Mark Ford (poet)


Mark Ford is a British poet. He is currently Professor of English in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

Life

Mark Ford was born in Nairobi, British Kenya, on 24 June 1962 to Donald and Mary Ford. His father worked for the airlines BOAC, then British Airways. As a result, he had a peripatetic childhood, moving 'to a new country roughly every 18 months', accompanied by a 'sense of rootlessness or of not belonging'.
After school in London, he attended Oxford University, graduating in 1983 with a First in English Literature. He then studied at Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar, before returning to Oxford to study for his doctorate, writing his thesis on the poetry of John Ashbery, supervised by John Bayley. After a number of years working as a lecturer in Oxford and London, he then moved to Japan, where he was Visiting Lecturer at Kyoto University between 1991-3.
Following this appointment, he worked as a freelance writer, principally reviewing poetry for The Guardian.
He is a regular contributor to The ''New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books''.

Poetry

Landlocked Soft Sift Six Children Selected Poems Enter, Fleeing
  • ''The Morlocks: A Fantasia''

Prose

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry
  • ''A Guest Among Stars: Essays on Twentieth-Century Poets''

Translation

New Impressions of Africa A Monkey at the Window by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, parallel text, co-translated with Sarah Maguire The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories by Raymond Roussel, with an introduction and notes
  • ''Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems''

Editions and anthologies

No Name by Wilkie Collins edited with an introduction, notes and bibliography Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens edited with an introduction, notes and bibliography ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ and other poems by Frank O’Hara, with an introduction and bibliography Something We Have That They Don’t: British & American Poetic Relations Since 1925, with an introduction and bibliography, co-edited with Steve Clark The New York Poets: An Anthology, with an introduction and bibliography The New York Poets II: An Anthology, co-edited with Trevor Winkfield, with an introduction and bibliography Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems, with an introduction and bibliography Allen Ginsberg: Poems Selected by Mark Ford, with an introduction John Ashbery: Collected Poems Volume 1, 1956-1987 with chronology and notes Mick Imlah: Selected Poems London: A History in Verse with an introduction The Best British Poetry 2014 with an introduction John Ashbery: Collected Poems Volume 2, 1988-2000 with chronology and notes

Miscellaneous

John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford
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Articles and essays

  • ‘John Ashbery and Raymond Roussel’ in Verse.
  • ‘Non Persona: The Diversity of John Ashbery’ in Scripsi.
  • ‘Wanting to Go to Bed With Frank O'Hara’ in Scripsi.
  • ‘A New Kind of Emptiness’ in P.N. Review.
  • ‘Genius in its Pure State: The Literary Manuscripts of Raymond Roussel’ in The London Review of Books.
  • ‘Inventions of Solitude: Thoreau and Auster’ in Journal of American Studies.
  • ‘A Wide and Wingless Path to the Impossible: The Poetry of F.T. Prince’ in P.N. Review.
  • ‘Like a Lilly Daché Hat’ in Poetry Review.
  • ‘Elizabeth Bishop at the Water’s Edge’ in Essays in Criticism.
  • ‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Death’s Jest-Book’ in Poetry Review.
  • ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary’ in the London Review of Books.
  • ‘Uncollected, Unpublished, Unfinished’ in Oxford Poetry.
  • ‘Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom’ in Poetry.
  • ‘Entropy with Doxology’ in Poetry.
  • ‘She Opened the Door: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry’ in Essays in Criticism.