{"id":59,"date":"2013-02-04T14:13:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T14:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/04\/penning-perfumes-birmingham\/"},"modified":"2013-02-04T14:13:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T14:13:00","slug":"penning-perfumes-birmingham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/04\/penning-perfumes-birmingham\/","title":{"rendered":"Penning Perfumes, Birmingham"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote previously about the Penning Perfumes project<\/a> but now the moment of revelation is fast approaching!<\/p>\n

The fragrance I created in response to a poem will be officially released for the first time at the Penning Perfumes event on the evening of Wednesday 6th February 2013 at Le Truc<\/a> in Birmingham’s Ladywell Walk.<\/p>\n

I will be there, so will the poet Claire Tr\u00e9vien and we’ll be talking about the experience – Claire will be experiencing the fragrance designed from her poem for the first time and giving her reactions live (gulp!) and I’ll be talking about how I got from one to the other.  Everyone will get to smell the new creation and if it turns out you love it I’ll even have a few bottles for sale.  If you don’t already have one you can buy tickets now<\/a> for this and future events.  Speaking of future events I see that my friend and mentor John Stephen will be creating a perfume live on stage on 21st Feb in Oxford – brave man!<\/p>\n

I’m looking forward to a fascinating evening in Birmingham.  Ahead of the event I was asked some questions about the experience – these appear on the Penning Perfumes tumblr page<\/a>, but I’m also repeating them below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
It looks as if I’m working on something in this picture – but what?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

<\/p>\n

\n1. As a perfumer, is poetry something you\u2019ve used to stimulate new fragrance ideas before?<\/b><\/div>\n
\nThere have been a lot of different sources of inspiration and different kinds of brief, but this is the first time I\u2019ve had a poem to work from. More usual for me would be a cocktail, plant or individual scent note, sometimes just a name. Or there could be a more prosaic, conventional kind of perfume brief. This has been a great experience and has made me look back at the poetry I wrote in my youth (I don\u2019t write much any more) to see if there might be a fragrance hiding in there somewhere \u2026<\/div>\n
\n2. What has been your experience of turning a poem into a scent for Penning Perfumes – anything you weren\u2019t expecting, or that was easier\/more difficult than you expected?<\/b><\/div>\n
\nI suppose the thing that was most unexpected was how easy it was – I don\u2019t mean to say that the perfume came together first go – no such luck! But I expected to struggle to find a match between poetic phrases and imagery and scent notes, but in fact I found they came together very quickly and within an hour or so of first reading the poem I knew roughly the direction I wanted to take the fragrance. I did cheat a bit by exchanging emails with the poet though and that caused a couple of course corrections and added dimensions to the work that I\u2019d not seen before. One of the things that fascinated me was that the poem was itself inspired by a performance of music – so three forms of artistic expression are layered in my perfume only one of which is mine.<\/div>\n
\n3. Which is the one commercially available perfume that you\u2019d love to see turned into a poem and why?<\/b><\/div>\n
\nI\u2019d love to see Terre d\u2019Hermes turned into a poem partly because it\u2019s one of my favourite scents and designed by a perfumer I admire very much but also because it\u2019s such an abstract, minimalist creation I\u2019d love to see how it might manifest in verse.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote previously about the Penning Perfumes project but now the moment of revelation is fast approaching! The fragrance I created in response to a poem will be officially released for the first time at the Penning Perfumes event on the evening of Wednesday 6th February 2013 at Le Truc in Birmingham’s Ladywell Walk. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[59,20,7,13,58],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pellwallhelp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}