Scents and Sensibilities: A Workshop on Fragrance in Poetry with Moira Egan

Photo by Eric Toccaceli; via womensvoicesforchange.org.

This hands- and nose-on workshop will explore techniques that can be used to conjure the intensely evocative (yet vastly underrepresented) sense of smell. The most ephemeral of the senses, scent is, paradoxically, the one that is most intimately linked to memory, bypassing conscious thought to hit straight at the centers of memory, inducing poignant nostalgia and fierce flashbacks.

Participants will read and discuss published examples of fragrant poems. They will smell perfumes. Working with guided questions based upon literary synæsthesia, participants will draft new work, exploring memory, place, philosophy, religion, politics—even the making of art itself.

Moira Egan is an American poet/translator who lives in Rome. She has published eight volumes of poetry (five in the U.S.; three in Italy); the most recent of these are Synæsthesium (winner of the 2017 New Criterion Poetry Prize) and Olfactorium. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in journals and anthologies on four continents. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she has published volumes in translation in Italy by authors including Ashbery, Barth, Bender, Bidart, Ferlinghetti, Hecht, Simic, Strand, and Charles Wright.

Egan will also do a book signing at the workshop.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and Communication Studies and the Department of Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing.

This event for the FIT community; if you are not a member of the FIT community and would like to attend, contact Amy Lemmon, [email protected].