Recently, our school announced that poet Mark Cox would be added to its “Wall of Fame.” To think that an award-winning poet (Cox won the Whiting Award and the Pushcart Prize) walked the halls of our campus (okay—we’ve built a new facility since his days in high school) is pretty amazing. I thought that I should read some of Cox’s poetry, so I picked up his 1998 collection, Thirty-Seven Years from the Stone.
I know that poetry isn’t everyone’s idea of pleasure reading, so let me just share a few passages that I marked while I was reading.
from “Get Me Again”
And don’t we all know what’s going to happen?
And aren’t we surprised when it does?
from “Like a Simile”
(which is written as line after line of simile)
Fell into bed like a tree
slept like boiling water
got up from bed like a camel
and showered like a tin roof…
from “Still Life with Motion”
The monoliths of our time are billboards,
our main streets—thruways.
We move and move,
we rent U-Hauls and our Ryders,
we shift and pack and lift,
we dolly, we cart, and still
the limp duffle bags of despair
the Samsonite pullmans of delusion
arrive before us, remain with us.
from “A Stone”
There is too much weight to carry and not
go down from futures we could not have imagined into
pasts we didn’t really live.
from “Grain”
(in which the author imagines his death
and the difficulty of leaving his wife)
I will not want to leave my shirts emptied
over the backs of chairs,
I will not want to leave my toothbrush
leaning dry against yours,
I will have to be taken from you, love,
carried off by strong men
whose fathers sowed the grain fields around me,
it will take three of them, love,
I will remain so heavy with need for you…
Cox’s poetry is thick, dense, literary. If you make the effort, though, you’ll discover some nuggets like those above. If you like poetry that’s a little more accessible, try Ted Kooser’s excellent Delights and Shadows or Billy Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room. (Both Kooser and Collins are former U.S. poets laureate.)
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