Michael C Ford: California Poets Part 4, Three Poems

Michael C Ford (photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher)

December 29th, 2021

California Poets: Part IV

Michael C Ford

Three Poems

Treadmille to Armageddon Borrowing a pop music allusion, Donovan is encouraging us to think of this as the season of the witch All right but this day in March 2020 finds us walking Spanish along the traditional path of most resistance We are being braced by the usual stiffening vile wind usually accompanied by other cool aspects of the 3rd month There is little hospitable solace in a thought that only the starch of March could bring us to this birth of oblivion

Improvised B R O K E N Typewriter Poem Thanksgiving Day doldrums on Long Island and we witness the usual stripping from suicidal broiled turkeys leaving the usual holiday carnage and see great galaxies rising out of ordinary mist on the gray November water span spinning us all over the Sound. Fishing craft roll and loll and loiter on top of the long rolling rush of ocean towards Flushing. Storm clouds are getting ready to eclipse transcriptions in the gradebook blur of our past academic applications and literary journals that have no need for penciling or crinkled ink. The beat majesty of shoreline comic-book poetics will until further notice replace the hot typewriter ribbon and the return gear will be getting us back into words as black as North Atlantic

Patriotism at the Motel Cafe Truth is a metaphor that we forgot was a metaphor - Nietzshe Patriotism is a star-spangled breakfast Patriotism is out to lunch Patriotism is a parking lot full of pickup trucks with gunracks & axe-handles Patriotism is police beating up people too poor to be protected by lawyers Patriotism is corporate criminals diverting millions of dollars which could have been used to house the homeless Patriotism is killing nuns and priests and Communist peasants in Central America, in order to promote a neo-Fascist regime Patriotism is a conspiracy of racist hatred in the Southern faction of Africa Patriotism is getting your mitts on a gun and getting yourself killed in an already victimized foreign country Patriotism is cinema with a star-power movie hero commercializing patriotic murder Patriotism is being persecuted by American government greed-Capitalist social injustice

Interview II

January 7th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Michael C Ford, Poet, Performer, and Recording Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: Greetings, Michael, it’s been four years since you last appeared in California Poets. Do you have some new work to share with our readers?

MCF: I have the following pieces:

There's a Sign in Kansas City

It says: Safety Is Always In Season

This means camouflage is the way perennial

foliation loiters around us on Charlotte Street

This means October bonfires can compare

with the way a woman wearing an incinerator

chimney transfer on the back of her jogging

jacket looks at us with autumn glances

This means daylight saving time’s the only

way yesterday’s splendid pond in Chillicothe,

Illinois transforms into a pool for inconvenient

suicides; all the while emotional wisdom is still

treading water

This means unhappy husbands are finding

more ways to come home to hostile wives who

may be freaked on downers: boozy, lonely; while

outside there are the arms of old spring lovers

turning into clusters of winter-encrusted twigs

crunchy as a kiss in a sandstorm

This means all those meanings could be all

the ways there are left to be open to the weather,

as we continue to survive on safe meridians; or

continue to survive in the company of those

whose lives, somehow, seem to linger

between

renewals or ruinations

Not So Celebrity Bowling

But Cerebrally Brawling

I don’t want to hear about your conspiracy

With patriotic voting, when the fault of those

We elect every 4 years lies in the fact that that

The prescription shows up as being worse than

The disease

I don't want to hear about your conspiracy with

Ostensibly limitless sick funhouse monsters in a

Shotgun marriage to the merry-go-round of

American poetry society goons and their hot

Money mongering poet laureate foppery we are

Forced to endure every year in this country

I don't want to hear about your conspiracy with

A hip-hop trip-hop skip-hop boombox; but even so

Knowing how much it jangles the cash-register has

Always. been considered more expedient than the

Crusade of battlefield language commandoes

I don’t want to hear about your anthologized

University ivory tower press publishing, gutless

Rituals of worshipping only what they have

Transmuted the art of poetry into: bubbles on a

Fat vat full of bland oatmeal.

Clyde Beatty Plants a Dandelion

After/RUTA LEE

Chicago declares La Fiesta convention at

The Palmer House: lobby littered with

streamers on amplifiers. In My Adobe

Hacienda is an old misty serenade sifting in

filtered air through the sum of these banquet

rooms hung with music monitors, painted

piñatas, balloons and Gel-framed baby Fresnels.

No jungle trap for tender animals. Alert the

Lincoln Park Zoo, where a mesmerized lion

happens to encounter the ghost of Clyde Beatty.

I don’t think Clyde—reminded that he has the

same conceits as Frank Buck—would want to

bring any these lynched piñatas back alive: not

without taking a potshot at hotel lobby lassitude.

So who will allow us to suffer the humiliation of

the gun, the whip, and the chair? Chicago is a

big dinner table. Paul Carroll would enjoy the

irony of this: last night the Drake Hotel TV screen

through lounge entrance smoke witnesses

Severn Darden flickering in 1960’s re-run {no

kidding, Paul}. Everybody scoffing food at Faces

and The Happy Medium and even a haunted

Club De Lisa where the ghost of Baby Dodds

has been pounding on the drum kit since 1939.

It’s the mad rush on Rush Street, where the

bar-b-q’d beef is conducting what music is at steak.

I have plans for Albany Park: Buffalo Sodas—

bananas ripening in windows like war

widows. Look at how both ways over there

Eisenhower Expressway cars are guitars with

strums of windshield wipers. This is shelter from

a brief spring rain, dropping like pale, tired lions

into the room, I decide the Palmer House needs to

be taken over by Mexican bandits. Lake Michigan

presses against its own moon-washed light shining

over Cisco Kid contraptions: almost as if a scalpel

was hung from a gun-belt belonging to some outlaw

sombrero brain surgeon. This is just to say: “Don’t

get sick if you know what’s good for you!” There’s a

group named Thalians gathering here. Those in

attendance are totally decked-out in the festive

costumes of charity so I’m handing-over my donation

to an actress who’s appeared with relevance on national

television and she’s saying: “Thanks for remembering!”

She doesn’t realize that’s my job. The art of mnemonics

happens almost every day with me: place names, the

crucified landmarks. Every line I write is like a mama

lion, looking dandy behind bars in an evacuated zoo.

But, yes, all-of-a-sudden, it’s just about time to pack-up

and go Greyhound. The lights begin to dim and My

Adobe Hacienda is shutting its doors and windows.

True Story

The upwardly mobile yuppie hippie

Pulls on my coattails saying: “Hey, Mahn,

Y’wanna smoke some of my shit; I mean,

Like it’s rilly rilly good shit!”

I say, “Well, all the shit I’ve ever heard about

Has always been pretty abrasive and mordant

And toxic.”

Then, he gets back to me all quietly hostile and

Gnarly; riposting with: “Y’know, Mahn, you’re

like an asshole, Mahn, y’know, like a total asshole!”

My reply is: “Yeah, you’re probably correct in your

Assumption; but try not to forget—I might be

Where the really good shit comes from.”

DG: Powerful compositions, and they match the intensity of your original contribution. At this point I can’t tell which set of poems are superior. Have you been working more frequently since the time you first appeared in these pages, or have your writing habits/routines remained largely unchanged?

MCF: I'm thinking this is the 1st time the adjective "powerful" has been used to describe my literary discharges; also, not so sure I've encroached on superiority yet, but now that you've given me the sense of responsibility, maybe I can reach it by tomorrow afternoon. I'm not responding modestly. And, as I've had to think about it lately, I still consider myself an apprentice: that is I'm still reading and studying and learning something brand new every day.

DG: You mentioned writing poems on a typewriter and then using a PC to transcribe the pieces when they’re requested (as was the case here). Does the majority of editing happen on the typewriter, or do you also make significant changes as you type out the lines on a computer?

MCF: I recall in the early 1990s receiving emergency mail from a magazine publisher. He wrote something like this: you tell me you wrote your submission on your grandfather's 1945 Corona Red-Top typewriter. STOP THAT! You must buy a computer because I need to scan your stuff in order to transfer to my acceptance file.

So long story short: I scored a PC, then I had to find a 4th grader to show me how to turn it on. It took a while for me to grope my way through the electronic fog. To answer your Q about editing: I begin by scratching a pencil across pages of my vest-pocket notepad. I scribble around the text until it starts to work, then I poke out my fledgling words on a PC screen. That's when I really begin alterations. My layout changes directions, and the keyboard actually allows me to rearrange, not only the wordplay, but the line-breaks as well.

DG: I really got a kick out of “Not So Celebrity Bowling / But Cerebrally Brawling.” There were political themes in the original contribution and given that you’ve never shied away from the topic, I was certainly expecting to see them here. Are you feeling a pull to write more politically themed work at the moment?

MCF: Now, critics—both professional and secular—seem to have a different take on my work. I like it when they call me a protest poet, as if the main thrust of my work is getting into some sort of Bob Dylan lyrical stream of consciousness polemic. I think they like to believe that protest means a nihilist opposition to something construed as patriotic. Well, that’s just crazy talk. I don’t even think Dylan advertises himself as an inflamed dissident, does he? I think critics just like pigeonholing artists, most specifically, poets who are saying things that make culture vultures and hack writers uncomfortable. A lot of us don’t realize the true meaning of the word Protest. Protest actually means change. So, whatever any measures of my selected direct objects might lead readers into, I’ve only been inventing an invitation to, if they feel like it, change their minds. Didn’t Dylan compose a song lyrically defining protest, when he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changing?” How much change? Evidently since the 1960s, not sufficiently augmented enough.

You also have to realize that writing the truth about American political betrayal doesn’t, suddenly, make me a neo-liberal servant of political motor mouth self-styled rebellion. I refuse to be anybody’s house organ, be it Communism or Capitalism; nor do I conform to any dogma or dictatorship or ideology. There's confusion about opposing political rhetoric especially the salvos and false promises from privatized self-serving thieves we elected to poison the oval office for the last 61 years.

Although I’ve always thought of myself as a cultural anarchist and agreed with high degree reasons for defiance, I don’t feel any aggressive urgency to raise up my draft card, setting fire to it and shout about resistance. I recollect reading a statement by Albert Camus (I’m thinking it was from The Rebel) saying something like: Every act of rebellion expresses a Nostalgia for innocence. Also, out of the same document is a very clear declaration when he says: There is no anarchy without responsibility.

DG: You have recorded your poetry in the context of various types of music, from rock, blues, to jazz. Is there a genre that you feel is closest to your own compositions?

MCF: The briefest answer I could honestly give you is NO, whether it be film culture with its numerous genre identities, even getting into all the entrances and exits of the entire catalogue of graphic arts, or to all those assorted musical variations you included, yes, if it's relevant and original it will definitively imbue my work with its imagery

DG: Do you have plans to release more recordings of your work?

MCF: I don't really yet have a future blueprint in mind for one that would fit the kinds of concept recording I find necessary in challenging me to create a document I can livre with.

DG: About a month ago, you did a fundraiser reading for Beyond Baroque with a large group of other poets. Could you talk a bit about that reading, how the BB Literary Arts Center has impacted your career in general, and if you remember the first time you read there?

MCF: It's difficult to describe the variegated range of 35 writers involved in sending their own messages. Remembering the best at Beyond Baroque relates entirely to what other poets and writers have had to share and certainly some of the existing camaraderie that has always been inherent at Beyond B—both of these have absolutely impacted my literary journey on so many different levels.

DG: In addition to Beyond Baroque, what are your favorite literary places in LA—libraries, reading spots, and so on?

MCF: I don't really have a jones for any one particular 21st century venue because it never seems to be the place that's important. It's the people who bring sustenance to recitations and exchanges of information to a location.

Back in the '80s & '90s you could show up at rooms like The Onyx, The Lhasa Club, Cafe Largo, Luna Park, Be-Bop Records and Fine Arts. Now, along with some of the luminous voices being gone, we seriously lost the locations themselves.

DG: Who are some of the California poets no longer with us that you really miss?

MCF: Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Jack Hirschman, David Meltzer, Wanda Coleman, Scott Wannberg, Jack Foley, Yvonne de la Vega, Erica Erdman, Linda J Albertano, Mike McClure, Phil Whalen, Doug Knott, P. Schneidre.

DG: Los Angeles, the city that has been at the epicenter of your life and work, has changed a great deal. What, in your view, for the better and what for the worse?

MCF: It's lately been my sad realization that just about everything which was better has been either eliminated or alienated; and most we surmise to be the worst has somehow survived.

DG: What are you reading at the moment?

MCF: At this very moment I'm reading Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone by Hunter S. Thompson.

DG: Any New Year’s resolutions?

MCF: I resolved to never again attempt to list any more resolutions.

Interview

December 13th, 2021

California Poets Interview Series:

Michael C Ford, Poet, Performer, and Recording Artist

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You’ve had the privilege of working with some of the biggest names in literature and music. In 1969, along with Jim Morrison, Jack Hirschman, and Michael McClure, you performed at the Cinematheque Theater to help raise funds for Norman Mailer’s mayoral run, quite the colorful campaign not only in terms of language but also antics. Can you talk about what you remember of this time, what it was like performing with Morrison, Hirschman, and McClure, and was this really your first reading?

MCF: It was Morrison who introduced me to Michael McClure, when these two weekend concert readings took place early summer of 1969 at the Cinematheque on Sunset Blvd. The evening was arranged by a troupe of Andy Warhol’s Factory workers as a Hollywood version of Warhol’s New York City fundraiser for the novelist Norman Mailer who needed campaign dollars to fund his run for the Mayor of Manhattan. When Warhol sent Morrison a message encouraging him to appear, he added that one of Mailer’s campaign promises was that he would force New York to secede from the union and become another Country. Morrison straightaway admired the lunacy of that saying to me: “Oh yeah, we gotta help this guy.” It was then he asked me if I had ever read my work out loud in front of a mass audience, and I admitted that I had not. He said he wanted to read the complete stanzas of his “American Prayer”—not just the pages he privately published.

That’s when he accommodatingly suggested I join him in taking this trip. He invited McClure down from the Bay Area and in a serendipitous moment invited our august UCLA poetry teacher Jack Hirschman to join the party. And you were correct to believe this was the way it was—not only the 1st time I read alongside these amazing voices, but my 1st foray into public address.

More full coverage of that fundraiser weekend may be found in the only journalism review of the event, with a by-line credited to Anne Moore. It was in the June 19th 1969 issue of a music tabloid called The World Countdown.

DG: Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-American filmmaker and poet, once said the following: “In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets,” but is it ever a good idea for writers to actually enter politics, and do you think New York would’ve changed much had Mailer actually won?

MCF: Your question about cultural politics becomes a double-edged sword which might be more effective in the swashbuckling hand of Erroll Flynn. But let’s just see how much trouble I can get myself into. I get it that there were so many poets, painters, filmmakers, and musicians during that period of our cultural revelations, simply due to the artistry involved in their acts of defiance and who were diametrically opposed to any literary establishment prejudice, censorship, and oppression, and who were, indeed, by their very nature culturally political. It’s sad to relay that in the intervening years up to now those revered sensibilities of all our long-ago heroes seem to have been egregiously degenerated and dissipated.

Slowly, you become aware that right in present-day history the majority of films look like video games, the bulk of music distribution has been composed and recorded to be consumed by a mass mess of tin-ears in the ignorant contemporary marketplace. Most visual art being hung on nails in art gallery frames resembles nothing more than extremely expensive wallpaper. The art form of poetry has been appropriated by college English departments in a totally insidious way and controlled by academic Fascists in Poetry Societies. A poet friend of mine teaching in the Bay Area calls them out as monsters—resident evil conspiring the persecution of any writer who by continuing to maintain an unbridled imagination and a moral outrage justifiably opposes their anemic exotic boredom.

Charlie Parker and his satellites are ascended royalty; along with Jack Kerouac and his satellites gone into the graves of the seldom remembered. The films of Orson Welles are viewed unceremoniously in darkened alcoves in schools of cinema arts. Salvador Dali avoided the negativity of drug addiction because he advertised himself to be one of the positive reactions to drugs. Face it folks: in this new age, mediocrity rules with a congenital vengeance.

The composer Erik Satie once said: “To be great is not to deliberately refuse the Nobel Prize—to be great is not to have been chosen to receive it at all.” The same may be observed regarding the National Book Award, or the Academy Award, or the do-something-crude-and-derivative-and-get-an-award-for-it-Award. Any organization which glorifies narcissism by escorting an artist into the arena of desperation, competition, embarrassing behavior, false adulation, saccharine responses, and sanctimonious rhetoric can’t be all bad. Just my opinion: I could be wrong.

DG: In 1964, you met Jim Morrison, a fellow student at UCLA. Can you talk about that meeting, and was it already apparent to you, at least in those early days, that Morrison would become a cultural icon? In other words, what set him apart from everyone else you had met at that point?

MCF: It was during a time I was a non-registered student at UCLA, illegally attending incredible classes I chose to attend between 1964 and 1966—classes of which I never would have been aware if dissuaded by the rote-system of university scholarship.

That was when my recently acquired film school friends Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison along with me insinuated ourselves into Jack Hirschman’s poetry class. It didn’t take me long to realize what a truly inspiring teacher should sound like in a classroom. Jack named his sessions UTOPIA after an earlier concept that poetry should be thought of as utopian dream imagery.

What I basically learned from Hirschman’s lectures were the fundamentals of that which comprised my curious search for an alternative creative process. I decided to cultivate an idealistic field of literary endeavor, creating a cultural vaccine designed to immunize all students of the university of the street. Again, a more conclusive overview of those years will be found in my essays entitled “Cultivating our own Wasteland” and “Doors Open and Closed.”

Over the years there were five occasions when Hirschman and I shared the podium: the last one being in April 2021. A big thanks to film actor and poet Harry E. Northup for inviting Jack and myself to recite from our work on-line for an invited audience of residents at the Motion Picture Home located in California’s West Valley. Four months following that reading, Hirschman merged with my other ascended teachers: Rexroth and Patchen, and it’s the realization that after learning from Jack in the middle 1960s, he shared with me his last public reading 56 years later. This has to be one of the most remarkable moments anyone could have experienced.

DG: How did those early years influence the work you’re doing today?

MCF: At the outset it would have been impossible to encounter my more or less informal personal mentoring if I had not been able to experience the genesis of self-education during the earlier 1950’s; then doing a trampoline bounce into the 1960’s.

I was on the ground floor of unarguably the zenith of the most culturally illuminating times in modern history. There will never be filmmaking again with the revolutionary energy of what I witnessed viewing cinema between 1951 and 1970. There will never be music again cultivating the soundtrack of our lives with the same luminous decibel levels. I’ll try to not urge the point.

As far as my literary epiphany would be concerned, it had to be my 1958 encounter with Kenneth Rexroth who I immediately discovered was being referred to in Beat Generation history as the godfather of the San Francisco Renaissance: an epithet with which Kenneth himself never grew to be entirely comfortable.

It was an association I was grateful to have continued through the ’60s, the ’70s, during his tenure as a writing instructor at UCSB, and into the early ’80s, until our visit, during his last illness at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. I began my informal studies with KR backstage at a Central LA movie theatre transformed into the LA Jazz Concert Hall by a Beverly Hills booking agent, along with one of his clients—the legendary jazz altoist Benny Carter. I would witness Rexroth reading his work with a musical backdrop provided by Shorty Rogers and eight of his West Coast jazz giants: and in turn, Kenneth would later be backstage sharing with me the wealth of his knowledge. And I must remind you that it was Rexroth who introduced me to Kenneth Patchen when he arrived to fulfill yet another solo poetry and jazz concertizing at Hampton’s emporium and began mentoring me between 1959 and early 1962. Following my dismal last year of high school, it was both KR’s and KP’s suggested reading list of books which enlightened me as to what the word “education” really means.

Further explorations into that period of time for me may be unearthed in my memoir-assay: “How I was Stillborn and Consigned to a Memorial for the Birth and Euthanasia of California Language Art” plus my cultural essay titled “Kenneth Rexroth and All that Jazz.”

DG: How did cinema, poetry, and politics influence The Doors, and in what way does the general surface perception of their music today differ from how you actually saw them back then?

MCF: Being enamored with German expressionist film, Morrison, Manzarek, and myself would habitually attend the film screenings of Carl Theodore Dreyer: the dire images of Vampyr, the luminous presence of Melle Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, not to mention the mind-bending films of Fritz Lang.

Another thing in common with Morrison was when I observed that we both carried vest-pocket notepads, copying down striking images. They might have been snatches of conversation, bits of syntax from novels, lines from philosophical and psychological essays or paperback noir detective mysteries, even transitions of dialogue from scenes in all manner of movies.

With respect to the evolution of The Doors, I saw them, once at the London Fog, and twice when they went next-door to become the house band at The Whisky. A few months later, returning to Los Angeles—this time from being invited by poet friends to be an interim adjunct instructor at Weber College in Utah, and Boise State College in Idaho—I was looking up at a billboard on the Sunset Strip when I saw this in block letters: THE DOORS BREAK ON THROUGH WITH AN ELECTRIFYING ALBUM with 4 familiar faces emblazoned on the sign. And I do remember thinking, with a mote of sentimentality in my eyes: Waitaminute, I know those guys.

Also, I recall being in an Elektra recording booth with Jim, during one of the last of the Soft Parade sessions. I was eyeballing this enlarged studio space with streamlined state-of-the-art sound equipment which looked (in retrospect) like something seen on a Star Wars dashboard. Mentioning this vastly enlarged version of earlier remembered Elektra studio surroundings, Morrison responded: “Yeah, twelve acid trips built this room!” Well sure, it’s easy to imagine that LSD ingestion might have fueled his lyric writing, but it’s also very important to realize that it might have simply amp’d up a literary sensibility he’d already been courting in previous years of self-education.

Let’s be quick to point-out too the many instances of clueless rockers who dropped copious amounts of acid yet were incapable of writing anything but new age hack and contrived gibberish. To further answer your initial question: I really can’t remember any incident where Ray’s and Jim’s individualism, more aptly their unique contributions to a modern American musicology—which over time did transmogrify into a blueprint for political rebellion—ever being overshadowed by their exterior glitter of global popularity.

DG: You’ve collaborated with Robbie Krieger, John Densmore, and the late Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and these efforts resulted in an album, Look Each Other in the Ears, which was the last recording all three members did together. In the track, “Mars is America,” you say the following: “There’s treachery in every tree they climb. / It’s a question of how much hostility / I can stand in one sitting. / I lock my door from the inside / of a Galaxy 6 Motel, / then boost myself over the sill / of a chinked window.” Can you talk about the inspiration behind not only these lines, but also the piece in general, and how timely might it also be to record another, yet very similar track, “America is Mars.” In other words, to what extent, in your view, are we isolating ourselves from the world and have we crossed the point of no return?

MCF: The way you frame this final question nudges me into feeling you already guessed the answer. If living in any city in America is like living on Mars, there’s a chance it could be like being trapped in the living nightmare middle chapters of a Philip K. Dick novel. This might be amplified by trying to survive on dangerous perimeters of a climate where curiosity has been replaced by indifference, creative originality has been replaced by the predictable. Peace has been replaced by war because members of the executive branch who truly wanted to protect this country have been sadistically replaced by an elite cadre of alleged money-laundering, war-mongering gangsters. One’s only individualistic protection might be characterized as suspicion, caution, and a wary, weary paranoia.

DG: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

MCF: To put a capper on your initial statement, David, you wrote some really flattering syntax with enormous respect for Harlan Steinberger who was engineering and executive producing that infamous recording project: Look Each Other in the Ears and reflecting on landmark marketing of it in two formats: both vinyl and compact disc.

Let me bottom line you. If nothing else, this document proves that I think of myself more of a participator than an innovator. And much obliged to you for your acknowledgements and recognitions.

MCF signing off!

Author Bio:

Michael C Ford’s first CD entitled Fire Escapes; was a 1995 entry from New Alliance Records & Tapes. Hen House Studios has been promoting and marketing Look Each Other in the Ears (2014). That document (both vinyl and CD) features a stellar band of musicians not the least of which were surviving members of a 1960s theatre rock quartet that most of you may recall as The Doors. In 2015, a chapbook length poem The Driftwood Crucifix was published by Los Ranchos Press. In 2017 Women under the Influence was published on the Central Coast by Word Palace Press. Foothills Publishing in New York State offers a book-length collection entitled The War Chamber Ministry His debut 12-inch-vinyl recording Language Commando earned a Grammy nomination on the 1st ballot in 1986 and his book of selected work: Emergency Exits earned initial nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1998. Populated Wilderness is being published this year in chapbook format as a fundraiser for Lockwood Animal Rescue Foundation.