The Taste of Revolution

This chapter examines the interplay and tension between language, sensory experience, and time, with a focus on the author’s practice as a poet. It concentrates on one particular project engaging with the linked senses of taste and smell: her 2020 sequence of poems, A Revolutionary Calendar. Devised by Fabre d’Églantine and Gilbert Romme shortly after the French Revolution, the Republican Calendar attempted to recentre time around agriculture, plants, and animals. The 360 poems written in response led to performances that engaged the senses through live outdoor readings in a botanical garden and an online reading that explored the sound of culinary and consumption processes. Drawing on Marx and Serres, the chapter considers how sensory experiences can foster a collective understanding of the ways in which bodies are connected across species, and with the material world that sustains them.