I like poems that poke at language to test the unsayable. Over the last year or so, that’s led me to consider the sense of smell. Smelling can trigger emotional associations the way sound does – our responses can be direct, deeply personal: there’s often a kind of chaotic frisson in smell’s ability to bypass the thinking part of the perceiving mind. This intensity of feeling slips through the net of language – just compare the way we talk about color, for instance, or sound – these senses have a rich vocabulary and elaborate grammatical possibilities. Smell has neither of these: we might way, “it smells like coffee”, identifying a source and making a comparison, but that gives us just the merest hint of how we interact with smell. I'm curious about how and whether poems can shed these limitations. Can a poem get the time and space of smelling into language? I feel this most strongly at evening, when things change gradually, then all at once. How to get paper to hold the feeling?

Jared Stanley is a poet and writer who often works with artists and sometimes writes in prose. He is the author of four collections of poetry, So Tough, EARS, The Weeds, and Book Made of Forest, as well as many chapbooks and pamphlets, most recently The Blurry Hole (with Sameer Farooq, Artspeak, 2022), and SHALL, (Black Rock Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bennington Review, Harvard Review, VOLT, Folder Magazine,and many others. Recent exhibitions have shown at the Atheneum Art & Music Library (La Jolla), in collaboration with Matthew Hebert, and at the Lilley Museum (Reno), in collaboration with Sameer Farooq. He teaches in the MFA Program in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and lives in Reno, Nevada.

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