Frank Stanford

Frank Stanford
Born	(1948-08-01)August 1, 1948 Richton, Mississippi
Died	June 3, 1978(1978-06-03) (aged 29) Fayetteville, Arkansas
Occupation	Poet, land surveyor
Nationality	American

Frank Stanford (August 1, 1948 – June 3, 1978) was a prolific American poet. He is most known for his epic, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You— a labyrinthine, highly lexical book absent punctuation and line breaks. In addition, Stanford published six shorter books of poetry throughout his 20s, and three posthumous collections of his writings (as well as a book of selected poems) have also been published.

Just shy of his 30th birthday, Stanford died on June 3, 1978 in his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the victim of three self-inflicted pistol wounds to the heart. In the three decades since, he has become somewhat of a cult figure in American letters.

Biography

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Stanford's birthplace. Emery Memorial Home burned in 1964.

Early Life And Education

Frank Stanford was born Francis Gildart Smith on August 1, 1948 to widow Dorothy Margaret Smith at the Emery Memorial Home in Richton, Mississippi. He was soon adopted by a single divorcée named Dorothy Gilbert Alter (1911-2000), who was Firestone's first female manager. In 1952, Gilbert married successful Memphis levee engineer Albert Franklin Stanford (1883-1963), who subsequently also adopted “Frankie” and his younger, adoptive sister, “Ruthie” (Bettina Ruth). The children attended Sherwood Elementary School in Memphis, Tennessee, then junior high school in Mountain Home, Arkansas, where the family had moved in the late 1950s following A.F. Stanford's retirement. The elder Stanford died during the poet's freshman year at Mountain Home High School.

Subiaco Abbey and Academy, where Stanford attended prep school from 1964-1966.

In 1964, as a sophomore, Stanford entered Subiaco Academy — a boys' prep school run by Benedictine monks who provided a rigorous liberal arts and physical fitness curriculum — near Paris, Arkansas in the Ouachita Mountains. After graduating in May 1966, he entered the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the fall, pursuing a civil engineering degree as his stepfather had done at the same institution some sixty years earlier. In January 1967, the spring semester of his freshman year, Stanford took a poetry class from instructor James Whitehead who — quickly impressed with Stanford's talent — let the poet into the graduate poetry-writing workshop, an uncommon occurrence. Stanford soon became known throughout the Fayetteville literary community and even edited an issue of the student literary magazine, Preview. However, he left the university in 1969, never earning a degree.

Career

1969-1972

Over the next several years, Stanford kept writing, publishing in a wide range of literary journals and magazines around the world. He met Irving Broughton, the editor and publisher of Mill Mountain Press, at the Hollins Conference on Creative Writing and Cinema in 1970. Broughton read Stanford's work at the conference and agreed to publish the poet's first book; The Singing Knives was released in 1971 as a limited edition chapbook. That same year, Stanford married and divorced Linda Mencin, her father retired from the Army.

"The Minnow" If I press on its head, the eyes will come out like stars. The ripples it makes can move the moon.

Frank Stanford, c. 1971.

The poet spent much of 1972 traveling through the South and New England with Broughton, a communications teacher and filmmaker. Together, the two interviewed and filmed poets/writers Richard Eberhart, Malcolm Cowley, and John Crowe Ransom. (These interviews appear in The Writer’s Mind: Interviews With American Authors, a three-volume set.) Broughton tutored Stanford in the technical aspects of camera work, and the poet developed an interest in filmmaking. Moreover, he briefly lived in New York City, if perhaps for merely a few weeks, but only, he would later write, "to go to the movies."

The one constant in his life, writing poetry, continued unabated. Returning to Arkansas from New York, he took a room in the New Orleans Hotel in Eureka Springs, where he worked on his magnum opus, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. The details surrounding the creation of the poem are almost fatefully obscured, but consensus is that Stanford had composed significant sections of the work as a teenager, then returned sporadically to the manuscript throughout his 20s leading up to the book's 1977 publication.

1973-1976

In the spring of 1973, while in Eureka Springs, he met painter Ginny Crouch, and they soon married, settling first in a house near Rogers, Arkansas on Beaver Lake, but elsewhere in the years to follow— including her family's farm in southern Missouri. For several years, he meagerly supported himself and his second wife by working as an unlicensed land surveyor. Stanford and Broughton made a documentary about Stanford's work and life titled, It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood, which won an award at the Northwest Film & Video Festival.

Based in Washington, Broughton received manuscripts from Stanford, sometimes transcribing additional poems via telephone from him in Arkansas and the East Coast. Following the publication of The Singing Knives, Broughton's Mill Mountain Press published five more of Stanford's chapbook-length manuscripts between 1973 and 1976. Shade appeared in 1973, followed by Ladies From Hell in 1974. Field Talk and Arkansas Bench Stone (as well as a limited, second edition of Shade) were published in 1975. Perhaps the strongest of the chapbooks, Constant Stranger, was released the following year.

Returning to Arkansas in 1975, Stanford reestablished relationships with Fayetteville writers and met poet C.D. Wright, a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas. In 1976, Stanford rented a house in Fayetteville on Jackson Drive with Wright and established the independent publishing operation Lost Roads Publishers to publish the work of talented poets without ready access to publishing. The first Lost Roads title was Wright’s Room Rented By A Single Woman in 1977.

1977-1978

The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You

The cover of the 1st edition of Stanford's magnum opus, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (1977).

1977 saw the publication of Stanford's most substantial and influential book, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. A joint publication by Mill Mountain Press and Lost Roads (taking up numbers 7-12 in the Lost Roads catalog), the published version of the epic (which had, at one point, according to Stanford, reached over 1,000 pages and 40,000 lines) settled at 542 pages (383 pages in the second, 2000, edition) and 15,283 lines. Friends and poets — some prominent — had read parts or all of the manuscript, at least in earlier forms, years before its publication. In an April 1974 letter to David Walker, editor of FIELD, Stanford notes that poet Alan Dugan had written to him with the response, "This is better than good, it is great ... one day it will explode," and that poet John Berryman had noted, "Most poets would give their left eye to have written this, and their other eye to have done what you've done." The poem, perhaps surprisingly, has yet to "explode," but has achieved almost mythic status in certain circles.

Final Months And Days

By 1978, Stanford was heavily occupied with Lost Roads' publishing endeavors. Father Nicholas Fuhrmann, Stanford's former English teacher and longtime friend, has noted that Stanford was, during this period, visiting his mother (who was living near Subiaco) more often than had seemed usual. Stanford spent his last week in New Orleans before returning to Fayetteville on June 3rd.

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Stanford's grave in St. Benedict's Cemetery at Subiaco, Arkansas.

Death

On the evening of June 3, 1978, Stanford took his own life in his home at 705 Jackson Dr. in Fayetteville. In her essay, "Death In The Cool Evening," widow Ginny Stanford notes that her husband had committed adultery and that she confronted him about the affair. Following an argument, Stanford retreated to his bedroom, and moments later, gunshots were heard: Stanford had thrice shot himself in the heart with a .22-caliber target pistol. Both Ginny Stanford and the poet's lover, C.D. Wright, were in the house (in different rooms) at the time of his death. Police reported that Stanford was dead on their arrival to the home at 7:28 p.m.; Deputy Coroner Hugh Huppert subsequently ruled the death a suicide. Stanford was buried in St. Benedict's Cemetery at Subiaco beneath a stand of yellow pines, five miles from the Arkansas River.

Aside from Stanford's likely shame, other potentially oppressive factors may have motivated his suicide. Wright and Ginny Stanford reported that the poet was depressed and withdrawn on the day of his suicide. Father Fuhrmann, who had met with Stanford approximately ten days before the poet's death, feels that the poet had "a lot on his mind." Stanford had attempted suicide before, too — at least twice — and had, in 1972, also spent time at the state mental hospital in Little Rock.

Legacy

Frank Stanford's legacy is one shrouded in (and perhaps tainted by) legend, mystification, and inaccuracies. Stanford frequently embellished his letters and personal anecdotes. Numerous misprints rampant throughout published articles and essays have confused even the most elemental details, hindering potential for critical scholarship. For example, a 2002 collaborative interview in Poets & Writers credits C.D. Wright as original publisher of The Singing Knives (Mill Mountain Press, 1971); Stanford met Wright in 1975. Even Stanford's very books have printed biographical and bibliographical errors; for instance, the biographical note for Crib Death states that Stanford was "born in 1949 in Greenville, Mississippi," when in fact he was born in 1948 in Richton, Mississippi, some 240 miles away, and the table of contents for The Light The Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford lists The Singing Knives as having been published in 1972, Shade as having been published in 1975, and Crib Death as having been published in 1979, when in fact they were published in 1971, 1973, and 1978, respectively.

Posthumous Works

"Instead" Death is a good word. It often returns When it is very Dark outside and hot, Like a fisherman Over the limit, Without pain, sex, Or melancholy. Young as I am, I Hold light for this boat. When the rest of you Were being children I became a monk To my own listing Imagination. Nights and days floated Over the whorehouse Like webs on the lake, A monastery Full of noise and girls. The moon throws the knives. The poets echo goodbye, Towing silence too. Near my house was an Island, where a horse Lathered up alone. Oh, Abednego He was called, dusky, Cruel as a poem To a black gypsy. Sadness and whiskey Cost more than friends. I visit prisons, Orphanages, joints, Hoping I'll see them Again. Willows, ice, Minnows, no money. You'll have to say it Soon, you know. To your Wife, your child, yourself.

Frank Stanford, c. 1979.

Ironwood Press published Stanford's chapbook, Crib Death, in 1978, shortly after the poet's death. Lost Roads, editorship succeeded by C.D. Wright, published a posthumous chapbook of yet more of Stanford's poems, titled You (as well as a limited edition reprint of The Singing Knives) in 1979. In 1990, the press released a collection of Stanford's short fiction, titled Conditions Uncertain And Likely To Pass Away. A 111-page volume of selected poems, The Light The Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford, was published the following year by the University of Arkansas Press. Furthermore, much of Stanford's work is as yet unpublished, including at least one completed manuscript titled, Automatic Co-Pilot.

Distribution

Despite flourishing interest in Frank Stanford's work, large publishing houses have yet to develop interest in the poet. Stanford's small press publishers to date — Mill Mountain, Ironwood, and Lost Roads — have faced variable limitations with respect to production and distribution, most of Stanford's titles having been released as limited edition chapbooks, long since out of print. In October 2000, Lost Roads republished The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You in a corrected edition with numbered lines, and the press reprinted the book again in 2008. On February 1, 2008, Lost Roads republished The Singing Knives and You.

Reception

Stanford's work has been described as surrealistic tall tales— poems of wild embellishment with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape, drawn from his childhood in the Mississippi Delta and the Ozark mountains. He has been written about in at least two folk songs: the Indigo Girls' "Three Hits" and Lucinda Williams' "Pineola."

Stanford had a profound impact on regional poets, and 1997 saw significant homegrown activity in Arkansas and Missouri. A tribute to Stanford on July 26, 1997 featured a screening of It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood at Vox Anima, a Mountain Street gallery in Fayetteville. That summer also saw Stanford in print in the Ozarks, with three of his poems reprinted in The Portable Plateau along with Ginny Stanford’s essay, "Death In The Cool Evening." The same issue also featured an essay recounting the return of Stanford's sister, Ruth, to Fayetteville for the July tribute, while the The New Orleans Review published Ginny Stanford's essay, “Requiem: A Fragment,” a companion piece of sorts to "Death In The Cool Evening." Photos of Frank Stanford by the widow accompanied her essays in both The Portable Plateau and The New Orleans Review.

Stanford's work has also received critical praise. Alan Dugan — Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award recipient — called Stanford “a brilliant poet, ample in his work,” comparing him to Walt Whitman, and poet Franz Wright called him "one of the great voices of death." Poet Lorenzo Thomas called him "amazing ... a swamprat Rimbaud, poet James Wright referred to him as “a superbly accomplished and moving poet," and poet Richard Eberhart praised the “strange grace of language in the poet’s remarkable, unforgettable body of work.” Leon Stokesbury introduces The Light The Dead See by claiming that Stanford was, "at the time of his death, the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five." His contemporaries remarked his “perfectly tuned” ears, the “remarkable acuity” of his “clear-cut imagery and spring-tight lines,” and his “remarkable talent” as a “testimony to [his] place in American letters.”

However, Stanford's legacy has been largely overlooked in the canonization process of poetry anthologies and university literature courses. He is one of the least known of the significant voices of American poetry of the 1970s, yet in his day he was widely published in many prominent magazines, including The New Yorker, Chicago Review, kayak, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, FIELD, The Massachusetts Review, The Mill Mountain Review, The Nation, The New American Review, The New York Quarterly, Esquire, American Poetry Review, and Poetry Now.

Bibliography

• The Singing Knives (Mill Mountain Press, 1971; Lost Roads, 1979, 2008)
• Shade (Mill Mountain Press, 1973, 1975)
• Ladies From Hell (Mill Mountain Press, 1974)
• Field Talk (Mill Mountain Press, 1975)
• Arkansas Bench Stone (Mill Mountain Press, 1975)
• Constant Stranger (Mill Mountain Press, 1976)
• The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (Mill Mountain Press/Lost Roads, 1977; Lost Roads, 2000)
• Crib Death (Ironwood Press, 1978)
• You (Lost Roads, 1979, 2008)
• Conditions Uncertain And Likely To Pass Away (Lost Roads, 1990)
• The Light The Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford (University of Arkansas, 1991)

External Links

• Frank Stanford bibliography at Verdant Press
• Frank Stanford at The Academy of American Poets
• Poetry, photographs, essays and letters at The Alsop Review
• "The Life And Work of Frank Stanford" at Rain Taxi, Fall 1998
• "The Long Goodbye" by Ben Ehrenreich at The Poetry Foundation, 1/2008