folio : short takes on the prose poem
For reasons we don’t fully understand but which probably have something to do with a breakdown in communication between the language and olfactory centers of our brains, smell is extremely difficult to describe. Few abstract words exist for smell—there is no blue, or square. Often the best description one can give is “x smells like y”. In other words, a poetic description: one that relies on metaphor. Outpourings of language follow. “Poetic,” then, has become a common pejorative in the perfume world for writing about perfume that is too flowery: more specifically, “prose poetry” is often used. All over the internet, people post descriptions of fragrances in an attempt to describe them to each other; and those who read them roll their eyes. “Prose poetry.” (A strange echo to those poets who call a poem “prosaic,” too prosey.) Prose poetry falls short everywhere; it is both too poetic and not enough, both chemistry textbook and rhapsody. Some practitioners of prose poetry hope they arrive somewhere in between the two, existing in a negative space where genre distinctions fall away. But as a formal preoccupation, I turned to prose poetry because I wanted more genre. I want to write a poem that could be mistaken for a textbook, or a textbook that could be mistaken for a poem.
I’ve long bristled against the term “prose poetry” itself, despite writing in it almost exclusively for several years. Maybe because it suggests a neat division (and a neat combination) which doesn’t exist in practice; maybe because it threatens to become calcified as a form that, like the sonnet, every institutional poet needs to try their hand at to be taken seriously.
I tried many times to write something here about this unsettled form that didn’t also fall into its own trap or contradict itself. What I can say, safely: the name “prose poetry” implies that prose modifies poetry’s noun—that what we’re dealing with here is prose as a decoration or, more neutrally, a description of poetry. For all my dissatisfaction with the term, this has been useful. Despite myself, I still have a naive, qualified belief in poetry’s revolutionary power—if not in a material sense, then in the limited sense of language. I write prose poetry, then, a bit backwards: poetry as a language of aberrance, chaos, humanness that turns to modify the prose of the perfume advertisement, the textbook, the sermon—to infect it with strangeness and (if I’m lucky) beauty.
from Perfumer’s Organ
I think the sun fell into the ocean. A
filthy liquid filling up a murky glass.
This is how I describe the pain to my
doctor: tiny suns warming the center of my joints.
So I’ve been attending to the differences
between galbanum and geranium, typing and writing.
One is a sparkle at the back of the nose,
like something nearly poisonous; the other can only be described, unhelpfully,
as “minty rose.”
I am out of practice when it comes to
sensation. Sometimes it turns into an alarm system and nothing more. Sometimes
it gives me God.
Pain is a kind of “sparkly” aldehyde, I try to
explain—or really it can be any kind of texture. But currently I have nerves
and they are doused in no. 5. They are open to the sky, wet and sensitive. My
knuckles, I insist; they’re fucked! Can’t you smell it? The cleanliness of
pain?
Like the grape soda scent of misspelling it
“lavendar.” Alphabets slide off surfaces like oil, at the very points where
memory adheres. The ad on the bottle said “take the plunge”—
I
spray perfume and it opens a hole. In the presence of carrion, the vulture’s
head is bare of feathers.
Trample the flowers; go to the empty
heart.
I want a violet, supercharged with frost,
against a slab of cold cold metal. I’m after a kind of purity, itself a
half-fantasy built on synthetic materials and water.
An overdose of prunol, galbanum, or
leather. The smell of God’s armpit on the way back from a soccer game. On the
right person, simply transcendent—as a flash of the private life beneath a fur
coat, jarring to smell on a stranger. Hot, strange flesh underneath.
God, on the other hand, knows me, I’m
sure of it. I’m just waiting for him to come.
You, by contrast, offered me a
grapefruit.
I’m almost at the heart. The sun, pulsing
somewhere underground.
You wore white jeans when you climbed the
grapefruit tree, being careful of the thorns, and you cut one down for us with
your knife. I still think of you. It was a little unripe and we ate it like an
orange, in segments.
You pulled the snowy rind from the fruit
with your whole hand, like you were shearing a sheep.
When do we leave the storm of memory?
When will I touch your face?
When incense coats your hair?
