Book-Art
Anthologies
Alternative Publishing

Charles Henri Ford (1975)

Charles Henri Ford, now in his mid-sixties, is an unsung American original—a true polyartist who has exhibited paintings, made films, published collections of conventional poetry, and edited the little magazine View (1942-1947). He also co-authored, with Parker Tyler, one of the earliest explicitly homosexual novels, The Young & Evil (1933). His most recent book, Silver Flower Coo, is an unpaginated 64-part book-length poem composed of incomparably various typefaces (apparently clipped from newspapers—“found poetry”) and laid out in horizontal lines. This is truly “open field” poetry that exploits not only the space available on a large book page but also the different sizes and shapes of readily available type. “Visual poetry” in one sense, Silver Flower Coo is quote traditional in another respect—the words form comprehensible linear phrases that must be read as conventional modernist poetry. The interests are mostly erotic; the wit, both verbal and visual. The work of a true book-artist, Silver Flower Coo indicatively looks like nothing else ever published in the United States (except Ford’s earlier, privately issued Spare Parts [1966]), to my mind, his real subject is the expressive possibilities of common typography.