[Roger Slater]

I also think this is very strong work.

While I could live without the epigraph, and I generally don't like epigraphs, I still vote for keeping it. I found it to be an interesting fact, for one thing, and I think the reminder that infants can't speak clears the way for you to use elevated diction in the poem, since it reminds us from the start that these are not the infant's actual words, but words of an adult who is trying to translate the infant experience into adult-talk. (I don't think it makes much sense to say that a newborn infant who cannot speak would, if he could speak, use the vocabulary of a ten-year old rather than of an educated adult.)

[John Riley]

Julie, I guess you’re faced with an age old problem. How do you express the thoughts of a nonverbal person verbally. Taking the language deeper into infancy would be its own sort inauthenticity. (There is a reason Joyce dropped it after the first line of Portrait and he never shied away from an experiment.) Trying too hard to mimic a toddler’s voice could be a distortion drawing more attention to the poet’s poem instead of the poem. Moving in that direction is worth considering but it isn’t necessary for the poem to reveal the child’s thoughts, unless you want to turn it into more of an experiment.

[W T Clark]

It has nothing to do with some kind of strange imitation of childish-speech. When I speak of a poem that must express the inarticulate in articulacy, I am talking of a language that allows such an inarticulacy to be felt, not simply eloquently rhymed about. I guess that it is easier to dissmiss my comments if you conceive of it as an attempt to write in a toddler-ish fashion but I meant nothing of that. If you need an example then Wilfred Owen eloquently chastises war, but Isaac Rosenberg expresses the inarticulate horror of it in the language itself. So do you want to be Owen or Rosenberg: do you want to evoke, or do you want to make an experience? To dismiss my comments by saying that the infant has no language anyway so eloquence or inarticulacy are beside the point is to completely be give up on imagination.

[Rick Mullin]

Well, I'd add Ellington to Owen and Rosenberg. I may have quoted the Duke before here in some context: "We have to find a way of saying without saying." Kind of works here.

It's true that an infant has no speech, so in a sense you can write anything when it comes to expressing an infant's thoughts and impressions. But it won't work if it cones across as a well-spoken, observant adult speaking. I can tell you that the second I came upon "assaults" the poem became problematic. I hear you speaking, Julie. Maybe it hit WT someplace else, or he's getting at something else. Right now, I'm not buying this as the expression of an infant conveying experience. I chose the word "naive" carefully. That's the standard.

So you're looking for a way of conveying wordless communication with words. Communication emanating from a pure human with no experiential reference. Not yet maligned by language. What a project! And well worth taking it to what you already have here. I don't know how much revision this would require. Don't blow the ending.

Rick

[Rick Mullin]

Oddly, and honestly, I don't think it's a contradiction to what I've written just above to say I think this stanza is fine:

Calliope and carousel
might be, as near as I can tell,
another concept past my ken —
the pandemonium of Hell


Maybe immediacy is the best rout to naivety, whatever that means.


Good luck!
Rick

[John Riley]

I didn’t dismiss anyone’s comment. I don’t have that power. I merely pointed out what would be difficult in trying to change the language to do what was suggested. It wouldn’t be the same as changing how a man’s war experiences were written when the attempt is to do the same with a toddler. That’s obvious, not dismissive.

Thanks.

[Jim Moonan]

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(This is as big a Pandora's box as I can imagine that has opened here in the discussion of an infant child’s linguistic ability to articulate their feelings. If only we could know...)

It is quite fitting that on this Easter Sunday I would come to Erato and read the gospel according to Cameron on baby talk. Will I be assassinated for saying that? I mean it in the most beautiful kind of way. It is the way of Erato. If I am to be gunned down for saying it, let it be here, by a young gunslinger poet. : )

I have to say, even if it’s said in a less than articulate way, that I trust that it is Julie’s skill as a poet and as a mother that has led her to write what she wrote to be an accurate representation of how an infant with precious few expressive vocabulary words would express the fear of the overpowering sensory bombardment that inhabits a carnival. I don’t think the poem needs any seismic shift in how it represents the infant’s linguistic ability to express themselves, as some are suggesting.

My initial reading was “clean” and continues to be in the sense that it feels authentic, with one exception: babies don’t sob. I felt like you wanted to avoid using “cried” because it played to neatly with the words “bye-bye”. Babies can cry; can wail, can scream — but they don’t sob.

The real question is: exactly how old is this infant? If the infant is under a year old, then chances are they have no words to articulately verbally express such displeasure. Their only recourse is non-verbal expressions such as crying, etc. However, If the infant is somewhere in the 12-24 month age range, it would be entirely appropriate/accurate to use the words “bye-bye, bye bye” to be an authentic reaction to unpleasantness. That’s what infants do: they use what expressive skills they have acquired to communicate their feelings. "Bye bye" can serve many purposes to express emotions when you're one year old. Crying the words, “Bye-bye” in an attempt to express fear is profoundly beautiful for reasons I can’t articulately express.

I would suggest that the true power of poetry is its theatrical power to suspend disbelief to allow the audience to experience what might be otherwise unobtainable. Isn’t all good poetry the act of using borrowed words to say the unspeakable? Poetry is silence. Ok, I'll stop because I am not sure I even know what I'm talking about : )

My only question that remains is whether or not “Infant” is the right title. As I said earlier, it is one of my favorite words (I hadn’t known about its etymology that the epigraph points out, which is fascinating) but it is also wildly subjective/misunderstood in the sense of what age it represents, especially when talking about developmental aspects of child development. For me, the child in the poem is between twelve and twenty-four months old, but no older and no younger. Typically, I wouldn’t call that an “infant”. "Baby" yes; "toddler" yes, but not infant. An infant to me is the first three months of life.

I trust Julie (and my own experiences with infants, of which I have many. I once taught babies how to dance : ))

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[Julie Steiner]

Thanks very much for the helpful feedback and discussion. Draft Two is posted above with a changed title and tweaks to the first two stanzas.

I cross-posted with Jim, but I've decided to get rid of the word "infant" entirely, for the reasons he stated. It's one of those words that everyone knows, so no one is going to calibrate their personal definition against the dictionary's, and it can mean a different (but very specific) thing to each reader.

Rick, you immediately convinced me that "assaults" was contextually inappropriate, and that the immediacy of more specifics (without editorializing them) would be helpful both to set the scene and to convey the onslaught of new sensations. Thanks.

Cameron, I hope that the changes bring the poem closer to the sort of experience you want to have of it. I agree that the fact that the child doesn't have much language at his or her disposal doesn't necessarily give the poet completely free rein in the diction department.

John, Susan, and Roger, thanks for your votes of confidence, and for your defense of more sophisticated diction. I took Rick's and Cameron's objections to be more about the tell-y connotations and contexts of words like "assaults" than 100% about the vocabulary per se. I think (hope?) there's some wiggle room in S2 because the poet admitting that the concept of Hell is beyond the narrator's ken, but in S1 more simplicity seems appropriate. "Waves," "bursts," and "blasts" are also not in a "naïve" vocabulary, but at least they are monosyllabic and (I hope) less closely linked to distracting contexts like war. (Although the new "boiling oil" might still take some readers there, and I'm okay with that.)

Glenn, welcome to the Sphere! Glad you enjoyed the rubaiyat structure. My first draft actually started with a stanza of "know" rhymes, which I soon realized would evoke Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" no matter what I did, so I junked that.

Jim, I found your perspective very helpful. I'll consider changing "sobs," but I'm not sure our personal definitions of that word are the same. Both I and the young children I know have spent a lot of time sobbing to the point of near-asphyxiation, and being unable to reel things in and breathe calmly again for an annoyingly long time. You and yours must be made of sterner stuff.

I am considering just leaving the last line

     Bye-bye! Bye-bye! Bye-bye! Bye-bye!

thus removing the narrator, and the poet, entirely at that point.

[Rick Mullin]

Julie,

The first stanza is much improved with the switch from assault to waves. It de-Julifies the diction and gives it to the kid.

I will actually pay you to revert to the original second stanza. Too much junk [all with their words....] has replaced the Calliope, which is just a perfect image that encompasses so much visual and aural stimuli. And you loose the really crucial "might be, as near as I can tell"

... are you kidding me? Do you use Venmo, or do I write a check?


Oh, and I think it's much improved without the epigraph.


Rick

[Jim Moonan]

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Yes to all your revisions and nearly all of Rick's reactions. PayPal please.

The new title is perfect.

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