Aromatica Poetica combines our love of literature with our love of smell in a colossal endeavor to promote and celebrate the oft-disparaged sense, the “fallen angel,” as one of our inspirations Helen Keller named it in her attempt to raise it.
We hope to give beautiful language to a sense that is usually denied literary efforts, and in such a way, to prioritize the sense of smell and by extension taste, so that people with different perceptual experiences can revel and write freely about the senses they know intimately.
As Keller writes, “We should not condemn a musical composition on the testimony of an ear which cannot distinguish one chord from another, or judge a picture by the verdict of a color-blind critic. The sensations of smell which cheer, inform, and broaden my life are not less pleasant merely because some critic who treads the wide, bright pathway of the eye has not cultivated his olfactive sense.”
And as Proust writes, “But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest.”
Between and amongst these voices Aromatica Poetica plays.
Our founding editor, Dr. M. Leona Godin, has lived on pretty much every band of the sight-blindness spectrum, and has, in recent years of increasing blindness, come to be very fond of the sense of smell. Some books that put her over the edge in terms of realizing that a magazine such as Aromatica Poetica should exist include: The World I Live In by Helen Keller, Aromatherapy by Keville and Green, Proof by Adam Rogers, The Emperor of Scent and The Perfect Scent by Chandler Burr, Perfumes by Turin and Sanchez, and Perfume by Jean-Claude Ellena, as well as novels such as the famous In Search of Lost Time, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, The Language of Flowers, and the linked story collection Beasts and Children.
Perfumer & Flavorist, which caters to professionals in the industry, has also provided much fodder for thought. From interviews with scent and flavor artists to investigations of molecules, the magazine has helped to crack open the previously top-secret, almost magical, world of perfumery and flavor, that most lay people do not even know are so closely related and intertwined.
We join these and other adventurers in shedding light on the science as well as the aesthetics of perfume, flavor, and olfaction.
Visit our Submissions page to contribute!
