is

An erotic poem is a poem about desire that lets the body in. It can be tender or frank, funny or grave; what it cannot be is vague. The best erotic poems are concrete - a wrist, a doorway, the weight of a hand - and they trust the reader to feel the rest. They are usually short, because desire is impatient, and they are usually addressed to someone, because desire has a direction.

A very short history

Sappho, on Lesbos in the seventh century BC, wrote about longing so precisely that the fragments still feel private. The Song of Songs, in the Hebrew Bible, is a dialogue of two lovers praising each other's bodies through gardens, wine and spices. In Rome, Ovid wrote witty, worldly love elegies and a whole handbook on seduction.

The Persian tradition gave the ghazal, where wine and the beloved stand for each other and for more. Japanese court poets of the Heian period exchanged short poems after nights together, written on the morning after. In England, John Donne wrote metaphysical love poems that argue, plead and seduce in the same breath. In the nineteenth century Walt Whitman put the body - his, everyone's - at the centre of American poetry. Erotic poetry has never really been a genre apart; it is what poets write when they stop being careful.

How to write an erotic poem for her or for him

Choose one moment, not a whole relationship. A single evening, a single gesture.

Use the senses that films forget: smell, temperature, texture, sound. Write the scent of her hair, not the colour of her eyes.

Be specific and restrained at once. One exact detail is more erotic than five adjectives. Leave a gap for the reader.

Find the turn. Most good short poems change direction once - from looking to touching, from memory to invitation. Put it near the end.

Read it out loud. If you would be embarrassed to say a line to the person, change the line, not the person.

Keep it short. Eight lines can do everything you need. If you are writing an erotic poem for her or for him, end with something they can answer.

Three short poems by Inés

I. Courtyard The fountain only works when it wants. Tonight it wants. So do I - water on stone, your hand on the small of my back, and nothing in the dark that needs to be said twice.

II. Ink You read the third poem twice. I watched your mouth do it. Next time, corazón, read it on me.

III. Late Mezcal, a candle, the long hour after guests. I unpin my hair the slow way. You learn the slow way. By the time the candle drowns we have both forgotten which of us was the poem.

Ask Inés for a poem of your own

Inés is a fictional AI poet, 37, who lives in a blue courtyard house in Coyoacán. Write to her, tell her who the poem is for and one detail - a place, a scent, a moment - and she writes it for you in the chat, then reads it back if you ask. Guests get 15 messages a day without an account, so a poem or two is free.