|
CHARLES HENRI FORD (1908 - 2002- )
The American
surrealist, Charles Henri Ford, was both an influential writer and an editor. In 1933 he published The Young and the Evil, a novel he wrote with Parker Tyler. He is better known, however, for his collections
of surrealist poetry, including The Garden of Disorder (1939) and The Overturned Lake (1941), and for editing the surrealist magazines, Blues and View. He published Blues from 1929-30 while he was still a
teenager. View ran from 1940-47 and contained works of young artists and poets like Joseph Cornell, Randall Jarrell, and Allen Ginsberg.
Ford was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, on February 10, 1913
to Charles Lloyd and Gertrude Cato Ford. He attended the Christian Brothers College Grammar School in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lived with his mother and sister Ruth. In 1922 he was sent away to the Webb
School in Bellbuckle, Tennessee, and later attended the Morgan School in St. Petersburg, Tennessee. In 1929, he went to St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas, for at least one semester.
Later
in 1929, Ford lived in both Columbus, Mississippi, and New York City, while he edited Blues. In 1930 he moved to Paris, where he lived for four years. During this period he developed friendships with several
literary figures, among whom were Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. After traveling through Europe and North Africa, Ford returned to New York in October, 1934.
Following his return, Ford concentrated
on writing poetry and editing View. Poems for Painters was published by View editions in 1945, followed by The Half-Thoughts in 1947 and Sleep in a Nest of Flames in 1949, which included a foreword by Edith
Sitwell. He also edited The Mirror of Baudelaire in 1942 and A Night with Jupiter and Other Fantastic Stories in 1947. The book of stories was a View edition and included two pieces by Henry Miller. His
later collections of verse include Spare Parts (1966), Silver Flower Coo (1968), Om Krishna (1978), and Secret Haiku (1982). His selected poems, Flag of Ecstasy, edited by Edward B. Germain, was published in
1972. He died in New York on September 27, 2002, aged 94. |
