An Olfactory Meditation

The current prompt from ReadWritePoem is:

Walk around this week with your sniffer in high gear. Or take a moment right now to conjure up your favorite sense memories: Movie popcorn, gasoline, firewood, bed linens hung out on a washing line to dry - what is it that the sense of smell evokes for you? Be it positive, negative, or a little bit of both, put it into poetic form and share it with the rest of us.

 

So I did. Put my sniffer in high gear, I mean. And below, after days of working with it, off and on, is what I have.

What do I have?

1. One very drafty poem?
2. Sketches or drafts of several poems?
3. A poem in search of a form?
4. A poem, in the form it wants?
5. A non-poem.

Critiques welcome. Please.

A woman hangs laundry on the line.
    The grass is freshly mowed.
        She wears an apron.
            Starch, under a hot iron.

The widow sobs into her husband's shirt.
    As long as she can smell him, he lives.

Those who lose their sense of smell say that everything tastes like sawdust.

• Anosmia - lack of ability to smell
• Hyposmia - decreased ability to smell
• Phantosmia - "hallucinated smell", often unpleasant in nature
• Dysosmia - things smell differently than they should
• Hyperosmia - an abnormally acute sense of smell

These dreams have no scent. Scentless dreams.

She smells of lily-of-the-valley, of lavender, of lilacs.
He smells of horse, leather, manure.
She smells of garlic and tomatoes.
He smells of gin, cigarettes, and secrets.
She smells of cinnamon, nutmeg, chocolate.
He smells of another woman.

Coffee, and bacon sizzling in the pan. Just the sound smells of bacon.

This lemon, with its faintly oily skin.

Odor information is easily stored in long-term memory and has strong connections to emotional memory. This is possibly due to the olfactory system's close anatomical ties to the limbic system and hippocampus, areas of the brain that have long been known to be involved in emotion and place memory, respectively. Wikipedia

Cities have smells: New York, Santa Fe, San Francisco. Rome.

The dog asks "Who are you?", its nose in your crotch.

Belly button smell, under-arm smell, scrotum and vagina smells.
    Mask it, deodorize it, wash it away.

You put your nose to the infant's soft skull,
    trying to remember the true beginning,
        where we really come from.

The smell of the foreigner, his strange diet leaking from his skin.

After the flood: wreckage, and the smell.

There are diagnosticians who can smell disease,
    mothers who can smell misbehavior,
        lovers who can smell infidelity,
                                even when it is not there.

Bake cookies to sell your house. Put vanilla on the pulse-points to sell yourself.

This smell, she says, Godmother's house!

... it seems strange that human beings are able to distinguish so many different odors. It seems that there must be a highly-complex form of processing occurring; however, as it can be shown that, while many neurons in the olfactory bulb (and even the pyriform cortex and amygdala) are responsive to many different odors, half the neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex are responsive only to one odor, and the rest to only a few. It has been shown through microelectrode studies that each individual odor gives a particular specific spatial map of excitation in the olfactory bulb. It is possible that, through spatial encoding, the brain is able to distinguish specific odors. However, temporal coding must be taken into account. Over time, the spatial maps change, even for one particular odor, and the brain must be able to process these details as well. Wikipedia

Old pickup smell, animal and metallic. Stale beer. Stale tobacco. Stale male.

Ice. Freezer smell.

    Or glacial ice,
            the smell of sailing back through time,
        past animals and plants,
into ice and stone and lichen.

The prison smell, dense, metallic, electric.
The smell of threat, suppression, and rage.
The smell of danger, barely contained.
The smell of slamming iron doors.

When she comes out later to bring in the laundry,
she drops the clothespins into a pocket in her apron.
She folds each garment, and brings it to her face, before putting it in the basket.
   
She brings it to her face to smell the day.

Comments

[Nathan]

If you wanted to you could revise this into something more traditional through formatting, incorporating the different parts into a meditation about the woman, something like that, but I think this is really amazing in this form. It's a poetic exploration with the figure of the woman as its base taking the form of a mosaic of texts. What's the fancy word? heteroglossia I think. I really love it.

[Crafty green Poet]

I love this the way it is, its like flicking through a scrapbook,

[Anne]

Deeply in love, we two. I was sure of it. And then, one day, i noticed. His side of the bed had no scent when he arose to go about his day. Nothing on the sheets, nor pillowcase, nor me. I knew at that moment it was almost love, almost a lot of things that would never last. I was right.

[Dave]

Great collage. You're really cooking lately.

[A~Lotus]

For me personally, I think you may want to work on a bit with the formatting of the entire poem. Some stanzas are written one way and others, something else. It's kinda hard on the eyes.

However, I LOVE LOVE LOVE the way you incorporated references (i.e. Wiki, terms, definitions, etc..) to this poem and REALLY MADE IT FLOW!! Like everyone else has said before me, it reads like a collage and/or a scrapbook. :)

I enjoyed this poem overall.

[gautami tripathy]

I like the disjointed thoughts worked into it. They blend for me. Pieces of paper pasted. dusted and shining. Thats how it felt for me. I like it!

yellowed piece of paper

[twitches]

To me, this looks like much of the "new" poetry I am reading that is influenced by the presence of the Internet. There's so much going on out there that I am afraid I am sometimes too old to pull off, but the fact that I can appreciate it means maybe there's hope for me! I like the creativity here, the new formatting, the inclusion of this medium that is such a presence in our modern lives. Very cool, and very "now" as well. Go you!

[niki]

I liked all of this - the poetry, visuals, information, "smelling in my mind" each one of the smells you have listed!

I especially like the simple story of the woman folding her laundry. I saw my grandmother in that - she continued to dry her clothes outside because they smelled better (and she is right!) And now I know what that smell is....THE DAY!! Love that!

[SB]

Oh, it's a collage! Well, of course it is...

And, Niki -- I was seeing my own grandmother as I wrote that part of the ... collage.

[Annamari]

"A woman hangs laundry on the line.
The grass is freshly mowed.
She wears an apron.
Starch, under a hot iron."

this reminds me of my own grandmother. Thanks.

[Lirone]

Hmmm... I think what you have here is some first class ingredients with which to cook, but not a meal yet! I feel there are two poems here (at least) - one about smells through a relationship, another about smells through a lifetime....

Would you mind, in the spirit of collaborating on poems, if I had a play around with your images to see what I come up with? Obviously feel free to say no if you'd prefer to continue working on these alone!

[SB]

Please, have at it!

[Lirone]

Thanks for letting me play with your words and images - I enjoyed it a lot! Here is the poem I came up with: Scent story.

[christine]

These poems are amazing! I love how each one stands alone, yet together they are like beads on a necklace, each one making a whole. Moments and scenarios of scent, this is inspired work.
My critique? Keep doing what you're doing.