Katie Ford, poet

I had the good fortune of hearing Katie Ford read her poems about New Orleans last year when she visited my school. She reads with such poise and presence. I remember skimming through some of her poems before she arrived and not really experiencing their essence (not really possible in the act of skimming, is it?), but then I heard her read and they all came vividly to life. I was trawling around last night looking for a good poem and came across a November one of hers from The New Yorker. Not sure how I missed this. I also found a video of her reading. Haven't figured out how to embed it but I am including the video link below the poem, as it is pretty good quality. I have been feeling poemless for the last few days. Wanting to rest my mind on something but whatever that something is, it has been just out of reach. I'm glad I ran into Ford again.

"November Philosophers" by Katie Ford
published Nov. 9, 2009 in The New Yorker

Nothing is nothing, although
he would call me that, She was nothing.
Those were his words, but his hand was lifting
cigarettes in chains and bridges
of ash-light. He said he didn’t want his body to last.
It wasn’t a year I could argue
against that kind of talk, so I cut the fowl
killed on the farm a mile out—brown and silvery, wild—
and put it over butter lettuce, lettuce then lime.
I heated brandy in the saucepan, poured a strip of molasses
slowly through the cold, slow as I’d seen
a shaman pour pine tincture over the floor
of my beaten house.
She seemed to see my whole life
by ordinance of some god
who wanted me alive again.
Burnt sage, blue smoke. Then sea salt shaken
into the corners of violent sadness.
She wrote my address
across her chest
to let everything listening know
where my life was made.
We waited, either forgetting what we were
or becoming more brightly human in that pine,
in her trance, in the lavender I set on the chipped sills,
not a trance at all but my deliberate hand cutting
from the yard part of what she required.
Now wait longer, she said, and I did as I would
when the molasses warmed over the pot enough
to come into the brandy,
to come into the night
begun by small confessions—
that this was just a rental, and mine just a floor,
that the woman he loved was with another man,
his mother mad, his apartment haunted in the crawl space.
Then I told of the assault at daybreak between
the houses. Heat, asphalt, all of it and my face toward
the brick school where the apostolate studied first-century script
and song. There must have been chanting,
as it was on the hour.
What we said was liturgy meant only for us
and for that night. Not for anyone else
to repeat, live by, believe. Never that.
Our only theories were inside of our hands,
flesh and land, body and prairie.
I reached to smoke down his next-to-last,
which he lit and made ready.
The poultry like a war ration
we ate all the way through.
What we wished, we said.
What we said, we found that night
by these, and no other,
means.



Katie Ford Reading/Marick Press