Mark Ford (poet)

Mark Ford (born 1962 Nairobi, Kenya) 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, Kenya on the 24th 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 an 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 (Chatto & Windus, 1992; 1998)
 * Soft Sift (Faber & Faber, 2001; Harcourt Brace, 2003)
 * Six Children (Faber & Faber, 2011)
 * Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014)
 * Enter, Fleeing (Faber & Faber, 2018)

Prose

 * Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Faber & Faber, 2000; Cornell University Press, 2001)
 * A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (Waywiser Press, 2006)
 * Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays (Peter Lang, 2011)
 * This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (Eyewear Press, 2014)
 * Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016)
 * Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry (Oxford University Press, forthcoming July 2023)

Translation

 * New Impressions of Africa (Princeton University Press, 2011)
 * A Monkey at the Window by Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi, parallel text, co-translated with Sarah Maguire (Bloodaxe Books, 2016)
 * The Alley of Fireflies and Other Stories by Raymond Roussel, with an introduction and notes (The Song Cave, 2019)
 * Jules Laforgue: Selected Poems (The Song Cave, forthcoming November 2023)

Editions and anthologies

 * No Name by Wilkie Collins edited with an introduction, notes and bibliography (Penguin Classics, 1994)
 * Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens edited with an introduction, notes and bibliography (Penguin Classics, 1999)
 * ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ and other poems by Frank O’Hara, with an introduction and bibliography (Carcanet, 2003)
 * Something We Have That They Don’t: British & American Poetic Relations Since 1925, with an introduction and bibliography, co-edited with Steve Clark (University of Iowa Press, 2004)
 * The New York Poets: An Anthology, with an introduction and bibliography (Carcanet, 2004)
 * The New York Poets II: An Anthology, co-edited with Trevor Winkfield, with an introduction and bibliography (Carcanet, 2006)
 * Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems, with an introduction and bibliography (Knopf, 2008)
 * Allen Ginsberg: Poems Selected by Mark Ford, with an introduction (Faber & Faber, 2008)
 * John Ashbery: Collected Poems Volume 1, 1956-1987 with chronology and notes (Library of America, 2008; Carcanet, 2010)
 * Mick Imlah: Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2010)
 * London: A History in Verse with an introduction (Harvard University Press, 2012 (paperback, 2015))
 * The Best British Poetry 2014 with an introduction (Salt, 2014, 192pp.)
 * John Ashbery: Collected Poems Volume 2, 1988-2000 with chronology and notes (Library of America, 2017; Carcanet, 2018)

Miscellaneous

 * John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford (Between the Lines, 2003)
 * And So It Goes: Letters from Young Mr Grace (aka John Ashbery) (PN Review, Vol. 44, no. 3, 2018, pp. 45-51)

Articles and essays

 * ‘John Ashbery and Raymond Roussel’ in Verse (Vol. 3 no. 3, 1986, pp. 1-21).
 * ‘Non Persona: The Diversity of John Ashbery’ in Scripsi (Vol. 8, no. 3, 1993, pp. 225-233).
 * ‘Wanting to Go to Bed With Frank O'Hara’ in Scripsi (Vol. 9, no. 2, 1993, pp. 141-150).
 * ‘A New Kind of Emptiness’ (on John Ashbery) in P.N. Review (Vol. 21, no.1, 1994, pp. 48-50).
 * ‘Genius in its Pure State: The Literary Manuscripts of Raymond Roussel’ in The London Review of Books (Vol. 19, no. 10, 1997, pp. 19-21).
 * ‘Inventions of Solitude: Thoreau and Auster’ in Journal of American Studies (Vol. 32, 1998, pp. 201-219).
 * ‘A Wide and Wingless Path to the Impossible: The Poetry of F.T. Prince’ in P.N. Review (Vol. 29, no. 1, 2002, pp. 31-33).
 * ‘Like a Lilly Daché Hat’ (on James Schuyler) in Poetry Review (Vol. 92. no. 3, 2002, pp. 55-62).
 * ‘Elizabeth Bishop at the Water’s Edge’ in Essays in Criticism (Vol. 8, no. 3, July 2003, pp. 235-261).
 * ‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Death’s Jest-Book’ in Poetry Review (Vol. 93, no. 4, 2004, pp. 52-61).
 * ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Aviary’ in the London Review of Books (Vol. 29, no. 23, 2007, pp. 20-22).
 * ‘Uncollected, Unpublished, Unfinished’ (on the manuscripts of Mick Imlah) in Oxford Poetry (Vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 49-56).
 * ‘Joan Murray and the Bats of Wisdom’ in Poetry (Vol. 203, no. 5, 2014, pp. 473-488).
 * ‘Entropy with Doxology’ (on A.R. Ammons) in Poetry (Vol. 213, No. 4, 2019, pp. 390-402).
 * ‘She Opened the Door: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry’ in Essays in Criticism (Vol. 70, No. 2, 2020, pp. 139-159, (F.W. Bateson Memorial Lecture)).