Call him a poet in motion.

Steve Mormoris, the Scent Beauty founder and fragrance industry veteran, is not any stranger to moving fast, given his licensing deals with Stetson, Cher and Dolly Parton, amongst others. He’s taken that pace along with his extracurricular interests, starting with the publishing of his first poetry book.

“It’s a contemporary meditation on seeing the world through the attention of memory — it’s through the attention of memory that there’s a whole lot of revisionist history and replaying of the human experience that I used to be exploring. That’s how I might encapsulate this particular book.”

The book, which Mormoris is promoting with a book tour this summer, is named “The Oculus,” published by Tupelo Press. Mormoris’ relationship with the shape began during his college years when he took creative writing courses at Princeton.

“An extended time ago, after I was at Princeton, I used to be writing poetry. I took creative writing courses, and I studied with some very famous poets on the time,” Mormoris said, including Joyce Carol Oates, Pulitzer Prize winners William Meredith and Maxine Kumin, amongst others. “It was remarkable to me how literature could be so transformative and enlighten people to know the plight of others, human nature, the character of life and all of those universal themes,” he continued.

Having written privately since then, the chance to publish his book got here by happenstance. “COVID[-19] was one in every of these disruptive moments, I began writing more, and I used to be accepted to a writers’ conference at Tupelo Press in Williamstown, Mass.,” Mormoris said. “I used to be meeting all of those other poets and writers, we were all working on manuscripts together. I felt like I used to be back in college and, amazingly, the Tupelo Press offered to publish my manuscript.”

He still looks back on his time at Princeton for inspiration. “My professors have at all times intrigued me, like William Meredith, Stanley Kunitz, because I grew up with them,” Mormoris said. “I’m an enormous fan of Mary Oliver — a quite simple, accessible style and a superb poet. Mark Doty, who has been an advocate for gay rights and of gay life, is a superb author.”

His own style, Mormoris said, could be described as neoclassical, though not for long. “I’m more traditional in my form structure. This particular book, there are sonnets and couplets and a few free-form poems. What I like in regards to the book is it has a wide range of forms,” he said. “I’m experimenting, I’m breaking away from classicism. I hear that rhyming poems are a whole no-no, but I even have a number of of those in my book, too,” he said.

Thematically, the Oculus covers broad ground. “The book has three sections. The primary one is in regards to the fear of emotional intimacy, the second is about world travel and discovering the great thing about the world, and the third is more of an elegy to my mother,” he said. “I went through writing, I went through rewriting, then the production of the book, and now I’m in promotion mode.”