Mark Cox (1956, East St. Louis,
Illinois) teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington. His honors
include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, The Society
of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, and numerous fellowships. During Summer 2000, he served
as the 24th Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place, Robert Frost's family home, in
Franconia, New Hampshire. His books include Smoulder (David R. Godine, 1989), Thirty-seven
Years from the Stone (Pitt Poetry Series, 1998), and Natural Causes (Pitt
Poetry Series, 2004). He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife, Karin, and
their three children.Statement:
From my perspective, my body of work is really one long poem. A kind of record of my being in time. Sometimes I will approach that very lyrically, trying to absorb and translate the sub-verbal feelings of a moment in time; other times I find myself pinning that moment to a more narrative forensic bulletin board, trying to understand its causal relationships. Both modes are important to me, parts of who I am, as is a sweeping range of tone and diction. I worked for a decade as a bridge painter before I started teaching, and that definitely affected my stance toward formality in language and sentence structure. Though lately I’ve certainly gotten quieter and unashamedly domestic. Ultimately, on my good days, I try not to limit myself, to take risks, to love the writing (living) process more than what gets written. On my good days, a voice occasionally coalesces for me and I write it down.
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