Reviewed by Peter Mladinic
Knowing
by Mark Cox
Press 53, April 2024, $17.95, Paperback, 98 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1950413799
William Carlos Williams said “No ideas but in things.” Knowing, a book of lyrics and prose poems, is rich in imagery and rife with ideas. If Williams and Wallace Stevens dominated the landscape of American poetry in early twentieth century, poets Philip Levine, Thomas Lux, and Tony Hoagland, referenced in Knowing, made their mark in the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. Perhaps all of the aforementioned influenced the distinct voice in Knowing, a voice that probes and wonders, laments and celebrates. Three central ideas are: The past is good, the present is better; fate coexists with human will; and time is unstoppable, art stops time.
The past is good, the present is better, and memory is a bridge between the two. The last two poems in Knowing cite a fear common to people as they age, Alzheimer’s, a fear of forgetting. Cox doesn’t dwell on it. Rather, knowing nothing surpasses being, he celebrates being here. Memory assuages, and memory invites perplexity. “I have forgotten more than I remember,” says the speaker in “The Remnants.” Reflecting on marriage and divorce in “Gasoline,” he says, “After, you handle intimacy as if it were a dangerous fluid. You use approved containers. You don’t smoke in the same room.” In “Hindsight” reflection is minced with regret. “I did my growing up with someone else.” And in “Letter to Hoagland and Rivard from Wichita, KS, 5/3/98” the bitter sweetness of the past and the present is evoked in:
Gentlemen, I hear your tireless singing out there above the finely tuned four-barrel of our generation; I envy how you’ve stripped the insulated wires to an ignition we weren’t given keys for. I know the crack in your windshield runs clear through the whole complacent country.
Yet I’m strangely at peace now, writing rarely, lighting the small votive candles of my children, watching them flicker against their dim rooms, then flare into laughter and speech.
“Leftovers” is set in November, 1964. Ida Knudson is the poet’s grandmother. “She’s never had running water; she pumps what she needs from their well in the yard. Here at the door, she mostly appears as some wan spirit evanescing in the background…” Evanescence is key. Time is fleeting, change constant. The past is good, the present is better.
Choice is significant, as is the lack of choice. Fate coexists with human will. The impetus for “True North” is a memory of putting out a cigarette in a holy water font at a church wedding. “
“I can see it floating there, turning a little from side to side, like a compass needle coming to true north, the paper’s glue starting to give way, flecks of tobacco bobbing at the uncharred end.”
He comments on the bride and groom, whose marriage “lasted 16 years,” and of his own fate: “I quit smoking…And serious drinking. And going to church too.” In the following poem “Regret Au Gratin, Longing Pie” he says “choose again who you are to be…” In “Shelter,” a memory of driving in a snow storm, “To exist as something more than a speck of snow seems a miracle.” And in “All Right” a childhood memory of grief-stricken adults, “To live is to leave, the boy thinks; we make our own way, but lose something always and wherever we go.” Perhaps it was this boy’s fate, a few years later, in “Coming of Age,” to paint water towers on a college campus in Connecticut with Lonnie Parker, a character evoked with verisimilitude, in all his flawed, wonderful complexity. “Silver Springs, set in Florida, years earlier, is about a family vacation. There’s a vivid scene of being on the water in a glass-bottom boat, seeing “Beneath the water…exotic dioramas of majestic shipwrecks, mermaids, and treasure chests.” But what of people not on the boat, people seen from afar on the journey to Silver Springs?
“People want things right away, his dad says, and make poor decisions. They should be saving for important things and investing in their future; instead, they spend on immediate whims that make them happy. Take beer and cigarettes, for instance. People don’t need those to live. But somehow, the boy understands they do—just as he needs to look at his baseball cards before he goes to sleep.”
Just as art exists in the dioramas at Silver Springs, it thrives in museums, in churches, and parks. To the perceiver, as to the creator, art stops time. Art is part of life, but often an imitation of life. Outside, or apart from day-to-day reality. Art evokes wonder. “Hand,” a poem about Rodin’s sculpture begins:
Predisposition renders
what I think I know,
but whether this hand
is poised to grasp
or has just let go,
matters much less
than what extends away.
Further into the poem, the speaker says,
So many ways to take this hand.
To ask who it is, then,
is to reveal who you are;
to expose set dualities
and psychic scars.
And the speaker concludes:
What is projected, ultimately,
in this charged void of space,
are our own fragile bodies
and their fleeting embrace.
Art imitates life. In “Docent” the speaker alludes to another artist, the nineteenth century German poet Rilke. “Rilke never got over how alive and wet marble looks…” “For Phil Levine” is about life and art, in his poems Levine’s “insistence on saving every name of the lost.” In “Primary Color” “Magnificent thing, the making of art. A noble search for accuracy, truth, beauty and meaning within our daily mysteries.” Art both imitates and is life. In moments of our choosing or in moments of sheer circumstance the two converge. “Knowing” begins “There beyond the picture window, framed by gold curtains, the forest could be on a museum wall.” And ends, “How still it all is, so utterly clear. Then one bright leaf lets go and changes everything.”
Knowing eases and unsettles, as a good book should. It’s a human book, with no trace of sentimentality. Perhaps its abiding theme is Carpe Diem (seize the day). Mark Cox has done just that in his manipulation of language. He has wrought numerous memorable poems. The frustration of a review is one can’t talk about everything one might like to talk about. The poems in Knowing speak for themselves. The best are unforgettable.
About the reviewer: Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, House Sitting, is available from the Anxiety Press.An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.