Lindsey Webb : On Perfumer's Organ

 

 

 

 

 

On websites like Fragrantica and Basenotes, users from around the world post reviews and descriptions of perfumes. Because smell can’t be transmitted digitally—or, arguably, via language—these descriptions necessarily court the absurd. I might even argue these sites hold some of the best surrealist writing being done today. Take, for example, these snippets from descriptions of Diptyque’s Tam Dao, a popular, mostly inoffensive sandalwood-vanilla perfume:

-        “splintery”

-        “buttery, cumbersome”

-        “synthetic lime furniture polish which isn’t unpleasant”

-        “stir-fried chicken with peanuts at first spray followed by an orange chicken and veggies drydown”

-        and my favorite: “it smells like wet cement or a cold, dark parking lot on a rainy day, but add soft florals and a bit of spice like just the most tiny little micro speck of spice and then take that scent in your hands and rub it between some soft sandalwood powder”

In some ways, Perfumer’s Organ began as a loving homage to these maximalist, grasping attempts to capture that most fleeting and foundational of sensory experiences, scent.

In writing the book, I also thought a lot about communication at a distance—something that smell does very well, if indirectly, and something arguably implicit in the act of writing a poem. I wrote the bulk of it during the most isolated months of the pandemic, so this was constantly on my mind: am I really just sending all these emails and messages and conference calls to myself, as evidence to myself that I exist? And is this true of poetry as well? What does a social poetry really look like? This book doesn’t claim to answer these questions, but got most of its energy from them, and from this early pandemic anxiety. After all, to get close enough to smell another person—whether familiar or a stranger—is an extraordinarily intimate social experience, fraught with emotional and, in those days, physical danger.

At the time, I also wondered about the shared promise of both perfume and its ancestor, incense, to attract or communicate: one with a (potential) romantic partner, and the other with God or the dead. With a nod to Emily Dickinson’s third “Master letter” and certain Catholic mystics, I thought about writing a scented letter to God. Would God or some other promise of contentment and security finally come to town, if only I wore the right perfume? If I said the right words in the right order? Prayer, poetry, and perfume imply an audience, even if none is there; this book is an attempt to search for that audience, that social promise, in its ideal and more earthly form.

Thanks to rob mclennan for inviting me to send this manuscript and for publishing it. Thanks also to Kylan Rice and Dallin Law for looking at early drafts, and to my friends and colleagues at the University of Utah PhD program who talked me through some of its ideas and questions.

 

 

 

 

 

Lindsey Webb is the author of a chapbook, House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She was named a 2021 National Poetry Series finalist and received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Steffensen Cannon fellow in the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Lindsey Webb : short takes on the prose poem

 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?

 

 

 

Lindsey Webb is the author of a chapbook, House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her writings have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She was a 2021 National Poetry Series finalist and received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.