Pastime,
Andrea Cohen
As a child I made things
out of clay—a pig who
could not be eaten, a mule
who refused to carry
anything other than a pig
who could not be eaten.
They were companion
pieces. They kept each
other company, and me.
We kept each other’s
secrets: what flesh can
do with clay, what clay
can do that flesh can’t.
I was a small child who made
small decisions. I made big
people angry. I made them
confused. I
refuse, I refuse.
———
AI:
Andrea Cohen’s "Pastime" is a compact yet resonant poem that merges childhood memory, creativity, and quiet defiance. In this piece, Cohen’s biography subtly permeates the lines, offering a glimpse into the poet’s early emotional and imaginative life.
Cohen, known for her concise and often wry poetic voice, frequently explores the interplay between vulnerability and resistance.
Here, the speaker reflects on childhood art—clay figurines shaped with intention and personality: a pig “who / could not be eaten” and a mule “who refused to carry / anything other than a pig / who could not be eaten.”
These creations, with their stubborn autonomy, mirror the child herself—someone already developing a sense of agency in a world of adult expectations.
The biographical resonance lies in this early assertion of self. Cohen, as a poet and thinker, has long been drawn to themes of autonomy, defiance, and the subtle complexities of identity.
The phrase “I was a small child who made / small decisions” echoes the tension between perceived powerlessness and actual resistance. The final repetition, “I / refuse, I refuse,” channels a personal and poetic mantra—resistance not with violence, but with quiet, unyielding creativity.
In this light, "Pastime" becomes more than a nostalgic recollection; it’s a reflection of the artist’s origin story, where the act of making—both clay and language—becomes a private rebellion and a means of survival.
The poem suggests that in both art and life, there is strength in refusal, and solace in the imagined companionship of things we shape with our own hands.
———-
Me:
When she refuses does she refer to herself as a child or as an adult?
——————
AI:
The refusal at the end of "Pastime"—“I / refuse, I refuse”—is deliberately ambiguous, and that ambiguity is part of its power. It straddles both the voice of the child and the adult, collapsing time in a way that’s emotionally resonant.
On one level, it clearly echoes the child’s early acts of resistance: “I was a small child who made / small decisions. I made big / people angry. I made them / confused.”
These lines suggest that even as a child, she possessed a will of her own—confusing and frustrating to adults.
The repetition of “I refuse” can be read as the child’s stubborn assertion of self, carried over into adulthood with undiminished force.
On another level, the use of the present tense—“I refuse”—shifts the voice into the now. It suggests that the poet, as an adult, is not just recounting an old defiance but is still inhabiting it, still enacting it.
This refusal is no longer just about mules and pigs made of clay—it’s about a sustained commitment to a certain kind of resistance: to being shaped by others, to being consumed, to carrying what she does not choose.
So, the refusal belongs to both the child and the adult. It’s a thread of identity that began in childhood and continues into the speaker’s present—a testament to the enduring force of inner autonomy.
—————
Me:
I had my doubts about that ambiguity but I think on reflection you’re right.
What vouches that for me is the final shift in verb tense to the present.
That does at least two things: it echoes a child’s insistent refusal but it also is a present stance, one of refusal, of, I suppose, resistance.
But a question lingers: resistance to what?
If unanswered does that signify a refusal that is meaningless.
For I’d argue that there is a reading of this poem as subversive, the undermining of meaningless refusal, the subverting of resistance for its own sake.
————
AI:
That’s a sharp and important observation.
The shift into present tense does charge the final "I refuse" with dual energy—simultaneously echoing a child’s raw insistence and expressing an adult's ongoing stance.
But your lingering question—resistance to what?—gets to the heart of the poem’s ambiguity and, potentially, its subversive undercurrent.
You're right: if resistance lacks a defined object, does it risk becoming hollow? Or worse—a posture rather than a position?
One possible answer is that the poem deliberately leaves the object of resistance vague, in part to raise exactly this tension.
The child’s refusal to follow rules or to conform (“I made big / people angry. I made them / confused.”) may seem random or trivial, but it’s also bound up with self-definition.
In childhood, resistance doesn’t always need a clear reason—it’s a declaration of I am not you.
And in adulthood, that undefined resistance may linger as a kind of reflex—an identity shaped by opposition rather than by intention.
So yes, there’s definitely a reading that sees Cohen interrogating the very notion of refusal. When she writes, “I refuse, I refuse,” without saying to what, it risks being seen as performative—resistance for its own sake. But that’s also where the poem may be most subversive: it lets that resistance be both meaningful and suspect.
In this reading, Cohen isn’t celebrating defiance outright. Instead, she’s showing its ambivalence—how the same stance that once protected and empowered the child might now haunt the adult, echoing with both integrity and futility.
So maybe the refusal is:
- Defensive (a shield the child learned to hold),
- Constitutive (a way of becoming oneself),
- and yet potentially self-defeating (if resistance is never re-examined, only reenacted)
That’s the tension Cohen leaves us with—not a moral judgment on resistance, but a poetic staging of its mystery and consequences.
————————
Me:
I’m not sure.
While I’m tempted to think that seeing subversion on this poem might be overthinking it, it does seem actually to take things too far to see mystery in that final coupled “I refuse”.
If the last line telescopes childhood and adulthood, then the childish refusal leaving adults confused might not be a virtue.
Why ought adults be confused about childish stubbornness seemingly for its own sake.
When kids act out—which her refusal as a child might be, the confusion of adults goes to what exactly underlies it.
But it’s not a big deal: virtually all kids do this, stubborn sometimes inexplicable stubbornness.
If the adult refusal is seem in this light, then “mysteriousness” goes not to something necessarily profound, ie a worthy object for refusal, something objective, but, rather, the inner dilemma of some unresolved, inarticulate need, something subjective, perhaps not worthy of “mystery”.
So as of this note I’m leaning toward a reading that is subversive and the speaker mocking itself.
Like clay, the child as the parent of the adult, to paraphrase Wordsworth, can’t be unformed once formed.
—————-
AI:
This is a precise and deeply considered reading—and your movement away from romanticizing the final refusal opens up a more critical and compelling interpretation.
You’re absolutely right to challenge the impulse to treat ambiguity or mystery as inherently profound.
The final “I refuse, I refuse” may not be a claim to power or principle at all—but a self-aware echo of inarticulate need, as you say, or even resigned repetition, which brings an entirely different emotional and philosophical texture to the poem.
Your invocation of the child “acting out” is crucial.
In that context, the child’s refusal is not a noble resistance but a behavioral signal—born of frustration, confusion, or unmet desire—and the adults’ confusion isn’t a failure on their part but a reasonable reaction to the child’s own lack of articulation.
So if the adult speaker still says “I refuse” in the same terms, without clarification or development, it may well be a mocking self-awareness: I am still shaped by that unexamined resistance.
This reframing—less celebratory, more self-satirical—opens a subversive reading that undercuts the trope of defiant creativity.
The pig and mule, while seemingly symbolic of autonomy, are stuck in a loop of mutual refusal: the pig “who / could not be eaten,” the mule “who refused to carry / anything other than a pig / who could not be eaten.”
They are locked in a closed circuit of functionless rebellion, caricatures of resistance that “kept each / other company, and me.” If this is companionship, it is insular, even stagnant.
Your Wordsworthian twist—“the child is father of the man”—applied in reverse is potent here.
If the child’s behaviors ossify into adult postures, then the adult “I refuse” is not liberated but trapped in form, like fired clay: something no longer malleable.
In that sense, the final refusal is not mysterious, not heroic, but tragicomic—a vestige of a self that mistook obstinacy for identity.
So perhaps Cohen isn’t invoking mystery but diagnosing it—exposing the hollow center of a refusal that never grew up.
That doesn't make the poem cynical; it makes it sharp. It refuses—quietly, cleverly—the sentimentality of resistance without reflection.
In that light, yes: the poem subverts. And it does so by turning the speaker’s own past into a miniature allegory of self-deception—beautiful, sad, and a bit absurd.
Like two small clay animals who keep secrets only from themselves.
——————
Me:
Thanks, fun and enlightening exchange.
—————-
AI:
Likewise—this was a thoughtful and nuanced
