Terri Ford (Yuli Wu photo) | ZOOM |

        It is a plain gray house in Winton Place. A swing hangs from the wooden front porch in front of the small green lawn. On the inside, though, it's anything but plain. A pillow in the shape of a jumbo pair of red lips sits atop the leopard-print couch. On the floor are scattered zebra-print pillows. Welcome to poet Terri Ford's writing grounds.

        Miss Ford recently released her first book of poetry, Why the Ships are She (Four Way Books; $13.95), and is working on a second book.

        “I guess I thought as a grown-up poet I should have a book,” she says. “That's what poets do.”

        That is what she does. This is where she does it. This is how she does it.

Pretty in pink

        Miss Ford's hair is bright pink.

        Brighter than the pink heart on her red shirt under her white overalls. Brighter than the plastic pink watch wrapped around her wrist. Brighter than the pink flower over the eye of the model on the Sephora catalog strewn across the floor with all the others.

        Miss Ford's hair is bright, vivid — like the images in her poems.

        In Why the Ships are She,Miss Ford writes about her family, the beauty parlor and a pair of women's big, white briefs in a panty raid.

PANTY RAID

By Terri Ford It is 1974 and out the institutional open windows of the college dorm, nylon bikinis in floral prints are plummeting like the cheap bodies of birds. And then your mother's large white briefs like a mainsail, like a flag of surrender, begin a slow dancing down current, cinematic, lithe. All of the faces are turning up, hushed, like those holding a hoop to save a child burning. It is the opposite of being lifted into the sky the way I imagined my grandfather ascending after the long pain of illness: this large pair of underpants falling forever on the startled face of an undergraduate boy. For Paula Snow

        She writes about topics that find a way of touching people, including her friend Elizabeth Logan Harris.

        “I respond to her poetry from somewhere deep inside of myself,” Ms. Harris says. “The humor, the sadness, the deep understanding of the body, she brings that all to her work. It becomes a very personal experience reading her poems for me.”

        Miss Ford says the topics of her poems have expanded as she has continued to write.

        “When I first started writing seriously, I thought I had to write about serious topics like illness and failed love,” she says. “Actually, I still write about those things. But there's a lot more. The impulse to write is close to the impulse for telling the truth.”

Tools of the trade

        In the room between the living room and the kitchen, a black computer monitor sits on a circular wooden table covered with clutter. The matching black tower rests on the floor.

        But this is not where Miss Ford writes. She writes by hand, not by keyboard.

        “I have to be able to feel some stage of commitment with it,” Miss Ford says. “I feel less able to change it once it's typed.”

        She also knows she isn't going to achieve perfection on the first try.

        “I write a lot more than I would ever show to somebody,” she says. “Some of it is just crap.”

        She's learned to recognize what will be further developed.

        “Either I'm interested in it and it seems to be something or it doesn't,” says Miss Ford, who also works at a lawyer's office and teaches literature and writing at Northern Kentucky University. “Sometimes I think it's something. Sometimes I definitely don't. Other times I'm not sure, and I probably won't know for sure until I read it out loud in public somewhere.”

        Reading in public was something Miss Ford got to do a lot of when she ran a poetry series for about seven years. It was also something that kept her writing new material.

        “I thought I was going to have to dig out a lot of old poems to keep on reading,” she says. “But then I realized I didn't want to read old stuff. I wanted to read whatever I was writing at that time.”

        She also changed her mind about something else.

        “At first I wanted to read what I thought was really good and impress people with what I thought was good,” she says. “Then I started wanting to read things I had just written to find out if they were good or not.

        “That meant sometimes I would risk sucking in public. But I think that's a good experience, a good experience for me.”

        She sits down on the white leather chair surrounded by mini-mountains of shopping bags. Danvers, her black cat, begins to bat at the earring dangling from her left ear. The right ear has no matching earring, only little, sparkling studs like the one in her nose.

        Her toenails, painted in an array of colors, peek out from the leopard-print band of her sandals, which matches the leopard-print bins in front of the fireplace and the leopard-print purses on the mantel. And, of course, the leopard-print couch with the jumbo, red lip pillow.

        Miss Ford doesn't seem shy with her leopard-print interior and fluorescent pink hair. Her voice is strong and confident. Her regular sentences are filled with drama. She has the kind of voice that could keep even the sleepiest student awake in the most boring lecture class — more than just awake, hanging on each word.

        The life and energy that are in her poems are also in her voice. But she recognizes that performing poetry can be scary.

        “It's making something public that you did alone in your room,” she says. “And it's hard to get over that "This is all about me and these people are all looking at me.' They're either thinking that I'm good or that I suck.”

She doesn't work alone

        When Miss Ford performs her poetry, people aren't looking at just her. She has a partner. Christian Schmit, who goes by the name Uncle Glockenspiel and is essentially a one-man band who has been putting sound to Miss Ford's readings for the last three or four years.

        “It started with Terri wanting to have some kind of music or noise to accompany her poetry,” Mr. Schmit says. “She asked me if I had any ideas, and I said I'd put my brain to it for a while.

        “I read her poems and tried to find noises that were appropriate. Next thing I knew, I had this strange menagerie of objects and instruments.”

        This menagerie includes a saw played with a violin bow and a push lawnmower played with a drumstick.

        While he says the experience of hearing Miss Ford perform her poems can't be duplicated, he hears her when he reads them to himself.

        “When I read her poems, I feel like she's talking to me,” Mr. Schmit says. “It's definitely Terri's voice on the paper. There's not much difference between the way she would talk to you and the way she would write a poem.”

        Miss Ford considers Mr. Schmit, who designed the cover of her book, a part of her work.

        “Performing with him is such a different experience,” Miss Ford says. “It's more like being a rock star. In some ways, I feel like I'm singing. I'm practically out of my body I'm so happy.”

        She's also happy with her book.

        Seventy pages - that's how many are in Why the Ships are She. That's how many Miss Ford loves.

        “I love my book,” she says. “I really love everything about my book.”

        Including the pink back cover. No, not brighter than her hair.

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