ABSTRACT

I start my university classes on children’s poetry with chocolate. I give each student two small squares of single-origin chocolate, and ask them to experience one of the squares with as many senses as possible. We then generate adjectives to describe those sensations. After they have exhausted their store of sense vocabulary, I read them professionally prepared tasting notes. These might include references to top notes of cherry, almond, or citrus, middle hints of tobacco, smoke, or vanilla, and finishes of caramel or coconut. Following this, they taste their second piece of chocolate. To their amazement, many of them find that they can now taste flavours they couldn’t before; the words have actually changed their sensory experience. As we process this activity, we discuss the relationship between language and sensory experience, how each informs the other as imbricated and yet heterogeneous registers. We talk about how language evokes memories, expectations, and emotions that work their way into our perceptions, and how synaesthetic metaphors form a large part of their everyday vocabulary for describing experience. We talk about the conventionality of metaphors, the pleasure and surprise of novel ones, and the ways language can both enhance and limit our ability to process sensory experience. My purpose in starting our study this way is to induct students experientially and multimodally into an approach to children’s poetry informed by cognitive poetics.