[Alexandra Baez]

Julie, I'd like to add my name to the list of those who are transfixed by this poem. I like the new title and, overall, the removal of the epigraph: I, too, had wondered how someone who cannot speak manages to utter a series of “bye-bye”s. For the record, I’ve tilted toward the views of those who believe that it’s not inappropriate for the interpretive voice of the n to speak through the child in this poem in the way that you have. (I wasn’t even thrown off by “assault” and such.) I see the poet’s role in this type of situation as a sort of “transformer,” converting the experience of the baby into something that readers can assimilate and relate to through their own understanding. Your own “translation” didn’t interfere, I don’t think, with my imaginative sympathetic experiencing of the scene at hand--to the contrary, I felt the genuine germ of feeling in it, so much so that I started forming psychic connections back to my own preverbal days and all the maladjustment to the world that comes with them. The poem offers a portal through which I can walk, myself, into that deeper, non-lingual, primal-memory-charged imaginings of that experience; the written words act simply to kick off a larger process for which it nonetheless can claim ultimate responsibility. For realistically, this poem is not just about the baby’s experience, but about adults’ relationship to that experience.

That being said, I’m also fascinated by the idea of trying to articulate things fully in the way that Cameron described. (I think you’ve edged toward that but not gone nearly as far as he would.) But in the end, I think that the result would probably disproportionately satisfy the reader’s emotions over their intellects, whereas the deepest satisfaction for an adult ultimately comes, I believe, from more equal attention to both.

The rhyme scheme of this is really nice and feels so slyly magical that only now am I actually noticing it for itself. Is this an established form? Just curious.

I love the musicality of “Calliope and carousel” (although I hadn’t known the applicable definition of the former), but I do think there is something evocative and incantory about your new list of carnival items: I love all those “b”s and monosyllables, and they really do evoke the mental simplicity, bedazzlement with objects, and exploratory babble of a child (although I don’t know how boiling oil figures into a carnival).

Each time I read S3, I’ve grown slightly impatient with the list of body parts that the contact burns after “skin,” but then I seem to find a comfortable new mental position in the thought that babies do rattle on dramatically like that. As to the “incisors” reference, I love it--it totally brought back childhood memories of similar thoughts!

I personally think the last line works much better spiked with some feature like “I sob” than it would as a simple list of four “bye-bye”s. The latter, I think, would tip over the edge of monotonous and look simply like a lazy way to fill in all the requisite metrical feet. I also think that without something like “I sob,” readers could miss the feeling and motive behind the exclamations.