I think a fragrance is all about sensations and imagery, and can evoke visions, feelings and thoughts.
When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.
The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
And though the coldness I have always felt leaves me, the numbness doesn't and probably never will. this relationship will probably lead to nothing... this didn't change anything. I imagine her smelling clean, like tea.
What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.
Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
the streams buck like rams in a tent / whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed /shadows of the shepherds. /black eggs and fools' bells fall from the trees. / thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the donkeys. / wings brush against flowers. / fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.
Curse him for being all tight muscle, with ivory skin and a mouth as soft as rose petals. Curse him for having hair as fair as the sun, and eyes as black as night. Curse him for having the grace of a cat and deft, cool hands. And now I am having the same argument on paper that I have in my own head on too many nights. I know my choice is sensible, but it isn't my common sense I think with, those times Rosto's stolen a kiss from me.
The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.
Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again.
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.
The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.
Her voice left a flavor of honey and gunpowder on the air.
I am reading Henry James...and feel myself as one entombed in a block of smooth amber.
[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently place, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.
Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.
He was the heat of a fire and the sweetness of the moon I'd only just met.
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?
We lie in each other's arms eyes shut and fingers open and all the colors of the world pass through our bodies like strings of fire.
and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.
She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.
