‘The Singing Flower is Crying’

This question opens Isabella G. Mead’s poem ‘Letters to Jocelyn’ in The Infant Vine, Mead’s debut collection. The ‘I say’ frames the line as reported speech, though it stays in (my) mind as an expressive interjection, too – an emphatic figure of speech: ‘I say!’ But it is also emblematic of the act of asking that endures and forms a constant across the poems, which treat their subjects with dignity, curiosity and respect, engaging in ways illustrative of an ethical commitment to ask and to listen and not to assume.

‘Letters to Jocelyn’ is a response poem ‘after’ the UK visual artist and writer Jocelyn Allen’s ‘Imitating B’s Toddler Style’ (24th / 26th March 2022)’, part of a series of photographic (self-) portraits. On her website Allen describes how these works ‘grew naturally out of deciding that I would not show my children's full faces within my images; when they appear, I crudely edit over their features.’ In ‘Imitating B’s Toddler Style’, Allen – as her toddler, B – is the only figure in the frame. As the portrait’s subject she faces the camera, biceps curled, hands in fists raised to shoulder height. She wears a child’s bright blue bowl upside down on her head, a green-and-white-chequered tea towel knotted across her shoulders so it falls across her chest. Her expression is (deceptively?) neutral. The portrait is humorous, tender, sincere.

I seek out Allen’s image directly before returning to Mead’s poem in full, rereading it and finding an ekphrastic depiction in Mead’s poetic language – resonant with Siri Hustvedt’s assertion about every painting always being two paintings, ‘the one you see and the one you remember’. There is Allen’s work itself, then a viewer’s perception (and recollection) of it; ‘in an ekphrastic way’, in Mead’s language, the image takes on another life still, transformed further again in poetry, where it holds its own:

Encounter, ekphrasis, epistolarity – as approaches, these form various doubles and refractions, which Mead’s collection engages with purposefully and often lucidly: ‘Dear Jocelyn, isn’t all poetry epistolary?’ asks the speaker of the abovementioned poem, ‘Letters’. As this question attests – even rhetorically – these approaches cohere as literary forms attentive and receptive to re-forming our perceptions of the world, sharing in common an openness to having our engagements and notions of everyday, familiar speech, objects and events shaped and reshaped: by the artforms of others; via epistolary conversations; and, as exemplified by Mead’s poetry, through interactions with infants and young children.

The poetry of The Infant Vine further draws attention to how language mediates and transforms the immediate, physical, felt world, moving from material spaces to their expression in the permeable and responsive realm of text. The poems frequently attend to sounds and their associations, such as in ‘The Human Body’, which lists: ‘Ouse, Esk, Beck, Lud. Curtly skirting the vowel, the o in go-on, / the rivers of your country don’t need to say much to make / their point’. Shapes figure often in Mead’s poems too: ‘Alert to circles, you shower in round shapes – / eye, breast, breakfast plate’. Not only does the poem catalogue (round) shapes through its sequence of visual images and details, but these named shapes themselves form in patterns of sound across the poem, where ‘plate’ follows ‘shapes’, and ‘breast’ doubles/transforms aurally towards its assonant repetition/echo in ‘breakfast’.

These shapes, of image and sound, are closely linked to physicality and sensation, too. In ‘Personal Slalom’ the mother’s (or motherbaby’s) body doubles against televised winter Olympic skiing: ‘they spray snow / when my milk comes in’; ‘all I think about is / bodies’; ‘the small life falling / asleep in my arms’. Here the poem’s precise enjambment embodies the ways in which risk and loss can figure closely with(in) postpartum and caregiving spaces of safety and comfort, with language and lineation open, permeable to possibility and change. If each poetic line offers its own segment of meaning, ‘the small life falling’ doubles into – and away from – potential peril, towards closeness and safety instead, where the small life is held in/towards sleep, secure in the arms of the poem’s focalising speaker and caregiver.

The poem ‘Baby Siren Song’ similarly moves and traverses temporal and spatial contexts, creating contrasting compositions of distance and intimacy, association and juxtaposition, where

Moving from a workplace bathroom cubicle in Port Melbourne, from which the poem’s speaker is expressing milk for her baby, ‘Baby Siren Song’ comprises proximity and separation, and the uncanny doublings of association: the view of a stranger’s warm bundle of chips against the conjured and closely felt presence of the absent/distant baby. The poems also shift between literal and figurative spaces, often humorously so, in a voice that can be simultaneously tender and ironic: ‘H grunts & from his swaddle frees his balled hands, which he sucks with barnacle-vigour. The more he wriggles & squirms the stiller I become – driftwood has no arms’.

In representing later periods of infancy – toddler years notorious for their unreason – familiar language and associations are transformed, idiomatic expressions altered and made engagingly strange: ‘When I tell H he cannot XYZ, I find my hill and fall to my knees. The grass below is cold and wet like the black nose of a dog. H cries and cries and I feel the tears running over his perfect round cheeks as if they are my own’.

In ‘Midwinterish’, a poem after Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Winter Solstice’ – and intertextually suggestive of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day by title – H

In the next lines, the mushrooms ‘explode from the earth in a single night, impossibly soft, learn to submit to sunlight by morning’s first rays.’

Cautious as I want to be of imposing analogy or simile, this image nonetheless resonates with the concerns and interests of this essay. How might (poetic) language be, or become, alive in this way – ‘impossibly soft’; pliable and profuse; responsive to the questions and lessons of ‘how we live’? And how might poetic expression attend and give care to how we – adults, children and mushrooms alike – live?

This is to say: in rereading The Infant Vine, I find myself pondering and seeking to articulate the relationships between the language and form of (primarily free verse) poetry and the spaces of pregnancy and childbirth, postpartum experience and early parenthood. I believe these relationships go beyond clichéd or obvious perceptions and assumptions – of poetry’s relative brevity, and of it being fragmentary and oblique in ways reflective of the caregiver poet’s lack of time, sleep, focus; though this is not to invalidate these congruencies, either. As the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has expressed memorably, ‘the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.’

The American biographer and critic Julie Phillips, in her book The Baby on the Fire Escape, contends that ‘[a] typical picture of a woman with children is of someone whose children are constantly breaking in’. There is a vitality here, I think – an energy to the disruption or disturbance and to the verb, break(ing), resonant as it is with poetic language and its lineated forms. In a note on his new collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers, the poet Ender Başkan writes, ‘I returned to writing poems when our first child was learning to talk. Language, sounds and words were fun again […] We were being broken open.’

To be disturbed, to be broken open, is to be receptive, responsive.

For Phillips, the act of writing during motherhood ‘is not continuous but provisional, contingent, subject to disruption – and yet the words are still coming and the work is getting done’. This also accords with what Başkan describes, though Başkan attends specifically to the form and affordances of poetry, writing that:

As someone who has not often had a consistent writing space – by which I mean focussed time as well as a physical location – I think about how material space matters, but how writing also happens in language, on the page, whatever and wherever that page may be.

As Lene Tanggaard observes in her paper ‘The Sociomateriality of Creativity in Everyday Life’, ‘people do what they need to with the materials they have at hand.’ For Tanggaard, ‘creativity is an everyday phenomenon resulting in continual processes of ‘‘making the world”’. Children are part of this process, even if, it seems sometimes, by way of disturbance. And – a point I will return to – children are also engaged in the process of creativity and renewal themselves.

Phillips recounts in The Baby on the Fire Escape, how the American painter Alice Neel’s in-laws claimed, ‘on no evidence, that she had once left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment when she was trying to finish a painting […] a vivid image of the dangers, in their mind, of trying to do two things at once’. Phillips’ book draws its title from this anecdote. One of Neel’s paintings graces the blue cover. In it, a woman holds a baby to her chest, their faces close together. There is something fraught and uneasy about the image. Phillips refers to ‘the edging, unsettling drama’ of Neel’s portraits.

I recall a vintage image, findable online as ‘Mom uses a trash can to contain her baby while she crochets in the park, 1969’. In the black-and-white photo the baby is foregrounded, standing within the rubbish bin’s tight diamonds of mesh in a puffy nappy and pale t-shirt, dimpled legs bare. I first read the baby’s expression as bewildered, but is it ambivalent, accepting? The mother is beyond the baby and slightly out of focus, sitting on a picnic table bench. She is also dressed in white, or in light-coloured clothing, and her hair, long and dark, appears to move in a breeze, falling from its deep side part across her shoulders. Her face is turned towards the work in her hands.

I can remember myself as a child in the way, in this kind of way – recall my own mother studying ceramics as part of a TAFE fine arts course during my early primary school years. She is working at something at the kitchen table, absorbed in hand-building forms from white clay (really a blueish pale grey?), and my toast is stuck in the toaster. I tell her the toast is stuck and can I try to get it out? Yes, she says, yes, yes. Then she is furious – furiously intercepting me from plunging a metal cutlery piece into the toaster. She has sometimes stated how after that she never worked from the kitchen table again, which I suppose meant working, practising, making less, in all.

In Mead’s ‘Letters to Jocelyn’, the speaker remarks, ‘I admire the artistic drive of mothers’, and elsewhere in the same poem, ‘When I look at your “Portrait of a Mother” photos, I see that planning and spontaneity are two sides of the same coin. That the hard edge of creative life is care – ’. I think of this hard edge variously as strength and as barrier, resolve and obstruction. Mead’s poem progresses to suggest: ‘And perhaps this is the crux of the matter. It takes time to feed and dress and bathe and sing to sleep a small child. So we test our wills not against our children but against time, which grows as thin and expansive as a seafloor’.

I recall confidently assuming, with all the requisite magical thinking of pregnancy, that my daughter would slot into my life as it was or had been with relative ease. When she is months old I try bringing her to various literary events – some of which I am supposed to participate in, even facilitate – strapped into a wearable baby carrier. Unlike what I have observed of other people’s babies at such events, mine is not agreeable or accommodating but loud and furious, shouting across my divided attention.

Three, four years later at a friend’s poetry book launch my young child tears back and forth through the crowded bar. In one direction is the courtyard (a contained space, relatively secure); in the other, an exit onto Brunswick’s Sydney Road and its nighttime traffic. I am panicked each time I lose her for what can only be a few seconds – she is so fast, so fearless! – and my daughter thinks this is a riot, zipping between adult legs, ricocheting off couches, under barstools, eluding my view and physical reach.

Another poet at the launch asks if I have read a poem of Bernadette Mayer’s which refers to giving children chocolate at poetry readings. I later find it, ‘Chocolate Poetry Sonnet’.

Before another book launch I try to ply my daughter with the promise of ice cream to get us up Bourke Street from the train station by foot. She finishes a vast, generous bowl of chocolate gelato at a table outside Pellegrini’s Espresso Bar, then spends the duration of the launch wilful and unruly in her tangled hair and clashing prints (photos of this night show reds and greens, penguins and cheetahs) on the pavement in front of the packed-out venue.

In Chinese medicine, one of my academic work colleagues tells me, beside us on the sidewalk, ice cream is the worst: cold and wet. This confirms what I find in Mayer’s poem: ‘i deserved it / right?’  

Who would inflict a poetry reading on a young child / a young child on a poetry reading?

Popular wisdom – and presumably, common sense – suggests children and the solitary work of writing (and other forms of creative practice) are incompatible. ‘You won’t regret the love,’ a writer friend responds when I tell her I am pregnant, and in the subtext of this I perceive the unnamed, unnumbered regrets she assumes that I might have – or possible ambivalences or conflicts, at least.

In Little Labours Rivka Galchen observes, ‘Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions’. There is a sense, then, that babies and young children are out of place in literature. Yet there are of course also countless texts that explore and question these relationships – oppositional or otherwise – between caregiving and art, and particularly motherhood and creativity. Amy Brown lists just a few examples of writer-mothers in the detailed footnotes of her verse journal Neon Daze – ‘Ferrante, Cusk, Paley, Notley, Nelson – all of whom I recommend’.

And how stirring it is to find babies and children in literature behaving like babies and children, not as the precocious unreliable narrators so pervasive in literary fiction, but in all their fullness and complexity – present in clear and immediate focus rather than as peripheral or vague figures in the background. I am thrilled to read Kate Zambreno’s description in The Light Room of the violence, volatility and agency of young children: ‘Coming out, I see our children attacking each other in the distance. This is not atypical for them’. In Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘Prelude’ in Strange Bliss, there is the way the child Kezia ‘wasn’t crying […] as the tear dripped slowly down she caught it with a neat little whisk of her tongue and ate it before any of them had seen’.

Of course, I am taking in these representations through adult eyes. Louise Glück’s poem ‘Nostos’ proposes, ‘We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.’ Maybe, like Hustvedt’s two paintings, there are two childhoods, those experienced and those remembered and formed in literature and language? 

In Mead’s poetry, the divergent interests and attentions of the child and caregiver arise in ‘Fool at Perigee’: ‘Taking her hand in mine, I point to a patch / of high indigo. “See the moon next to that socket- / shaped cloud?” Shaking me off she skips ahead / in pink and aqua sneakers’.

LK Holt’s ‘Static Poem for a Two-Year-Old’ in Birth Plan involves a child’s viewpoint via second-person address. After introducing van Gogh as a point of reference, the poem’s second and third stanzas continue:

The moon appears too in Galchen’s work. ‘Mysteries of Taste’, for example, which catalogues the baby’s interests and preferences, and closes with the line, ‘Always she is the first to notice the moon’. It is through Brown’s Neon Daze that I learn how Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, ‘possessed no special desire to write children’s books’ and ‘wanted to be a serious modernist – a Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf’ but ‘believed she was stuck in childhood’.

While this might imply an opposition between (the texts and perspectives of) childhood and the works of ‘serious modernists’, it feels worth contemplating how the disruptive presence of motherhood, babies and children – present in the works of many – has the potential to unsettle language and perception in meaningful and arguably positive ways. Children might interrupt and disturb the focus of adults, but what new forms – of listening, receiving, and response – might emerge through these ruptures, giving rise to potential for dialogue and interaction?

Arguably, the first launch I attend with my daughter is my own, when I am eleven weeks pregnant with her and queasy with a mix of nerves and morning sickness I hope to keep hidden. Some weeks later I think the nausea has passed – I am entering my second trimester.

I attend another friend’s book launch, and as the proceedings commence, informally in the relatively small event space, I find myself standing very close to my author-friend while she reads from her new book. The space seems to grow unaccountably hot, and thick with what I sense is a bewilderingly strong smell of hairspray. My nausea returns, and I have to step out during the readings to throw up outside – as far from the venue as I can make it – into one of the gutters of the Abbotsford Convent courtyard. My partner brings me water to drink, and we splash what’s left in the bottle over the mess. I am convinced I’ve caused a disturbance, made a scene. Inside, after the launch proceedings, I apologise to the author, who assures me she noticed nothing, and explain the cause. Another poet is with us and, when I name ‘morning sickness’, exclaims excitedly: ‘What does that mean, what does it mean?’

I hardly knew/know. But I thereafter thought of this as my daughter’s first commentary on, or objection to, poetry. Years later, from toddlerhood onwards, she would voice her complaints more patently, precisely, in language.

I had thought to subtitle this essay ‘Poesies of Early Childhood’, but am not writing from the child’s I/eye, nor do I hope to ever speak for, or over, a child’s perspective. In Başkan’s poems the child’s voice is honoured – lively, immediate and compelling – even as the poems speak from a distinct adult ‘I’. In ‘Here Is The Shirt, (Get) Off My Back / Swimming In The Afternoon’:

Başkan’s poems include the child’s voice while refusing, refuting condescension or an othering that would frame the child’s view as cute and unsophisticated. The same poem relates an encounter between child and another adult:

The speaker of Başkan’s poem recounts: ‘the parent [...] smiles towards me as if to say cute / but i refuse to collaborate’. There is not an us/them, adult/child dynamic here but a collective, and one which resonates with the broader sensibilities of Başkan’s work, which invites us to ‘dream the world anew / start with our own material conditions’, asking/proposing ‘how to make a dignified life / lets pool money so we all get wet’.

In the poem ‘In Real Life’, the child’s voice and perspective animate and reimagine artistic biography through an engaging performance of life writing and revision:

However stylised the poem, Başkan’s lines hold the child’s voice on its own terms, it seems – preserving and elevating its expressive energy in translation from speech to poetic form. In this case Başkan does collaborate, but with rather than against – looking at and with rather than down on? – the child’s worldview.

Andrew Brooks’ poem ‘Year of the Ox’ similarly co-operates with the child’s voice, where the adult and child’s voices slide together in the poem’s lines, ‘as narrated by Arvind Rosa’, whose bio notes, at the time of writing and/or initial publication in October 2022, is four years old. The figures and voices of Toby Fitch’s daughters likewise glimmer throughout the poems of Sydney Spleen, obliquely and explicitly. In the book’s acknowledgements, Fitch thanks them ‘for seeing things I don’t see’ (conversely I think of Mead’s poem: the child refusing to see with the adult. Elsewhere, as in ‘Megafauna’, the child’s view and knowledge are protected from the recognition and grief of the adult speaker caregiving in the Anthropocene: ‘I am reading this book to you / and have failed to note the sixth mass extinction’).

In Mead’s practice, the child’s voice also features beyond The Infant Vine itself. I learn Mead’s daughter Clover read her own poem, ‘Roses’, at Mead’s Melbourne book launch, a poem included here in full (with Clover’s permission), and which I admire anew on every reading for its precise language and Gertrude Stein qualities – and on its own terms:

I have wanted to write in an ekphrastic way about my child’s artworks, even as I am aware of the pitfalls (sentimentality, indulgence). I start to record some of her titles when she is three, four years old: ‘Fox in the Cold Rain’; ‘The Singing Flower is Crying’. The latter is what she names a drawing she makes for a birthday card for one of her friends, and I enjoy its unexpected drama and emotional range, befitting of the age group she and her peers belong to then.

I have explored children’s artworks in other contexts, too, visiting Barbara Piscitelli’s children’s art archive at the State Library of Queensland for this ekphrastic purpose in late 2024. In an online video Piscitelli describes children’s artworks as producing ‘a special form of language’, which is mostly a language beyond or outside of language, one visual not textual, though some artworks do also contain written texts and narrative fragments, whether via transcription or the child’s own handwriting.

On one of my days at the SLQ my daughter, then five, visits and wants to stay with me, despite her dad and I offering incentives like ice cream and swimming back at our accommodation, or looking for lizards along the riverbank’s paths outside, to draw her away again. I assume her staying with me in the special collections space of the John Oxley Library is an impossibility. She is shiny and damp with sunscreen and the outside humidity, and I’m sure her moods and behaviours might be too volatile for this kind of library space, but the librarians are unexpectedly unfussed and welcoming; they supply her with grey lead pencils and pieces of yellow scrap paper (leftover hold slips), and she sits in quiet concentration to draw a row of smiling flowers, what she used to call singing flowers. Replying to a friend’s texts later, I say my time in the library is going well but I also feel a bit stupid, travelling interstate to spend a week with a children’s art archive when I have my own child artist subject, who’s vying for my (undivided) attention.

Once she starts school, her interest in writing and sounding out words increases. She cuts the shape of a cone out of coloured paper and a circle scoop to put in it, draws in sprinkles and labels it ‘IS QIME’. ‘hope you haf a good fusrus they’ she writes in her Father’s Day card. In her story, she writes: ‘The dog dint haf enreye fens it was sard’.

On our fridge are notes from her friends: ‘Der Ada / you are the best fend / I love you’

And from her, again to her dad: ‘Sancke you for ol the food.’

Language, sounds and words are fun again, again – as Başkan articulates. I find first her spoken language and drawings – her visual expressions – and then her early writing thrilling for the unexpected perceptions they offer, and their attention to sound, cadence, inflection. For all my enthusiasm and reverence for these forms, I remember Galchen’s title in Little Labours, ‘A reason to apologize to friends’, which concludes: ‘And […] I – I tell this anecdote to friends who will listen, as if it is interesting’.

Accordingly, I try to remember to temper how much and what of this material I share with other people (let alone place in an essay). Again via Little Labours, and perhaps also popular wisdom, the title ‘Other people’s babies’ is completed by the brief body of text: ‘Are often noted not to be of interest’. I was maybe seventeen when I heard an older man denigrate a woman he knew for talking too much about her pregnancy and anticipated baby: ‘For fuck’s sake, Rebecca, you’re not fucking Eve.’ For all the things I don’t remember about being six- or seventeen, these words and their sentiment have stuck with resounding clarity.

Children’s viewpoints and artistic expressions are of interest to researchers such as Piscitelli, of course. To ‘interesting’ I should add significant, important, in recognising children’s cultural participation and agency. Piscitelli’s collections comprise thousands of works on paper – mainly drawings and paintings – formed between 1986 and 2016 by children in Australia, Vietnam, and China, with the addition of a later series by children in Wuhan and Brisbane representing the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. These pandemic artworks, collected in ‘Series 16: Pandemic Picture Stories’, feature varied personifications of the virus and its valiant opponents, such as in the intricate and brightly coloured ‘Doctor, fighting!’, and ‘Dragon Ball Car in Fighting with COVID-19 pandemic’. Other titles include ‘Wuhan on the balcony’ and ‘Virus, go away’.

A transcribed artist’s statement for a delicate illustration in black pen titled ‘Work’ by Tiago Chirinos – four years old at the time of the work’s creation – reads in part: ‘This is me and I’m thinking about what this coronavirus looks like [...] The spiders are making my Dad happy. They don’t like people having coronavirus so they are giving him healthy food like vitamins.’ The work features a row of smiling spiders which evoke (to my adult’s eye) both the personified suns of children’s illustrations and the virus itself, as pictured in stock images – and even the corona virus/microbe emoji, with its spiky cilia.

‘Work 2’, by the same artist, is in orange watercolour paint, and comprises the weightier lines of a brush. This time the artist’s statement reads, ‘A man having coronavirus and the little boy is thinking about what the coronavirus looks like and that’s the sun.’ The different perspectives layered into these statements bring to mind the poems composed by the character Joana in Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (as translated by Alison Entrekin):

Apparent non-sequiturs in Chirinos’ statements – which also reference a party boat, ‘[s]moke coming out of the top’; ‘an orange that has coronavirus on it’ – splice together unexpected perspectives, offering new vantage points in ways resonant with Joana’s poem. In Lispector’s novel, Joana offers up ‘a longer one’: ‘I saw a little cloud / poor worm / I don’t think she saw it.’ Piscitelli’s archives might correspondingly invite viewers and readers to see and question ekphrastic and epistolary possibilities in their layers of perception and expression – and in the spaces between what is seen, known or given.

Engaging with Piscitelli’s archives – and particularly her collection of artworks from the series Children Have Rights: An exhibition of Children's Drawings and Paintings, 1995-1997, where each picture illustrates a child’s view of the articles that make up the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – I find it impossible not to think of the artworks, viewpoints and experiences of the children of Palestine. Some examples of Palestinian children’s artworks are collected in publications such as A Child's View from Gaza, a book published in 2012 which features drawings by Palestinian children who lived through Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza strip from 2008 to 2009. Notably, these artworks were censored by the Museum of Children’s Art in Oakland, California in 2011, context which informs the collection’s subtitle: Palestinian Children’s Art and the Fight Against Censorship.

As with A Child's View from Gaza, an exhibition of artwork by Palestinian children from two United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools was memorably removed from Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London in February 2023 after complaints concerning ‘safety’.

What could speak more potently to the power of children’s art than its censorship?

Present, ongoing examples of Palestinian children’s artmaking are often documented and shared through social media by the likes of Al Jawad camp, a free educational camp for displaced children in Gaza – the initiative of the journalist and educator Hadeel Al-Gharbawi. 

In online video footage from Gaza in 2021, a boy shares his dream of ‘having a car like Cristiano Ronaldo’s’. According to the English subtitles, he tells the filmmakers recording, ‘I’m a good football player.’ To his friends: ‘Go bring the ball so I can show him!’ ‘For real?’ ‘Yes.’ He is smiling, his demeanour and expression both humorous and serious.

In another video – a short clip attributed to Abdallah Al-Khatib’s Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege – a group of children rush into the frame and offer their dreams to the camera:

In a press conference in November 2023 a group of Palestinian children in Gaza address the cameras and speak in their not-native English, appealing to the world for protection: ‘We come now to shout and invite you to protect us […] we want to live as the other children live.’

This is all to say: it would impossible, or disingenuous and irresponsible, to try to write on ruptured language and representations of obstetric healthcare, pregnancy and childbirth, parenthood and caregiving, childhood and ecocide without speaking of Palestine – and listening to Palestinian voices.

It’s not my intention to suggest that children’s language is inherently poetic or that poetry is inherently childlike, but I am interested in the vitality and power of children’s voices and perceptions, and in the ways poetic language and form might honour and hold such expressions, beyond mimicry or appropriation.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson in her text Poetic Artifice, authored before her early death at twenty-seven, voices an understanding of poetry in which the poem ‘is always different from the utterances it includes or imitates; if it were not different there would be no point in setting down these utterances or writing these sentences as a poem’. The Turkish American translator and poetry scholar Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests, ‘Poetry is a rhythmic beat between sense and nonsense’, and I think of other compelling and generative dualities: imaginary/real of Marianne Moore’s ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’; poet and scholar David McCooey’s recognition of poetry’s ‘dialectic between knowing and not knowing’.

For Galchen, ‘Only the supernatural gets the actual’:

Metonymically attending to this supernatural encounter and presence, Galchen refers to her baby as a puma; Brown, in Neon Daze, describes a similar alteration of states: ‘The baby is turning into a cat or a pig / or a lamb and I am turning into a baby’; ‘I confuse you with the subject of / the podcast. Or with me. One of us is like / Virginia [Woolf] and knowing this causes the tears / again’.

Mead’s poems too enact these kinds of transformations, often into fierce and dangerous bodies: a bear, via simile, ‘turning her huge velvety head to the distant twitch of a rabbit’s ears’ in ‘So What’s Your Ideal Dinner Party’; an alligator, in the shape poem ‘Alligator’, who ‘would not hesitate to snatch / those junk birds out of the / warm sky’ after a daycare educator’s email relays news of a ‘Drone over /           toddler yard’; a human woman transfigured – possibly by zoomorphic infection? ‘You know the disease is in you by the afternoon’ – into a bonnethead shark in ‘Bonnethead’:

If there is something other, strange or supernatural, in the experience of childbirth and caring for a baby, there is also something powerfully different about the language of poetry, as Forrest-Thomson attests in Poetic Artifice: ‘Every reader knows that poetry is different and that in its difference lies the source of its power’. In ‘What to Forget When You’re Expecting’ Mead suggests ‘a poem is enough’: ‘This and your mother’s living ghost will cleave / a space for nuance, air enough to breathe’.

This space for nuance – and for the inexplicable, unapologetic difference Forrest-Thomson recognises in poetic form and language – might bring us to questions of what, drawing from Mead’s allusive title, there is to be gained by forgetting to expect. How might spaces and modes of poetry allow for new ways of receiving and interacting with young children’s views and voices?