Poems paired with perfumes

Over on Notes from the Gelfite Review blog, Jehanne Dubrow pairs poems with perfumes. As a taster here is Soivohle’s perfume ‘Honeysuckle bird’ paired with an Andrew Hudgins poem.

Penning Perfumes shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards

The Saboteur Awards shortlist is now out, with the top five nominations in twelve categories. We are chuffed to be included in it!
If you enjoyed our work and have a spare minute, do vote for us in the ‘Best one-off’ category!

Penning Perfumes Bristol

Perfumes plus poetry plus cocktails at the taxidermied-to-the-hilt Milk Thistle bar made for a fabulous end to the Penning Perfumes tour in Bristol.

Photos by Ruby Walker Photography!

Tori Truslow read her poem inspired by Narcisse Noir.

One of our original poets, Amy Key, was back for her final Penning Perfumes performance - for now…

Anna Freeman, our first Bristolian poet.

Followed by Holly Corfield Carr.

And David Briggs.

These events are starting to look quite cultish….

Wish we could remember which perfume she was smelling!

Elizabeth Moores of Papillon Perfumery sharing her barnyardy sex perfume with David Briggs - inspired by his poem.

The detritus of sniffing sticks and cocktail glasses.

Elizabeth Moores on Perfume Muses

Elizabeth Moores is the perfumer behind Papillon Perfumery, a new British line of artisan fragrances launching this year. Elizabeth will be at the Penning Perfumes event at Milk Thistle bar in Bristol tomorrow evening, unveiling an intriguing new fragrance she’s created from a poem.

We asked Elizabeth three questions ahead of the big reveal.

Is poetry something you’ve used before when developing fragrances?

Although I have never worked directly from poetry, a lot of my perfumes are greatly influenced by periods of history, romantic and literary concepts, nature and artwork; much like painting or a piece of poetry it is the fragments which are extracted from these muses that combine and make something entirely new.
Working from a poem significantly illuminated these similarities and allowed me to connect with the poetic semblance and create an olfactory representation of the poem.

Without giving too much away before the night, how did you find the experience of creating a new perfume off the back of a poem?

Like all the arts, perfumery is greatly influenced by a variety of sensory elements, not just smell.

When creating a perfume, I think of colours, textures and places. I imagine the people who may wear the fragrance, and hope that the perfume will help them conjure their own unique and personal allusions. The whole experience of creating a perfume based around a poem has been very interesting for me.

Which commercially available perfume would you love to see interpreted into a poem?

Shalimar by Guerlain [good choice Liz].

You can meet Elizabeth and sample her new mystery perfume at Penning Perfumes on Wednesday 27th February. Tickets are available here.

Three questions for Holly Corfield-Carr

Holly Corfield Carr is a Bristol-based poet, writer and artist. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and is currently working as Spike Island Writer-in-Residence, supported by Arts Council England. Holly’s work is published in magazines including Ambit and Magma and has been commissioned for performance, exhibitions and public artworks such as Missorts, an immersive soundwork produced by Situations. You can follow Holly here She will be reading at the Bristol Penning Perfumes event on 27th February..

1) How would you describe your ‘normal’ poetry style?

I am not sure how to answer this so I’m going with ‘elliptical’. Not concise and not especially evasive, but perhaps egg-shaped? Weighted slightly off centre, tapering to a point that rounds off before it is fully achieved. Ha! Having said this, I used to work as an egg-collector on a farm and I once found a soft-shelled egg, laid before the shell had fully calcified. Surface tension had pulled it into a wrinkled sphere, gnarled with tough little calcium deposits. It was fascinating. That’s how I hope to write – still fluid, still unset.

2) Did the scent we give you challenge or suit your usual writing process?

I often work in collaboration so I thought this would be a challenge but one that would suit my practice well. It turns out my nose has an absolutely terrible memory and the scent I received recalled something I couldn’t name. It might have been easier if I could speak in a perfumer’s idiom and trace out notes and resins and dry tones. But all I could do was sniff and sniff until I unearthed something, and even then I wasn’t quite sure what I’d found. Happily, this strangeness made the poem.

3) What’s your favourite smell?

Lavender. Garlic. Wood smoke.

Three Questions for Anna Freeman

Anna Freeman is a multiple slam champion, creative writing lecturer at Bath Spa University, and an activist for ginger rights. Her work is funny, mostly, but with a spine of genuine pain and humiliation at the inarguable fact of her own existence. Her poetry has also been known to leave a greasy after-taste of lingering wrongness. Like a kebab. Anna has performed her poetry in myriad cities including London, Bristol, Manchester, Vancouver and Seattle, and appeared as part of Radio 4’s Bespoken. She spends most summers performing at a plethora of festivals including Glastonbury and Latitude. Her first collection, Gingering the World from the Inside, is scheduled to be published in April 2013, by Burning Eye Books. She will be reading at the Bristol Penning Perfumes event on 27th February.

1) How would you describe your ‘normal’ poetry style?

Autobiographical comedy… or, metaphorically, a dream in which I’m naked at work and everyone has to line up for a colon exam, but I haven’t revised.

2) Did the scent we give you challenge or suit your usual writing process?

Luckily I have an impressively sizable nose, so the sniffing part went well. Not sure how good the wordy bit is.

3) What’s your favourite smell?

My fingers.

Penning Perfumes Oxford

At the Albion Beatnik Bookstore

Host Claire Trevien

Poet James Webster

Poet Valerie Laws and attentive sniffers

Poet Lucy Ayrton

Poet Dan Simpson

Poet Eloise Stonborough

By this point the room was fairly whiffy

Some intense concentration

And even more intense perfume-sniffing

Perfumer John Stephens of the Cotswold Perfumery prepares some smells inspired by a Lucy Ayrton poem

Human guinea pig for John’s aroma materials!

Poetry and perfume-induced reveries…

With thanks to Ben Nicholson of Achilles and the Tortoise for the beautiful photos.

If you’d like to experience the Penning Perfumes magic, our last event takes place this Wednesday 27th February. Book your ticket here.

Three Questions for David Briggs

David Briggs received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and his first collection, The Method Men (Salt, 2010) was shortlisted for the London Festival Poetry Prize. He lives, teaches and writes in Bristol. He will be reading at the Bristol Penning Perfumes on 27th February.

1) How would you describe your ‘normal’ poetry style?

Not so much ‘real toad in the imaginary garden’, as toad in the abstract, hiding in the dense, knotty undergrowth of the imaginary garden.

2) Did the scent we give you challenge or suit your usual writing process?

Only in the sense that I hadn’t written so consciously about smell before. I tend to use language as an appeal to sight, sound and texture, by natural inclination, so it was good to explore the channel between nose and brain, for a change. And I love the perfume I was given.

3) What’s your favourite smell?

Byron, my dachshund.

Three questions for Eloise Stonborough

Eloise Stonborough grew up in London and now lives in Oxford where she is writing a DPhil on prosody in early twentieth century poetry at Balliol College. She recently edited The Salt Book of Younger Poets with Roddy Lumsden. She will be reading at tomorrow’s Oxford Penning Perfumes.

1) How would you describe your ‘normal’ poetry style?

A lapsed formalist with the obsessions of a lovestruck anatomist.

2) Did the scent we give you challenge or suit your usual writing process?

While I like writing from prompts, I tend to start poems from an intellectual or verbal ‘trigger’ so I struggled to translate the scent into words so that I could write from that translation. If anything else this process has taught me that not everything worth writing about is based in language and I should try be more aware of my sensory imagination as well as my linguistic one.

3) What’s your favourite smell?

My father’s aftershave, wool suits and the smell of smoke on leather. I am trying not to think too carefully about why all of my favourite scents come from a stereotypical 1950’s masculinity.