Reading "The Lanyard" from Billy Collins' newest book, The Trouble with Poetry we find the line "No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly"
So, in our October writing prompt, we addressed Marcel Proust's madeleine cookie, which I said was once a rather snooty literary reference that has worked its way into pop culture.
The prompt is to "try writing a poem that begins with or concentrates on this Proustian Memory experience where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings forward a series of memories."
A novelist I enjoy reading is Umberto Eco - his newest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, has a protagonist who has forgotten who he is and all he can remember are the things he's read or seen in movies. He lacks any personal identity. Marcel Proust claimed that all art is distilled and ordered memory and Proustian memory" refers to the way a single stimulus can unfold a world of personal associations.
Look at an earlier prompt from Poets Online on childhood memory where Ellen Kaplan addressed this idea.
Are these just olfactory memories? What do you call memories triggered by taste (which, if I was Proust, would have been the key cookie sense) or touch or sound?
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