Author Interview: Mark Cox

Welcome to TRB Lounge. Today, I’d like to welcome the author of Knowing – Mark Cox, for an author interview with The Reading Bud.

About The Author

Mark Cox has authored six other volumes of poetry, the most recent being Readiness (2018) and Sorrow Bread: Poems 1984-2015 (2017). He has a forty-year history of publication in prominent magazines and his honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, and The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington and teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Program.

You can find author Cox here:
Amazon | Bookshop

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Interview

Welcome to TRB! In addition to your formal bio, could you share a deeper, more personal insight into your life that influences your poetry?

When I was compiling my selected and new poems, Sorrow Bread, I very much had my three children in mind. I felt that I was leaving them a record of exactly who their father was. I feel the same way about many of the poems in Knowing. “Gasoline” is a complex poem that offers a perspective on the divorce that helped shape them. The poems that reference them like “The Song that Never Ends” and “Wonderbread” are particularly dear to my heart.

Beyond the general overview, could you delve into the themes, emotions, or experiences that inspired your latest collection of poems?

Knowing, at its core, is about living comfortably with three facts we know for sure. That is, living involves loss, insists on change and ends in death. These constants give value to all human relationships, be they with other people or matters of the spirit. In this sense, the book is as much about not knowing as it is about knowing

Poetry often reflects deep personal feelings or insights. What specific emotions or experiences drove you to write the poems in your book?

Life is chock full of mistakes, missteps, embarrassments and regrets, yes? If you are not being honest about them, you are not embracing and encountering your whole self with your art. Art is very much a revelation of self, even when art seems impersonal or denies it. I have done a lot of things that I am ashamed of; being honest with myself about them is a prerequisite for change and growth. We have to come to terms with our failings if we want to approach forgiveness and some semblance of inner peace.

Many poets have a defining moment or influence that shapes their work. Can you describe what sparked your journey into poetry?

I became a poet accidentally, really. In sixth or seventh grade I had a teacher named Irma Schiele who saw some talent in me after doing a class metaphor clustering exercise. She had me stay after class and told me to go home, write a poem and have it on her desk in the morning. I did that. She marked it with an A in red ink and said write me another one. That was perhaps 55 years ago and I have just kept at it. There were times when I concentrated on song lyrics or prose, but I have been writing poetry since that day in grade school.

From initial inspiration to the published collection, how long was your creative process for this book of poetry?

Although there are some older poems in it, most of the book was written in a five year period between the publication of Readiness and Knowing. That’s probably a constant for me in terms of time. It takes between four and five years for a book to take shape. I revisit and revise heavily.

While your primary focus is poetry, have you ever considered or dabbled in other literary forms, like fiction or non-fiction?

I have written short stories and screenplays. Many of the prose pieces in my poetry books are really flash fiction or flash memoir. Narrative comes naturally to me. When I start writing something I don’t really know what shape it will ultimately take. The work has to tell me that over time.

Can you recall a defining moment when you realised you were meant to be a poet? Was this path a natural calling or one filled with obstacles?

I will answer this with a poem from my book Readiness:

Night Sky above Bassae

That sky is a kind of book with black pages. Then stars appear, cluster by cluster, syllables first, then whole sentences, shivering faintly in the frost of their fire. A passage it has taken thirty-five years to translate—still on my back, still clasping the thin wool blanket to my throat, the Greek ruins I lie within, unguarded, fenceless, bordered only by their own felled walls. To sleep on stone is to enter it. To be stilled by history is to age. What you are becomes who you are. Carbons, calcium, water, salt— basic compounds, simple chains loosing into… what? Desire? Design?

When the bus returns, as one does each morning, to complete its mountain route up or down, as may be the case—when that bus stops, the young man I was will step up into it and its patrons, feel his clothing rubbed against others’, the smell of simple breakfasts and tobacco and Turkish coffee on their breaths. He will hear the chickens squawking from their woven cages. And I will have reentered the story of the living, once again a paying passenger, jolted along, vaguely claustrophobic, but now a poet, more or less.

Describe your poetic process. Do you follow specific routines or practices that help you capture your thoughts and emotions effectively?

I imagine the creative process as an infinite spectrum of processes between two theoretical poles: the mysterious internal and the factually known external. For comprehension’s sake, I divide this continuum into three stages: Vision; RE Vision; and Revision. During the first stage, I work intuitively and naturally, getting as much on paper as possible. During this stage I often work in prose and I may write two or more pages before one element (image, word, sound, pattern, line) emerges from the boil. In the second stage selection begins, partially conscious but mainly intuitive. During this stage, I trust the flow, yet begin to ask questions about the “photo” that’s evolving within the developing fluid. The lines might start to break here. A baseline might emerge. The stanzaic form might begin to materialize. The shape of the poem’s argument and experience begins to appear. At stage three, the hard questions about purpose and craft begin. How can I use this poem to understand myself and my world? Am I challenging my own ideas and temperament? What would the poem be like if I did it differently than this? During this stage the poem is more fully outside of me, an object, and I try to ignore the intense, personal investment I have in it. I am more like a mechanic fine tuning an engine. Obviously, in the process I also move between these stages fluidly and in different orders.

Aside from poetry, do you engage in other professions or hobbies that influence or enrich your writing?

I would just encourage writers to see themselves as artists and as part of that larger world of creative exploration and expression. Engage all the other arts seriously and learn what you can from them. Within writing, this is true of genre, as well. Don’t limit your exposure to poetry alone. Engage prose of all kinds as both a reader and practitioner.

Considering the themes in your poetry, can you recommend a few other poets or poetry collections that resonate with similar sentiments?

I’ll take advantage of this moment to list some poets who I think are under-recognized. Most of them have passed now: Jack Myers, Michael Van Walleghen, Morton Marcus, Stephen Berg, Claudia Emerson, Laura Kasischke, William Hathaway.

In the world of poetry, who are the authors or works that have significantly shaped your style or thinking?

There are too many to list. I feel I have been influenced by everything I’ve ever read, in one way or another. The English Romantics were important to me in the early years. Certainly, the Confessional poets, Lowell and Sexton in particular. Some poets you might not expect, like Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers and Conrad Aiken. Stephen Berg’s poems struck a chord in me. They all trained my ear in lyrical and conversational music. They taught me to be ambitious in my approach to the art of poetry.

Poets often speak of facing creative blocks. Do you encounter these, and if so, how do you overcome them?

There are no blocks if you learn to accept failure and understand that it is the ongoing process of failing that makes a few limited successes possible. You have to be able to undertake and enjoy the process of writing without imposing judgment too early in that process.

Poetry can be a delicate balance of personal expression and universal appeal. How do you navigate this in your writing?

Well, accessibility has always been important to me. I always wanted the poems to be approachable, something that people could respond to without having to be highly educated in terms of what poetry is and how it functions. The struggle is always between this wrestling that we do between artfulness and naturalness. As Lorca said, between discipline and passion. When I came up, it was common to strive for art that seemed as if it just happened organically.  As if it was not a made thing. You esteemed the re-enactment of experience over intellectual contrivance. So even those things that are the most colloquial or the most casual, the most conversational, might be things that you spent hours considering, in terms of their thematic shape, in terms of the nuances of the voice, or the kind of music that you were trying to create. But you wanted it to read as if it was very, very natural. This way of thinking about style very much influences content. It privileges personal, human, often quotidian, subject matter.

Poetry sometimes touches on sensitive or controversial subjects. How do you address potential criticism or differing interpretations from your readers?

I don’t feel it is my job to teach an audience something. I have no expectations of them. It is my job to share my experience, my psychic truth, as best I can with the hope that others might find some value in it. Poetry accomplishes varied things. It connects, it consoles, it challenges, it provokes, and so on. I guess my hope is that my poems connect with readers on the basic human level, making my perspectives known.

For aspiring poets, what essential advice would you offer for their journey into the world of poetry writing?

We talk a lot about finding our voices, our authenticity. But I think the important thing for poets is to worry about listening as opposed to speaking. We have to listen to, and trust, our inner voice, pay attention to the ways in which we perceive and experience the world. We need to discover innate patterns, recognize them as such, then be able to question and alter those filters for personal and poetic evolution. Being a poet is a way of life, a way of being in, and interacting with, the world.

Thank you, author Cox, for taking the time to answer our questions and for all your insightful and interesting answers!

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About the Book

Tour Schedule:

• June 13: The Book Lover’s Boudoir (review)
• June 18: Lavender Orchids (review)
• June 20: Lavender Orchids (interview)
• June 26: Wall-to-Wall Books (review)
• July 1: Ashley’s Books (Instagram review)
• July 2: Anthony Avina’s blog (review)
• July 9: Anthony Avina’s blog (interview)
• July 16: The Reading Bud (review)
• July 18: The Reading Bud (interview)
• July 24: Review Tales (review)
• July 30: Savvy Verse & Wit (review)
• Aug. 9: True Book Addict (Review)
• Aug. 22: The Book Connection (Review)

Follow the tour with the hashtag #KnowingPoems

If you are an author and wish to be featured as our guest or if you are a publicist and want to get your author featured on TRB, then please get in touch directly by e-mail at thereadingbud@gmail.com