Michael C. Ford is an American poet, playwright, editor, teacher, critic, and recording artist whose work has been closely associated with the Los Angeles literary and spoken-word scenes. Born on the Illinois side of Lake Michigan, he moved with his family to Southern California as a child and began publishing steadily in 1970.
Ford’s career crosses poetry, theater, music journalism, performance, and recorded spoken word. His 1986 spoken-word recording Language Commando received a Grammy nomination, and his selected poems Emergency Exits received a 1998 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He has collaborated with musicians including Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger of The Doors, and his work frequently brings jazz, popular music, film, baseball, American geography, and literary history into the poem.
Voice and style
Ford’s poetry is highly associative and acoustically alert. It mixes documentary detail, cultural reference, surreal juxtaposition, vernacular speech, geographic specificity, typographic play, and the improvisatory energy of jazz. Poems often behave like verbal collages in which memory and American cultural history occupy the same frame.
Crosswalk Casserole
Crosswalk Casserole, published by Lawn Gnome Publishing in 2013, gathers poems that move across decades and landscapes while revisiting Beat-era figures, music, cities, roads, memory, and the changing American West.