Seuss's 'Cowpunk' and Lux's 'Ode to What I Have Forgotten'
Nov 10, 2025
Note: I began this last week and, in true form, finished most of in it a burst, intended to come back and finish it, then promptly forgot about it. Instead of leaving it completely, I've tacked on a breezy ending and am posting it swiftly, with little clean-up. I should do more of this.
Of a number of excellent poems I read recently, one really floored me: Diane Seuss, "Cowpunk." There is a whole world of experience in that poem. It reads very poised yet raw, polished but somehow conversational.
When I encounter things that I find particularly effective, especially of a literary/artistic nature, I have been trying to ask, with more intention: How does it work? Why so powerful?
So I'll start with the opening lines:
Do you think your suffering is exceptional?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The times are strange, no doubt.
How could you not read on? But let's stop for a moment and linger. We open with a question, directed at you, the reader. Questions directed to you, the reader, are a pretty powerful poetic device. Like instructions to the reader, they are invitations. They ask you to step into the poem. And it's pretty hard to resist answering them, if only with your attention.
And because of the weirdness of text - its potential resistance to the rumored ephemerality of time - I also wonder: from when is this question being asked? Which of course, is here and now. Which might return me to the question: who is asking the questions? Questions of this sort, when asked from the text of a poem, also make me ask: who is asking this question? Who is asking me this question?
These lines remind me of the famous Baldwin quote about the uniqueness (or not) of pain and suffering:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
After reading this poem a few times, I sense another aspect of uncertainty in these opening lines. It does not ask: Is your suffering exceptional? But instead, Do you think your suffering is exceptional? I am stuck on that, the do you think. But in everyday speech, we use do you think regularly as a shorthand all the time. Isn't Do you think we'll make it to the movie in time? shorthand for Will we make it in time? Still, I'm not sure it is over-interpreting to hover over the do you think, to wonder if we might read it with a different emphasis: do you think your suffering is exceptional?
I don't think Baldwin is dismissing the uniqueness of one's pain but rather recognizing it as a form of connection to others, amidst a comment on the role that art plays in illuminating that connection. Regardless, Baldwin sounds more decisive here than Seuss, and I like the openness, even ambiguity that she brings to her question.
Maybe. Maybe not.
From that moment of ambiguity, the poem turns more personal and inward. Describing the sense of fearlessness with which the narrator once took on life, when they thought life had taken all they had to give, they report learning that they had more to give, more to be taken:
Of course, there is more to take.
I’m copious and so are you.
My pipe. My roses. My stubborn
mule. My burbling
brook which must be traversed
to get to the island of blue lawn chairs.
And before we can even stop to ask, What are these things?, we are swept into a current of memory, where images and fragments hint at scenes heavier and darker. There is trauma here, also fuzzy but palpable. The fuzziness is confusing to us, as readers -- but I imagine it was confusing, too, to the young narrator, to be faced with a young high school drama teacher's marriage proposal. They are somehow rendered both crisp yet opaque, the way our memories of meaningful moments can seem both immediate and fuzzy.
I want to jump ahead to the closing stanza, which reads like a litany of the "more" that could be taken, and was:
Jim was fired, and died.
Petra’s dead.
The berry bushes are a dream.
The island is a pipe dream.
The pipe is a hallucination. Still, I’m copious, and so are you.
Wait -- what was that pipe to begin with? Or the mule? The island?
Those first two lines are fairly concrete, but what of the berry bushes, the island (of blue lawn chairs), the pipe? Upon reading this a few times through, I struggled to figure out what those images were doing in relation to the rest of the poem.
A digression: in a poetry group I've been spending time with, we recently read Thomas Lux's "Ode to What I Have Forgotten," a beautiful poem with a similar arc: though it does not start with such a provocation, it does start from a place of seeming joy that is fairly concrete, easy to imagine and understand, the memory of a loved one:
The joy-face of Larry Levis, age twenty-seven, in a bare apartment; lightening joy over a word game, blind joy, unbroken joy over a word game with friends
But true to the poem's title, Lux starts to work his way from this memory to that which "I have forgotten," starting with recognizing that his memory is faulty to begin with:
I've half-forgotten, I possess only a frame and a few details: my friend,
installing carpet, stapled his thumb to a stair. As soon as he ripped it free
he punched me in the face.
And almost as though we are moving outward (or inward?), across rings of more and more forgetting, he move into murkier and murkier territory. "Cloudy" is the narrator's memory of his days in the Midwest, though what he shares is quite clear, and then it's a long chain of forgots:
I forgot when I was so hungry my parrot looked nervous. I forgot, disgracefully, the rachitic and the dejugulated. I've forgotten electric fences, with wires
to pass through, without touching. I forgot I owned a knife that wouldn't sleep,
a rifle almost as tall as me.
There are also memories "repressed" and "suppressed," there is "misremembering," and assertions that "I don't recall." These are all paired with memories (or mis-memories? unmemories?) that are clear as images yet, presented without context or elaboration, almost frustratingly opaque in meaning. In the passage above, no explanation of who is rachitic and dejugulated is given, nor where these electric fences are, or in what context such weapons were present -- and those sorts of images recur through the remainder of the poem.
I am thinking of Lux's poem, in relation to "Cowpunk," because both poems, as they move inward, simultaneously become less accessible in their meaning yet no less provocative or emotive. These aren't isolated impressionistic images; they hint at stories that we don't quite know. Yet we don't need to know them to get catch a glimpse of them and, presented together, they do tremendous work, even if it's not clear what that work finally is.
(Is there a parallel between Lux's playing with forgetting/memory and Seuss's dream/pipe dream/hallucination? Both seem to hinge on memory and recollection, in any case.)
There is a small part of me that wants to hate the closing line of "Cowpunk." Everyone, now, reminds us that they contain multitudes. I love Whitman with all my heart and soul but I would kind of like that line to be forgotten for a bit, so it can be reclaimed from the battering that comes with being made ubiquitous. "I'm copious" has a bit of that feel, no?
But every time I read the poem, I wonder more about that line.
Still, I’m copious, and so are you.
What is that "still," exactly? Is it loud or soft? I can hear it as defiance, but tilt the ear and it almost sounds desperate, less hopeful and more hoping.
Regardless, both poems find the copious in memory and the psyche, perhaps even moreso in its murkiest corners than in the parts that are more visible, more accessible. There is always more, there, to be taken.[1]
Which perhaps means there is always more there, too, to give.
"Life is one long, fragmented, murky episode," writes Carolyn Kizer in her "Thwarted: After Tu Fu.". Is this a translation? A paraphrase? Who is speaking? And why, when I read the opening line -- Thwarted, old friend! We have been baulked again. -- why do I feel as though they are speaking to me, and calling me old friend? ↩︎