‘Perfume’ - Megan O’Neil

Like a wracking with sobbing,

You can hear it through the wall, lacrimosa.

Sheer tights laddering, heavenly.

Skirt in the fist; blush flinch.

A winter star, coldbright, smoking in its hook—

Cuntstruck, corset-tight,

Unparting a breath clasp

With a bolt cutter

A little death gasp

Boned like a dress

Scissor blade flashdark

Short skirt, snake bite, sidecar.

Detach—

Venus on the half shell;

Wet hair,

Aching in the pearl glisten

A shucking knife,

Episodic bladework; me with my black moods caustic, ritzy. You in your long coat.

Top notes of opium I stand in the doorway silhouetted, in vapour; you breathe me in for the last time I stalk away, a stage direction. Hair shining in the house lights.

A vocal quality underscores the italicised moments in the poem, almost a drawl to my ear. Can you tell me about them?

A voice in your ear is precisely the effect I was going for – conspiratorial and intimate. The italicised moments wane as the poem progresses because I felt to have this pressure on the cadence all the way through would be too prescriptive, but I wanted the voice here to have some insistence. The initial “Like” is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, referencing the similarity between the sound of crying and sex. “Death gasp” is referencing the French term for fainting or orgasm, “petite mort”. To set a word slightly on its side, leaning, felt true to this sense of swooning. Similarly with “heavenly,” I wanted to evoke a sigh.

Your compounds are exciting (“coldbright,” “cuntstruck,” “flashdark”) – combinations of words and of notes in a perfume. Where did they come from?

Kathy Acker is one of my muses. Her approach to language, which sometimes borders on kleptomania, is fascinating to me. She wrote: “Language is material. Material is rich”. Material is rich! That struck me like an arrow. Beneath that idea is a philosophy of carving something of your own with language – the angel in the marble. This certainly makes sense to my own view of the artistry of writing, and my attempts, at least, to not be limited too much by form. I suppose you could also say that creating neologisms or undertaking this wordplay sets the poems in a slightly different world. I am not particularly interested in writing in common parlance. I have always felt that in poetry especially, language should hold a preeminence, be foregrounded, be clad in pearls. The perfume notes rising through the poem were part of this. In Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle makes reference to how we each speak one long sentence in our lives. Why make it base? Why be economical? Also, I love Anne Carson. She does that all the time, creating portmanteaus and refashioning language. In Autobiography of Red, she uses “rhinestoning” as a verb. It’s gorgeous. As a writer, you are constantly and agonisingly chasing your own tastes.

Not-knowing can be one of the most freeing aspects of the poetic form. ‘Perfume’ keeps its cards just out of reach. I admit I had to google “lacrimosa”. What do you make of secrecy as a part of poetry?

I so agree with this, that surrendering to not-knowing is a real pleasure of poetry. I love writing which leans into the lyrical or sonic qualities of a word in order to convey its broader meaning. The answer to this question is entwined with the previous; I really love secrecy as part of poetry, being spirited away, being in flight from the quotidian and so, to me, having this play with language or creating secrecy is part of that. It’s like a wild brushstroke; tenebrism.

The line length expands at the end of ‘Perfume’ like a blade slowly opening; indeed, “episodic bladework” introduces the shift. Then we are in theatreland: “I stalk away, a stage direction.” That’s great. I’d love to hear about finding the shape of the poem.

There is a theatricality in everything. I also write plays, and I’ve always been quite obsessed with this image or tableau of a figure silhouetted in a doorway. It’s so naturally dramatic, a body being framed at the point of entering or leaving. “Episodic bladework” ushers in something different; where previously some lines are one or two words long, I wanted to eschew line breaks to pivot into a more breathless quality wherein its structure is less mannered and more urgent, to try and capture this flash of a scene where a relationship is ending. I felt too that this shift in the line length worked quite naturally with the sense of the view expanding to a door, and this transition to the theatrical; to a sense of artifice, a mirage, standing in vapour and vanishing like perfume sillage.

In your brilliant Substack newsletter, A Pearl Dissolved in Wine, you write: “I do feel very strongly about the confessional and the autobiographic not ever lessening the power of writing. This happens with many women writers – their work is read like diary entries, as though there was never any prowess involved, any towering and formidable ability.” For a long time, I was terrified somebody would spot me in my own writing. How do you navigate this?

There is a particularly myopic and pernicious method of critiquing writing by women which reduces the work of it to a passive reflex, or which simply devalues it completely. Obviously various styles of writing wax and wane in and out of vogue but this approach, undergirded by a derision towards women, does not. However, I do think it is also the case that the celebration of women writers outweighs it. Ultimately, you cannot militate against the ways your own work may be viewed, and sadly not against wilful misreadings of your work, but why should you? Anyone who writes knows the sensation of vulnerability that accompanies putting their work into the world. But that’s what comes first – criticism is secondary. Personally, I think often of the sheer stones of the writers I really admire, of the scale of their tenacity. Sarah Kane continuing to write what are now considered canonical plays after being pilloried, Kathy Acker, Anaïs Nin – they kept going, even when their work was misunderstood. I know precisely what you mean, that terror of feeling seen too keenly, but it is actually a good thing. I have had an experience or two wherein I have been seen quite piercingly in my own writing but ultimately, it’s a compliment, isn’t it. Your work is being read, being watched, being reviewed. You essentially just have to bite the bullet. Besides, didn’t Philip Larkin say once: “Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.” That’s rather good.