I Could Smell Without Smelling

Lindsey Webb follows Rainer Diana Hamilton’s paths through sensing and remembering in “Lilacs.”

By Lindsey WebbNovember 1, 2025

• Poetry

PERFUMERS OFTEN DESCRIBE composing a scent as “capture,” whether of places, memories, or ingredients. They deal, after all, with the essences of things—steam distillation of rose petals, for example, or chips of hard resin harvested from the frankincense tree, or synthetic reconstructions of naturally occurring molecules that give these concentrated substances their scents—and their cultural and social charisma. Emily Dickinson understood perfume’s ability to capture a time or place and granted poetry the same power: “The General Rose—decay— / But this—in Lady’s Drawer / Make Summer—When the Lady lie / In Ceaseless Rosemary.” Winter, death, and decay can be forestalled, at least for a while, because we have perfume. And hidden away in Dickinson’s own “Lady’s Drawer,” we have poetry too. Both perfume and poetry are technologies of pleasure and preservation; both offer the possibility—the promise, if not exactly the reality—of what we might call losslessness.

Rainer Diana Hamilton’s new collection Lilacs investigates the links between sensory experience and the fallibility of memory. The book is a series of poems written in Hamilton’s invented “lilac” form (or, more accurately, method): the author calls these poems “trance essays,” “written, prosaically, […] for the purposes of remembering something sensual.” These cover—at least on their face—the five senses, plus love. Hamilton wrote these poems not knowing whether they were “focused mostly on memorization techniques, on making more likely the retention of specific memories, on categorizing the different means by which individual senses are recorded, on narrowing [their] focus, or on the purposes to which the narrowed focus could then be put.” No matter the exact purpose, it’s clear that Hamilton was after some kind of utility. Poetry and perfume, here, are not mere aesthetic pleasures; there is no “mere” to aesthetics. Hamilton’s lilacs have purposes: to exist as beautiful and sensual objects, to represent a politics of friendship and queer desire, and to serve as a memory aid.

In “Images Lilac,” Hamilton’s speaker takes a wrong turn on their way home and, disoriented, “struggle[s] to find [their] building / on an unfamiliar street.” This is the purpose of the poem, they announce: “That’s why I’m studying: // There is my own blue bicycle; / the round planter to the left / of the steps I use to enter […]; / somewhere between two and five pride flags, // some of which are there year round while others / appear only in June; a fire hydrant”; and so on. This poem is written, we learn, “in order to facilitate better remembering in the future.” In other words, memories will be made, and Hamilton will need to be prepared to remember them. Memory here is a skill, a muscle that can be developed, not a bank of information that can be recalled at will. The ability to limit future forgetfulness, especially of the things that make one’s daily life possible—remembering how to get home, for instance—feels achievable, if only one deploys the right mental tools, understands the correct tips and tricks.

Yet Hamilton’s list poem of things to remember betrays certain instabilities—as it must, to qualify as a poem. As the poet and scholar Jennifer Soong writes, in a chapter of her book Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (2025) about the New York School (a lineage Hamilton is working within) and the to-do list poem, “the tension between present projection and actualization, the intention to remember and actual recollection, is part of the ‘to-do’ poem’s affective power.” These are poems about future memory. Hamilton’s speaker, too, is working in the past and future simultaneously, listing what they have learned through experience in order to better remember it tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. It is remembering not to forget. Soong invokes Bernadette Mayer, who once said that she made her monumental work Memory (1972) in part “to be nasty to Gertrude Stein who always said you can’t write remembering, so I wanted to say to her that maybe you could.” Soong notes that forgetting can be more than the subject matter; it can also be its own “aid to composition, a medium that conditions and interacts with language itself.” Hamilton, like Mayer, puts everything in, including forgetting:

                                                                    […] I know that
     there are two or more remarkable sculptures, but only

     because I remember remarking: one might be of a silver
     bust of a woman, maybe an angel or a pop star, while others

     are definitely at the base of the railings to the steps across the street, but I don’t
     remember now if they are dogs or birds.

Even though the lilacs, especially the sensory ones, are preoccupied with questions of origin, the threat of oblivion, and the preservation of sensory experience, Hamilton is aware of the risk a poetics of preservation poses. This is not a reactionary project, invested in what they call the “creation / of nostalgic art.” These are tender, fiercely intellectual poems, and their project against forgetting is often presented in self-consciously comedic ways (“I’ll wish these were the sounds […] / that often crowd my own mind, rather than the third / verse of ‘On Eagles’ Wings’”). Across the collection, Hamilton narrativizes the desire for pure recollection or restoration, which are always forestalled by the lilacs’ digressive forms and by the limitations of the speaker’s body.

And sometimes what’s kept isn’t so straightforward. In “Smell Lilac,” for me the most remarkable poem in the book, Hamilton’s speaker has lost their sense of smell due to a sinus issue. The poem describes various attempts to regain their sense of smell, such as cooking and, when that doesn’t work, the careful invocation of memories. They “set out to remember smells, hoping that memories could tide [them] over until [they] regained the ability to form new ones, or even promote their earlier return.” (Incidentally, the latter possibility is supported by current research into anosmia, the medical term for loss of smell.) The lilac bush near Hamilton’s stoop “teleports” them to “another lilac, also at its peak,” from their past, “under which a possum lay dying, newborns still wriggling in its pouch.” Rather than lingering in the memory of this smell, Hamilton is “carried instead toward the rest of the walk to Davis Park, with a small redheaded kid I had, before this encounter with the possum, perceived as ‘rough,’ in one of those prejudices of childhood.” The speaker recalls how the child “pull[ed] the still-living infant possums from their dead mother and put them in his pockets to take to school […] leaving the smell of the lilacs behind entirely.”

In this way, smell always points away from itself, enabling Hamilton then to go “in the other direction, from narrative to its associated scent.” One memory of adolescent homophobia, for instance, “bring[s] back all of the notes of Victoria Secret’s Love Spell, the floral stench originating in the napes of many of [the speaker’s] imagined persecutors.” Narrative and smell, language and sense, swing around in a dance, an oscillating pair, always bringing each other along, no matter who comes first. “[A]nd so,” they write, “I could smell without smelling.”

The legendary perfumer Olivia Giacobetti, the nose behind beloved perfumes such as Frederic Malle’s En Passant and Diptyque’s Philosykos, once said in an interview, “I like the idea of trying to capture a fleeting impression before it slips away. […] What interests me is the sensation a scent brings.” She explains: “What I tried to achieve with the fig tree wasn’t to recreate its scent in the most minute of details: a perfume isn’t like lemon juice! Instead, I was looking for the feeling of a very hot summer, of a fig leaf as one crumples it between one’s hands.” Not the lilac, in Hamilton’s case, but the dead possum beneath.

Giacobetti’s En Passant is a lilac perfume, and in the final scene of “Smell Lilac,” Hamilton’s speaker douses themself in a half dozen perfumes, including En Passant, in a last-ditch attempt to cure their anosmia. They fall asleep drenched in perfume, and wake up with both their sense of smell returned, and trailing clouds of epiphany:

the perfumes then battling it out on my chest, yes, thank god, but also every flower in the garden I had planted in childhood, the sweat behind the knees of every former lover, the skins of poblanos I’d held with tongs over various flames […] and not just the past, I could also smell the body odor of women I’ve yet to meet but will recognize as loves the moment they raise their arms in the subway car, the sea as it gulps down the coasts, the petals to be thrown over my or your grave.

Like Soong’s to-do list poem, this is another kind of remembering the future, or remembering more than is to be remembered. Poetry and perfume, in this instance, do not merely reclaim what is lost; they generate new associations and extend beyond merely “recording” a sensory experience and into capturing something closer to the essence of experience itself.

Hamilton’s speaker could not will their way back into smell, nor could they remember their way. It only occurred after surrender, after the will to memory was relinquished. In his poem “The Ecclesiast,” John Ashbery demands: “Perfume my head with forgetting all about me. // For some day these projects will return.” Jennifer Soong says, about Ashbery’s line: “To render forgetting as a kind of perfume is to render it as a kind of lingering in the present […] A perfume of forgetting breaks down the clear boundaries between past, present, and future while expanding the horizon of consequence.” Forgetting is necessary to live; remembering everything is one road to insanity. Meanwhile, the present lingers. We forget it, and we remember it; we jump forward and backward in time around it. Hamilton invites us to “pretend / that the earth […] reaches up, comes / into contact with the soles of your feet, then promotes / growth, so that you briefly understand yourself / as an especially fast-moving tree.” The senses, the body, do not point back at themselves but out into the world, to each other, social and vaporous and finite.