Creating Pleasure

This poem explores creativity as an embodied and deeply pleasurable experience.

Using the language of sensuality and desire, it follows the changing rhythms of creation—from sudden intensity to slow deliberation, and growing pressure to release—as imagination takes form in the tangible world.

Creation becomes more than the production of something new.

It becomes a way of finding ourselves within what emerges.

I think we often talk about creativity in terms of what it produces.

A poem. A painting. A piece of music. An idea made tangible.

But some of what I love most about creating happens before there is anything to show for it. There is a particular pleasure in feeling something begin to emerge—following an impulse, becoming absorbed in it, and watching something that previously existed only in imagination slowly acquire form.

The sensual language of this poem is intentional.

Creation has often felt deeply embodied to me. It can be exciting, intimate, obsessive, tender, frustrating, and intensely pleasurable. Its rhythm changes from one moment to another, sometimes arriving with an almost uncontrollable urgency and other times requiring patience and deliberate attention.

The final lines are perhaps the most important to me:

You can lose yourself
In the bliss of it

Until you find yourself
Inside it

That paradox captures something I repeatedly experience in creative work.

There are moments when I become so absorbed in making something that my ordinary sense of self seems to disappear. Yet what eventually emerges often contains some part of me I hadn't known how to recognize before.

Perhaps that is one of the deepest pleasures of creating.

We bring something into the world, and in the process, something within us takes form too.