Poet Katie Ford came to read a selected collection of her works on campus on Thursday, September 19, as part of the Visiting Writers Series. This marks the first reading of the ninth year this series has run.
Ford is the author of two books of poetry (“Deposition,” “Colosseum”) as well as the upcoming “Blood Lyrics.” Colosseum was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Publisher’s Weekly and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She received the Lannan Literary Fellowship, a $100,000 dollar award, as well as the Larry Levis prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and a wide variety of high-circulation journals. Ford teaches at Franklin & Marshall College.
The event opened to a nearly full house at 4:30 pm in Wilson Auditorium. She was introduced by Michael Thomas, Assistant Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, who not only praised her work but cited the praise of others, such as a New York Times review that described her work as having “the veiled brilliance of a stained glass window at night.”
“We also hope that you will be moved emotionally by a writer’s representation of what it means to be a human being, whether that experience is one of joy, celebration, longing, love, or sorrow,” Thomas said. “Art needs audiences as much as we, the audience, need art.”
Ford focuses on themes of natural disaster, urban decay, war and religion, the last of which is largely in part due to her religious upbringing and education at Harvard’s Divinity School.
Throughout the night, she discussed various other factors that go into her work, one of which is her Viking ancestry, which influenced the poem “The Lord is a Man of War.” This piece described pox-infected people being hurled by catapult as a biological weapon against a military foe, or how the narrator “could see the cooling lava pits of their eyes.”
Some of her poems were influenced by disasters many college students remember. “Irradiance” examines life in Fukoshima after the 2011 tsunami caused a reactor to malfunction and cause the area to be inhospitable. The Japanese believe those who perished in the wave live throughout the area as spirits, so to appease their ancestors, some people had to sacrifice their health and, in some cases, lives, to bury the dead and perform rituals.
Similarly, “Flee” describes Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans. This had a far more personal tone since she lived there at the time. She described herself as “a small noise” in the face of the “killing wind” and how homes were torn to pieces.
Her work is also critical of some elements of the current military engagements in Iraq and such areas. “One Long War” looks at how desensitized and disconnected the American public is to the current battles, since the most suffering non-military citizens typically experience is the additional tax to support war spending.
“Foreign Song” describes the suffering already taking place overseas and how, to have sent troops over, we “must not have heard their music.”
The most graphic was “The Throats of Guantanamo,” a piece inspired by three young men who were tortured and killed while incarcerated, despite their families being told that the men were fine. This was only discovered after a guard came forward and confessed what happened. She describes “the trinity of boys” as having no voice.
A few others, such as “Koi,” “Snow” and “Raised Voice,” had themes focusing on nature or, to be more precise, the conflict between nature and society. The auditorium rang with lines like “I held the chambered gun and clicked its emptiness against the crows” and “I listened to hyms and asked so much of them, they quieted.”
Toward the end, she read a few more personal pieces from her first book, including “Pistol” which described her post-traumatic stress after having been assaulted. “Song After Sadness” took a look at a picture of a doctor kneeling at the bedside of a young child who was not going to survive her hospital stay–Ford saw this picture while visiting her daughter, who’d stayed in critical care for roughly four months.
This last one was particularly poignant, indicated Frank Cipriani, adjunct professor of foreign language.
Similarly, Jeffery Jackson, assistant professor of English, noted how her work is connected to major literary figures of the past such as Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Zachary Scherl, senior English major, was glad to have attended. “The pieces were inspiring,” Scherl said. “I was very moved.”
Thomas, too, felt connected on a personal level. Not only did he incorporate her work into a lesson for his students, during which he focused on her unique balance of dealing with exterior events and internal chaos.
“In her methodology of absence, we are enriched, taken far from an ordinary landscape of material things, to another kind of rejuvenated home somewhere beyond ourselves, simultaneously discovering what we take for granted- sometimes the boom of the heartbeat, like the young child who has recently realized that sound with the ear pressed on a pillow before sleep,” Thomas said.
Ford is only the first of five writers who will be coming to campus for an exclusive all-poetry Visiting Writer’s series. Check monmouth.edu/arts for upcoming speakers on campus.
PHOTO TAKEN from flickr.com
Correction:
Last week, in a story headlined “Visiting Writer Series Introduces Katie Ford,” The Outlook reported that Jeffery Jackson was an adjunct professor of English, but he in fact is an assistant professor of English. If, for any reason, this inaccuracy has caused misunderstandings or problems, The Outlook regrets that.
