Hi, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
If you want to go directly to the poetry exercise, and skip all this “recipe blog” backstory, scroll to the next subhead.
Image from Joe Haupt, Flickr
I have a little bit of a hangup on scents, but ask anyone, that’s normal. Anytime a sitcom needs to introduce a sudden amnesia reversal or an episode of NBC’s Hannibal needs Hannibal to realize something super fast, smell happens. Scents are associated with memories. They’re visceral, and personal, and sometimes hard to dissect.
Like poems!
Poems and perfumes, two hallmarks of Valentine’s Day1, intensely intimate and potentially fraught. And confusing.
Perfumers write truly bizarre descriptions for their scents – for example, Byredo describes Eleventh Hour as “an exploration around the smell of things ending, a journey to the end of Time, the last perfume on Earth.” Chris Rusak’s Beast Mode is “Minimalist weirdo. A creature of deception. Perfume nerdery.”
Often, I’ve found our experience of perfume isn’t totally cohesive with our expectations. We’re often impacted by parts of a scent we don’t understand. I wrote a whole short story about it, in fact! Today’s game explores that phenomenon. It’s also a way to pull a vibrant sensory experience into your writing. This is like other observational exercises we’ve done together, but entirely smell-focused.
If you, like me, have a fragrance collection, you might want to grab your favorite perfumes/samples for this one, just for inspiration.
Exercise: A Nose for Prose (Poetry)
For this exercise, you’ll get to spend a little time doing research-y homework…or falling into an online shopping rabbit hole. Choice is yours!
Think of a few perfumes that have made an impression on you, for better or worse. Look them up online. Look at the descriptions first. Copy down the parts of the descriptions you find interesting.
Then, do the same thing for the perfume notes. Are there things that surprise you? I encountered “carrot seeds” in that Byredo perfume’s notes, which was odd. Are there fragrance notes in a much-beloved perfume that catch you off-guard because you’ve always hated them (I’m looking at you, MOSS!)?
Make a word bank using the words and phrases from the perfumes. Fragrantica is a great resource if you need more.
Now, on a separate sheet of paper (or section/column), write down some phrases about the role this scent has played in your life. Did you abandon the perfume you chose because you wore it during an embarrassing period of your life? Has the fragrance you chose always reminded you of a person you loved and lost?
Short words and phrases are fine, but so are sentences. You can just write emotions down, if you want.Look at your two working word banks, and ask yourself this question: how can I bridge these lists together? Experiment with linking specific notes to specific emotions, or phrases from the scent description to a vibrant memory.
Write your poem in the form of a perfume description. There’s a good chance this’ll turn out to be a block of prose poetry – that’s fine. Try to create interesting, unexpected parings, or capture the notes within a narrative arc.
A couple quick/short examples. You might write that Byredo's Eleventh Hour is a reminder that even carrot seeds can be an ending, that you can't make it to the end of things without rum, that bergamot was there from the beginning and will follow you wherever you go. Or, Beast Mode is the bottle you wanted to be. A blonde bottle but everything is dark – black licorice, black pepper, tuberose wilted in a fist (sound familiar)?
You could easily do a series of perfume descriptions, or break a poem out into “base,” “heart,” and “top” layers. The choice is yours!
I’ll be talking more about perfume in the Tuesday newsletter, hint hint, since it’s on my mind this week. I’d love to hear your fragrance recommendations – and see your poems! – in the comments.
HALLMARKS! HA!