odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
All material copyrighted to odourofdevonviolet.com © 2014
or to the various credited sources © 2014
XL
While poetry might have a ‘mouth’, promotional copy has
A snout, and advertising versification, a nose; a nose for
Shopping habits and impulse-buying; the job of the sponsored
‘Copywriter is the poeticising of consumer goods’, to cast
A spell of word-magic, verbal hypnotism on the Centaur-
Hoofing customer and rheumy-eyed consumer, so S.I.
Hayakawa hypothesised in Language In Thought And Action,
And reiterated it through several print impressions: ‘A poet …
Cannot let a yellow primrose remain merely a yellow primrose …
The primrose comes to symbolise things…’, less so in prose;
‘Similarly, an advertising copywriter cannot permit a cake
Of soap to remain a cake of soap and “nothing more”…
Like the poet [he] must invest it with significance so that it
Becomes symbolic of something beyond itself…’ –this is
Advertising basics: make words WORK for you, like money,
Make words PAY: certain metaphors, terminology,
Nomenclature, imperative vocabularies can pay incalculable
Dividends by driving divide-and-rule dirigibles of reductive
Directives; semantic tags sprout price-tags; stigmatisation
Is capitalisation of certain problem groups; transforms them
From camel humps to cash cows of clawed-back state assistance;
In laymen terms, call a spade a spade and you’ll be well paid –
Call it the Primrose Promise, or the mock-polemic of Primrose
Hill’s pheromones of artificial champagne-fluted lefts: blue
Labourites, red Tories, orange liberals, conservative
Revolutionaries, Stalinist reactionaries, anarchistic factions,
Laptop partisans, armchair protestors, cup-and-saucer radicals,
Syndicalists, gradualist Quarmbys, contrarian entryists and
Buy-to-let Bolsheviks of the Violet Revolution which drives
Through gentrification of the metropolitan precincts, scented
With amonia and DEVON VIOLET: more than just a perfume,
It’s a redolent directive, addictively reductive, tartly antediluvian –
All anyone can ask anyone else today is whether they’ve seen
The latest advert for DEVON VIOLET melt the television screen:
XLI
“DEVON VIOLET, eau de austérité! Come and be baptised
In this toilet-water of Austerity; miracle spa for all
Material maladies –makes Lourdes look like a Butlins lido!
Have you got the fiscal restraint it takes to be an upstanding
Pedestrian today? Don’t want to be out-of-touch with
The urban bucolic in the midst of empty stores? Want to
Opt-out from the pop-up shops and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
Retail refurbishments? Fed up with boarded-up?Want to
Powder your nose, freshen up a bit, but asset-rich and cash-poor?
Then point your proboscises no further: Odour of Devon Violet
Will sieve out all those fumes of stagflation for an affordable
Price: puts the kink back into fiscal consolidation with its
Irresistible musk painstakingly fermented by hand-picked
Opportunists, austeriticians, plutocrats and financial
Falangists –DEVON VIOLET's natural spring cadences are
Guaranteed to wash away those impecunious blues with
Their special nuanced hints of taffeta, muslin, velvet and
Choicest lotus to help you drift off far away from flu of affluence
And avaricious viruses into soothing fumes of pharmaceutical
Aspirations –Atishoo, atishoo, and they all fall down, those
Daffodils and failures, daffodils and failures, falling at
First hurdles, while violets of adversity survive, flourish in
Spite of difficult decisions and tough choices; victor over
Transitory voices; spring into violet shouts from the weeding
Of deregulation; blossom in valleys of unmaking, dismantling,
Tax-evading, investing in fumigated futures, sustainable
Olfactory infrastructures, dismantling malingering odours,
Blooming from green shoots of sluggish growth into proscriptive
Recovery –Try the pilot sample, straight from the sunny uplands,
Free at the point of spivery with every respectable red-top:
DEVON VIOLET –You KNOW it makes Scents –because it
HAS to, as there IS NO ALTERNATIVE, so don’t be a deficit-
Denying profligate wallflower: immerse yourself in the fragrance
Of fiscal flagellation and national self-harm –buy DEVON
VIOLET today!” You know it pays to spray the cheapest way!