My poem “Her Own” originated in an error. The girl in it mistakes the word sillage for silage, confuses the word for the scent following after the wearer of perfume moving through a room for the word for chopped cornstalks / fermented and fed, in winter, to pigs. And perhaps this poet, at some time, had the same misunderstanding.
I’ve been thinking about writing and being right and the routes to get anywhere near that state. Verisimilitude, I tried to type on my phone this morning, but autocorrect filled in similar dude. The phrase seemed, at first, all wrong for my diction. But then I began to consider another view.
“Her Own” is about the knowledge a girl does not have and the limits of her horizons. The association of her place, a site where she labors, with a rotten stench is, initially and predominantly, negative. Yet, by not making any direct statement about what opportunities she ought to have or what she should do with them, the image of the girl smelling her own clean scented hand suggests a kind of self-sufficiency too. I intend to leave the poem conflicted, as I am, by allegiance to my rural homeplace and acknowledgment of how such settings constrain some women. I mean to permit the reader to interpret flight in the last line as fleeing or soaring. Or aspects of both.
Maybe autocorrect’s recasting, the chill its-all-relativity of its attitude, isn’t entirely wrong either because verisimilitude is about likeness to, not absolute, truth. This instance in which auto does not refer to self has given me a more humorous voice than my own. It has given me an opening to writing this little essay, which has been a challenge to start because I am first and foremost a poet and this is prose.
I was texting about verisimilitude because, after publishing four books of poetry, I have a collection of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry, about to come out. I always refer to the contents as essays, but others are sure to categorize them as nonfiction, a label I fear promises a factual authority I don’t provide.
I am corresponding with a philosopher who writes, Art can be world-mirroring (to paraphrase [Edith] Landmann-Kalischer) only to the extent that it is also ‘world-creating’: art reflects and teaches us about our ways of being in the world partly by constituting or ‘inventing’ them. This reminds me that I believe art is true if the fallible human mind (which is to say the feeling individual maker) has put truest effort and intent into the effect of the piece on the genuine heart. The philosopher is Keren Gorodeisky, also a colleague at the university where I teach. Our exchange is a form of soothing reassurance from a friend as well as a thought-sharpening provocation from a specialist outside my field—another valuable duality.
“Her Own” is part of a pair. The poem that I have just been discussing is the first “Her Own” in my collection Colorfast, which appears early in the book’s pages and the girl’s days. A bit farther on, there is a second poem that, despite the possessive individuality of the phrase, shares the title, “Her Own.” This is because I was drawn to the terminology associated with perfume and read and took notes about it until I had more than a single poem could hold. So I had to write two pieces, about two times in a girl’s life, taking varying angles. Such angles in writing I compare to the slant of the sun—the same body, but striking so differently at morning and noon.
I have never given primacy to certainty in my poems. I do not suppose I must—or can—deliver irrefutable conclusions. “Her Own” and “Her Own” are not the only two poems of mine that have the same title. And many of my poems echo and talk back to each other across my collections. In poetry, I counter myself and I have it both ways—and these qualities also give the reader more possibilities to recognize, or at least wrangle with.
There are a number of potential readings of the second “Her Own.” The character is acquiring knowledge of the world and rejecting the way she has lived and its expectations of purity. But the girl’s way of rejecting is to accept a man’s stripping, fingerprinting hold over her. (Held and hold are words that appear again and again throughout the book, another kind of repetition aimed at creating continuity and contrasts, between caring and restrictive touch.) Her gain is also a loss of agency over her body and satisfaction with who she is and what she had. I’m arguing, to the limited degree that I do let my poems argue, for also, not that the girl is irredeemably at fault. If this is a noon poem, night is far off, the outcomes and sun not yet set.
The only definite error in the second “Her Own” was mine, not the girl character’s (unless, of course, she is me). It was just a matter of vocabulary. The first line, which now reads Floral complicated by chypre, until the final proof stage of the book, read cypher. My slight dyslexia or substantial imagination had composed a double meaning. But when my editor circled cypher in red and I factchecked the word, I did not question that this was a problem to set straight. (Chypre is a family of perfumes; cypher has nothing to do with the subject.)
Perhaps there is inaccurate vocabulary in this piece you are presently reading. I do not honestly intend and mean to when composing poem, as I wrote a few paragraphs ago. I often proceed by taking cues from sound as much reason, alliterating and off-rhyming, associating and coupling. For instance, in the first line of the first “Her Own,” I selected the words by following the er of after to wearer to perfume, then the rhyme of perfume to room. In the end of the later “Her Own,” old, note, and no chime with lamenting Os. I do not begin with theses and paths to reach ends already in mind. I might describe my method as trial and error. But instead I will use Gorodeisky’s—or let me try saying Keren’s—fresher and flattering term invention.
I do not include intentional misinformation in poetry or prose, despite what my nervousness about the categorization of nonfiction may suggest. I do not want to defend falsities in writing. What I am trying to articulate, to myself as much as others, is that there are also meanings that cannot by captured with complete clarity in words.
Verity is the name of a perfume and, though the purpose of perfumes is to mask a person’s natural odor, I don’t judge this a misnomer. Rather, I feel intrigued by how a perfumer, working in a medium strange to me, expresses such a characteristic as truthfulness. The things evoked to describe perfumes—leather, pepper, melon, sun, freshness, sophistication—aren’t contained on the vials, yet the metaphors are communicative.
Debates over veracity versus verisimilitude in literature go back so long before the girlhoods in my poems, to Goethe, to Aristotle. I don’t presume to supply answers to such great philosophical questions in poems, which are intentionally spatially small and nuance and implication driven. But I can offer imagistic or musical re-presentations, my own slight variations, and, with casts of crafted speakers, animate ideas in vignettes and set them in scenes.
The perfume Verity is a likeably modern chypre, says its marketing copy. Whether looking back and appraising the perspective of one poem from another with a more current point of view, or taking on the whole new genre of prose, I am finding means to be loyal to my subject matter. Writing essays helps me examine poems in a reviving and revealing style. And I was able to go back to my notes on perfume originally taken for poetry and find more inspiration for the essay “No Dummy” (and, it turns out, for this essay too). In “No Dummy,” I write about the oversized replica bottles displayed above cosmetic counters to advertise the fragrances they sell, which are called, unkindly, dummies. Or, as I prefer, factices (though the root of factice is nevertheless judgmental artificial).
Factices’ giant, gallon-or-more scale allows them a distinctive function—to be seen from a distance. Not unlike an essay about poetry that may appear more approachable to a broader audience than poetry itself because an essay is in solid paragraphs instead of broken lines. Or a sequence of poems that, when taken in concert, expand the individual parts’ implications and weight. Factices aren’t fake, they’re substantial pounds of real. As the website of the Facticerie, a collector’s museum, says, These bottles, though empty, are full of meaning…The museum’s philosophy is guided by this poetic tension: between presence and absence, illusion and legacy.
Betweenness—yes. Keren reflects on why we make art, drawing on the philosophy of Charles Taylor, The expression is needed partly to concretize the experience by distinguishing it from others, partly to distinguish mine from yours and from others’, and partly to align it with others by embedding it in a shared horizon of intelligibility—in our shared form of life as human beings.
On the horizon, one may see a silo as well as a skyscraper. Also, one may see the petite figure of a person not the self—who is revealed to be a friend as she walks nearer. When writing, whatever the form, what I may succeed in achieving is less conveying something veridical than showing enough of myself to feel real and also leaving enough open sky to be illuminated or shadowed by other sources.
Keren puts forth the notion that art is creation with a purpose more than merely capturing existent reality. Yet it is that I know her as a real living human, that she may receive my typos on the little handheld glow of a phone, that makes the philosophical concepts I’ve referred to here feel accessible to me at all.
Layers are stimulating, olfactorily and intellectually. Most perfume buyers prefer accords, not just pure scents like the rose oil the girl in my poem is bored by—they desire a harmony or unexpected meeting of fragrant components. Chypres meld several citrus impressions, a range of floral heart scents, and multiple forest bases. And, while a chypre is not the smell you’d get from rubbing yourself with a simple orange peel or a jasmine petal or a handful of fall leaves, it is not a cypher or cipher either. I don’t want my writing to be a puzzle for a reader to struggle to solve, but rather, a drift with many elements, some of which you are able to apprehend. Even in changing winds, a resonant, a redolent blend.
Notes
Rose McLarney’s essay, “No Dummy” appears in the journal Ninth Letter and will be included in her forthcoming collection of lyric essays, Rubble Masonry.
Karen Gorodeisky’s book, Beholden to Beauty: Aesthetic Value and The Authority of Pleasure, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
