Forgive Los Angeles, as we forgive
those who Los Angeles against us;
and lead us not into Los Angeles,
but deliver us from Los Angeles

With the possible exception of Charles Bukowski and Wanda Coleman there may be no other poet that’s written more poems about Los Angeles than Michael C. Ford. Ford is a pioneering poet, spoken word recording artist, playwright and teacher and the lines above are from his poem “Closing Prayer,” in his new book, In Case of Flood Stand On This Book It’s Dry English.

Born in Chicago in 1939, Ford came to Los Angeles at the age of three and he’s been here ever since. Whether it was attending UCLA with Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek or writing liner notes for the punk band, the Minutemen, Ford’s track record speaks for itself. The author of 25 books, his best known work Emergency Exits was nominated for the Pulitzer and he’s recorded a dozen Spoken Word recordings, receiving a Grammy nomination for the album Language Commando.

Divided into 5 sections, the new book collects over 50 years of Ford’s writings that were mostly unpublished but have now been finished and revised. Ford riffs on geography, film history, jazz and a lifetime of memories connected to these topics. Many of the poems have a short prose explanation to add further context because some of the pieces were from his 2014 spoken word album, Look Each Other in the Ears, others were initially liner notes from records he blurbed like one for Rollins or excerpts from columns Ford wrote for the Los Angeles Free Press and other publications like his own 1970s journal, The Sunset Palms Hotel.

Here’s the caption before the poem “Lost Jazz Bars: In Four-Time:”

There was a time when the city of Los Angeles was resplendent with vintage listening posts: modern sounds bistros attended by customers with enriched musical intelligence.

And though Ford’s work undoubtedly expresses a Southern California mentality, there’s a deep ethos of 20th Century Americana, rooted in jazz history, roadside architecture and femme fatales that makes his work both accessible and esoteric in the best kind of way. Younger readers may not know all his references but they can dig his colloquial register because his idiom is musical, geographic and encyclopedic simultaneously. Some of the pieces are lists that read like liturgy and almost every poem in the book is accompanied with some illustration, photograph or collage piece.

This new collection puts his long career into proper context. I first met Ford somewhere around 2005-2006, but it wasn’t until Summer of 2010 that we really had an opportunity to talk longer about poetry, music and the history of Los Angeles. I knew we had to talk when I ran into Ford two days in a row in two very different parts of Southern California. First I saw him out in the San Fernando Valley where we both read poems at a gallery reading on Magnolia in North Hollywood. The next day we bumped into each other in the backroom of Amoeba Records on Sunset Blvd. We were both browsing the Jazz stacks. Ford knows the genre well.

The new book has poems about the history of drumming, long gone record stores like Dolphin’s of Hollywood, Art Pepper, Chet Baker and iconic live music venues like the Lighthouse. Ford met both Pepper and Baker when he was a teenager. Consequently, the pieces emit lived experience: “We wanted to be early heroic bums / high on drums. . .the drug of / modern sounds.” When Ford writes about Buddy Collette, Coltrane or Chico Hamilton, you can tell he was there in 1963 in the audience at the Lighthouse, Catalina Bar & Grill or El Camino College.

He met poets Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen during his senior year of high school. The year was 1958 and it was at The LA Jazz Concert Hall on Jefferson and Crenshaw. Housed in what is now a church, the former movie palace was converted into a concert hall featuring nightly jazz performances.

On several nights between 1957-1959, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen and Stuart Z. Perkoff recited their poetry at The LA Jazz Concert Hall accompanied by live jazz players. One particular four-day series of these concerts was called “The West Coast Festival of Jazz & Poetry.” The Festival is described in Lawrence Lipton’s seminal book on the Venice chapter of the Beat Generation, The Holy Barbarians.

Ford was in the audience even though he was still in high school. What’s more is that he fell in with Kenneth Rexroth. “During those ensuing weeks,” he recalls. “I was lucky enough to be in the right place at exactly the right time in my personal history.” Rexroth gave him a reading list. “I was able to actualize many important components of world literature,” he says. “By reading his suggested catalog of books. It was like going to a guerilla street university…. Rexroth said things that sounded almost as though he were speaking in Italics.” He met Kenneth Patchen in the same period.

Ford grew up on film. “Instead of leaving me with a babysitter, my parents took me with them to the movies,” Ford says. Knowing this explains all the long gone starlets his poems mention like Clara Bow, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner to Marie Windsor. He connects the dots between Fatty Arbuckle and OJ Simpson.

Ford’s education continued when he studied Poetry with Jack Hirschman at UCLA in 1964-65. “We were in the bunker preparing for war,” he recalls. Ford met Ray Manzarek, Jim Morrison and John Densmore, later known as the Doors in Hirschman’s class. “You could park your car next to the flagpole at UCLA back then,” Ford says. Hirschman’s Poetry class covered Antonin Artaud, the theater of the absurd and surrealism. Artaud’s ideas of confronting the audience influenced Jim Morrison on multiple levels, starting with the films he made in UCLA Film School. Manzarek and Morrison pulled Ford into the film school bungalow one late night to preview their films. There’s a poem about these memories: “To Manzarek: Long After BUNGALOW 3-K-7.”

Ford performed his poetry for the first time in front of an audience with the Doors at a Benefit event for Norman Mailer in 1969. Morrison asked him to read. Morrison had a special affinity for Ford because he loved poetry. Morrison’s influences included William Blake, Rimbaud, Kenneth Patchen. When Morrison wanted to slow down from the rock & roll lifestyle he organized his poems and collaborated with Michael C. Ford. Both Ford and Morrison published books of poetry in 1970.

Ford’s piece “Message to Morrison,” recounts their friendship with a litany of memories and impressions: Morrison, I am with you at Devonshire Downs in 1967 / where you’re just beginning to feel like a stranger.” In this poem and all the rest in the book, Ford shares first-hand accounts of incredible history while making music with language. There’s a poem written by the late great poet Scott Wannberg that really captures Ford’s oeuvre. Here are the last two stanzas of Wannberg’s “Michael C. Ford” poem:

Michael C. Ford
He was there man
Bopping with all the big ones
Used a pen to open a vein and bleed
Image and sound onto the page
He paid his dues man
And now it’s time the dues come back
He may think the girls are not as pretty now
And the music may not transcend meaning or time
But the listeners are here man
Glorying in the word distilled
The mastery of craft and eye and ear

Michael C. Ford
He was there man
And just now our gift is that he is here
We’re glorying in the words man
It’s not the reflection of the superstars
That makes him brilliant man
It’s his own effulgence
The illumination of a poet’s soul
The insistence of a rhythm man
The glory of the word.

Ford was indeed there and he’s still here. These poems will take you there and invite you to look and listen a little closer at the world.

Mike Sonksen, aka Mike the PoeT, is an acclaimed poet, professor, journalist, historian and tour guide. He teaches at Woodbury University, where he serves as the Coordinator of the school’s First Year Experience Program. He has published over 500 essays and poems, most recently two excerpts in Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters, edited by David Kipen (Stanford University Press, September 2023). He has delivered over 2,000 poetry readings, served as guest speaker at over 100 academic institutions, appeared on radio and television and hosted events in locations like Grand Performances and Getty Center. The second edition of his latest book, Letters To My City was just published by Writ Large Press in Summer 2023.

MIKE SONKSEN, aka Mike the PoeT, is an acclaimed poet, professor, journalist, historian and tour guide. He teaches at Woodbury University, where he serves as the Coordinator of the school’s First Year Experience Program. He has published over 500 essays and poems, most recently two excerpts in Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters, edited by David Kipen (Stanford University Press, September 2023). He has delivered over 2,000 poetry readings, served as guest speaker at over 100 academic institutions, appeared on radio and television and hosted events in locations like Grand Performances and Getty Center. The second edition of his latest book, Letters To My City was just published by Writ Large Press in Summer 2023.