Inspiration is (Literally) in the Air
Baccarat Rouge 540 and some poems for you.
I had this whole big post planned out, a whole missive all about how poetry is nowhere close to dead, but could maybe, begrudgingly, borrow a few lessons from Silicon Valley. But then I was in an 11:30pm rabbithole as one finds themselves in, watching this Rolling Stone interview with Lana Del Rey.
There’s poetry in everything. Everyone’s a poet.
—Lana Del Rey as interviewed by Rolling Stone UK, March 2023
What is it that makes a poetic life, exactly?
My rabbithole led me to this 2019 Vice article by
, another artefact in my current quest to re-sync progress to pleasure. And maybe it involves, as the article posits, submission of thought to feeling, off-page mood-boarding as world-building.I had a moment of quiet, simmering electricity. Because if I know me, and I do, allegedly, I have a tendency to zoom out, to try to have the long-view figured out, to plan the whole-distance.
Sometimes my tendencies get the best of me, make things feel dragged out and heavier than I want. Then another birthday passes and I wonder: Where did all my doing and planning go?
So I scrapped a half-drafted analysis of Rupi Kaur, my Joan-d’Arc-as-ex-content-marketer call to action to disrupt poetry. Because as much as I am a planner I’ve been very into embracing poetry as a way of life, not just this new genre of writing I’m into.
I mean:
Zoomed in.
All in the feels.
High vibe, low productivity.
Something I can’t help but finish at 1am not because I have to meet a deadline but because I’m just so into it.
I may be suffering from a mild case of Revenge Bedtime Procrastination. But don’t feel bad for me. It’s been a utter treat to be all alone with absolutely nothing to think about, no to-do list or daytime stress machine. Nothing but me and the delights of nighttime zooming in. Sometimes inconveniently synced with my cats’ nighttime zoomies. Not the same thing. Or maybe?
So with reckless abandon, I ventured into my in-between time fascination: the world of fragrance, smell, how to describe things that, as a writer, I find hard to get right but where the right-ness isn’t the point or where the potency lies.
During one of my late-night keyboard clacking shenanigans, I happened to be thinking about
, one of my first and still favorite Substacks that sadly ended with a post about how they were coming back—and then they didn’t.This is not an internet sleuthing mystery, by the way. The writers are still alive, writing. They’re just not writing the Dry Down anymore. I found that relatable because that’s been me so many times, with sudden and sometimes public resolve brought back down to earth by whims of life and practical matters. But it also prompted me that day to sign up for two more paid Substacks because it’s so easy to take free content for granted. I often wonder who I’m writing to—shoutout to Arianna, Terence, Mariah, and Nishal, a few names out of the faceless bunch that took the time out of their day to tell me “Hey, I see this. I appreciate it.”. Who cares about me trying to make poetry a little bit less stuffy and serious?
Anyway, I will tag
in case there’s a small chance they’ll see this and know that if there aren’t any plans to bring the Dry Down back, that at least my once-quiet admiration has set off its tiny little spark of gratitude. And I know a like doesn’t pay the bills. I know.But attention, like it or not, is a different kind of currency. It’s powerful, and it’s a battle like any battle for resources ever had. And it’s rare. So go check out their work and let this be a reminder to carpe diem the “content” you like to see before it’s gone.
So anyway, anyway.
There’s this perfume. You might’ve heard of it. More likely, you’ve smelled it. I want to say that you’ve definitely smelled it, as I’ve heard some lament at just how ubiquitous it is. But you may be living on a farm in the middle of nowhere and they could be living in a bubble made up of people who can drop $350 on a bottle of perfume. I know some of you live in countries I’ve never been to. So you might not know.
I became intrigued after this perfume probably got the best PR a perfume could possibly get: a journalist wrote an article about it for Vogue, in which she said she was wearing it at a Savage x Fenty show when Rihanna walked by, and said, quote: You smell good.
The perfume is called Baccarat Rouge 540 by Maison Francis Kurkdjian.
If you know perfume, you know that scent in general is notoriously difficult to describe. I think that’s what I find so intriguing about it. But this smell, it’s something else.
Spicy. No, floral. Warm. No, fresh. Sea. Clouds. Forest. A dentist’s office. Strawberry jam.
I couldn’t quite imagine it, based on what I had read. But that didn’t matter. It was so fun to read, to imagine how something could smell so intoxicatingly like metaphorical money to one person and like plastic to another.
Because of its steep price tag and popularity, a whole industry of dupes has spawned from this perfume. Of the dupes, we have Ariana Grande’s perfume called Cloud. It’s sweet and comes in a bottle shaped like a fluffy blue cloud. Not exactly the same vibe as Baccarat Rouge 540’s square bottle with a blood red label. But to many, they smell exactly the same. Verdict on that I guess depends on how acute your sense of smell is.
I finally did conduct my sniff test at my local luxury department store one day. After scrunching up the sleeve of my down jacket, I spritzed one wrist and was instantly hit with feelings of okay-I-get-what-they-meant but also something that could not be fully and or ever accurately described.
Walking down the escalator, I swung my wrists in front of my partner. Too deep in the hype myself, I wanted an unbiased opinion.
Smell it! What do you think?
Wincing face.
“It smells like cotton candy lit with gasoline.”
Poetic, isn’t he? Put that on the ad.
As I walked around my usual haunts over the next little while, I found myself catching more whiffs of BR540. And every time, it stopped me. Once, on a man in a business suit. Another time, in a sea of pedestrians, jasmine and saffron and cedar and cotton candy wafting in the air. My own spritz, meanwhile, lingered on my Canadian Super-puff sleeve for weeks.
I’ll leave you with some poems all across the wild, wonderful web that, to me, evoke the sometimes contentious but mostly evocative mood of Baccarat Rouge 540—inspired by its notes that are both laid bare for all to see yet somehow remain a concoction of atomic mystery.
POEM SAMPLER 02
If we were in infinity, we would be everywhere, even inside ourselves, as taste resides in the walnut, and the walnut resides in the shell. Then we would thrive inside the subjunctive, where nothing happens but dreams of being, as paradise dreams of its inferno, the inferno of cotton candy.
—From “Darkness of the Subjunctive” by Paul Hoover
i’d rather have a heart that beats that beats that beats that beats that beats
—From “Tin Woman’s Lament” by Yolanda Wisher
my melancholic obsession with false perfection a pink depression a deadly confection and a bold composition
—From “Complication of Version” by Meg
Lipstick is one of the very finest elixirs It has a soft consistency And can write on glass Red rum is sweet And candied With cherries from the Bottom of the bottle We sip it so gracefully
—From “Red Rum” by Dorothea Lasky
I’ll never know if your name bends the sunlight, honey, we’ll never touch but over your pulse you take with you this sweetness.
—From “Top Note” by Rhiannon McGavin
Am I navigating correctly? Tell me, which stars were my ancestors looking at? And which ones burnt the black of searching irises and reflected something genuine back? I look to Rihanna and Kim Kardashian shimmering in Swarovski crystals. Make my eyes glow with seeing. I am inhaling, long white clouds and I see rivers of milk running toward orange oceans of sunlit honey. Tell me, am I navigating correctly?
—From “Identity Politics” by Tayi Tibble
Discard your hope of being touched with no expectation. Climb in the fireplace and sleep there; scrape your tongue across every speck of imaginary dirt— because your hunger sounds like a sunflower dying… You might always live with this amber-drenched hurt.
—From “Slack-Jawed and Shell-Shocked” by Naomi Medley
For miles, the palm trees, exotic janitors, sweep out the sky at dusk. The gray air molds. Geraniums heat the alleys. Jasmine and gasoline undress the night.
—From “L.A.” by Bert Meyers
Smoke, like memories, permeates our hair, our clothing, our layers of skin. The smoke travels deep to the seat of memory. We walk away from the fire; no matter how far we walk, we carry this scent with us.
—From “Smoke in Our Hair” by Ofelia Zepeda
At night, I snuck into the garden and sang my pleas into the leaves. Still, the gardenia blackened as if scorched, the jasmine shot its stars into the ground, the peaches puckered around unformed pits. In the end, all we grew was oleander, pink flesh burst from clay, blowing sweet poison to the wind.
—From “What Grows in the Desert” by Jenny Qi c/o
You lay so still in the sunshine, So still in that hot sweet hour— That the timid things of the forest land Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand, Mistaking it for a flower.
—From “On the Hill-Side” by Radclyffe Hall
Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
—From “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón
Have you smelled Baccarat Rouge 540? What do you think it smells like?
I love your work to make poetry less stuffy. I love reading old letters where someone would spontaneously add a poem they’d recently been working on. We should do that with our text messages.
Loved this journey! One half our poetry project does live in the middle of nowhere and has never smelled Baccarat Rouge 540; have now added it to my bucket list (though I doubt it will live up to your poetic descriptions)