Katie Ford

- Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts, United States of America -

Katie Ford’s most recent book is If You Have to Go, published by Graywolf Press. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for her third book, Blood Lyrics. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside. Please visit www.fordkatie.com. 

 

Katie Ford (Princeton University - Lewis Center for the Arts - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.


A poet and professor, Ford has studied English, poetry, and theology at Whitman College, the University of Iowa, and Harvard University, respectively. She has authored the collections Deposition (2002) and Colosseum (2008), and the chapbook Storm (2007). Ford was a resident of New Orleans from 2003 to 2006. She now lives in Philadelphia with her husband, novelist Josh Emmons, and their daughter. She is working on a third collection of poetry and teaching at Franklin & Marshall College.

 

STATEMENT

I write from a country of natural beauty and human horrors, a country of canyons and electric cities, of floods and slums. My country exports medicine, computers, torture and corn. My country, more often than not, disturbs me, and insofar as I am an American poet who often writes from this particular source of disturbance, I am a political poet. Political poetry, despite its fraught and diminished reputation, is simply poetry concerned with citizens living under a government in a particular moment. When references to a government enter a poem, so do issues of power, power that is shaped, for better or worse, by human folly and human good. This power doesn’t simply hover over citizens as an abstract, far-off notion. Such power decides—sometimes blatantly, sometimes quietly—if and how citizens survive. Political poetry, then, is nothing less than poetry about life and death.

 

Living in New Orleans before and just after Hurricane Katrina made the American government and its failure to protect and aid its citizens an overwhelming and inescapable fact pressing on my mind. To be a New Orleans citizen was to wake up eight months after Katrina to news of skeletons found beneath the ruins of wasted shacks in the Lower 9th Ward. It was to hear that suicide rates had quickly tripled and that depression was considered an epidemic in the city. Respiratory and digestive illnesses multiplied as mold grew like grass inside of abandoned houses. Later, snakes infested some neighborhoods. Three doors down, a neighbor walked onto her porch after she had slit her wrists. Writing about life in that city was inherently political, even if the poem was simply about water, wards, tainted fish, or walks through the streets. New Orleans was now joined to the names of other world cities that ring out immediately with political resonance—Sarajevo, Baghdad, Saigon, Waco.

 

Adonis writes, “Have you gone mad? Please, / Don’t write about these things.” And yet he then goes on to write about the dead and dying of Beirut in 1982, a city under siege. Had I gone mad to begin writing poems grounded in such dismal images? Certainly we were all a bit mad in those days down in New Orleans. When I was writing Colosseum, the book from which the poems in this anthology come, I admit that Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” line, “My mind’s not right,” went through my head many times. Yet the measuring, ordering impulse to write the poem remained, even if each poem broke open new confusions and forms of dismay at what had been withheld from the essentially abandoned, and largely African American, New Orleans population. Often content such as this is so ungodly, is so harsh, that to think of it makes the mind feel severed or broken. Imagining what is occurring in the ghostly American programs of rendition and practices of torture do the same to me now.

 

And so there is a kind of double-madness that is felt as one composes these types of poems: first, the madness that comes at the thought of widespread, preventable death; second, the madness that comes when your poems, too, are full of these deaths, knowing such writing has been warned against as its own kind of madness. It is a deeply destabilizing position to be in poetically, which is just as it should be. I suspect that if a poet does not feel as if she runs a horrible risk—the risk of sensationalizing violence, the risk of sentimentalizing human loss—she is likely writing with too much comfort and too much ease. The poet should feel the same enormous pressure someone would feel writing a eulogy for a funeral attended by the beloved companions of the one who died. Then the poet, in her imagination, should add to that audience the rest of the world.

 

The admonishing of Adonis should press upon each word the poet writes; such admonishing can bring about the apt word, the hard-won song, the lament deserved by the dead. “In thy book record their groans,” John Milton begs God in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.” Far beyond being political, the poet, too, ought to take up this task: Preserve the groans of the dead, despite the warnings against it.

 

from Saying What Happened: American Poetry After the Millennium. Jeffrey Gray and Ann Keniston, editors. (McFarland Press, 2015). 

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. FLEE /

  2. OVERTURE /

  3. Still Life /

  4. Psalm 40 /

  5. Song after Sadness /