Playing The Child: Frank Stanford's The Pump

Irving Broughton

In Frank Stanford's poem "The Pump" there is an innocence and rawness, which first attracted me to his work, when we met at the Hollins College Conference on Creative Writing and Film some years ago.

With the simplicity of a child the poem moves in an almost stream of consciousness way toward open realization. In the second stanza Stanford writes, "Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms / I got worms under the slick boards." It is a sublimated ego, a voice deliberately naive, like a shy child who wants the world to know that he, too, had a birthday party once, and reaches into someone else's discussion to make the connection. In this, as in many of his poems, Stanford, like the child, makes organic poems. The lines grow from previous lines and stanzas, so that the ultimate effect is a free-flowing poetry of sentiment and, oftentimes, understated emotion.

I once asked Stanford if he was a good at recounting his dreams. He said he believed one dreams his own dream in the poem, that it isn't a matter of recounting; rather it is a matter of actually having the experience in the poem itself. The question of the subconscious, of course, came up. "The same state," Stanford ejected. "I can deduce it in myself when I'm awake."

The pump is alive:

"The pump would bite you in winter/It got hold of Jimmy." Then comes my favorite line, which works not by evoking the power of religion but because of the quality of the metaphor itself. He writes, "Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus." It could have been Buddha, perhaps, or some other cornerstone religious figure. But the message is clear, the pump gives and gives and only gives. There is a taste of irony when the understatement catches one off guard, amid this poem of seemingly simple sentiment and description. and one finds Stanford doing what he does so remarkably: taking chances in poetry -as in life, and somehow in the poetry managing to pull them off.

I write about this poem not because it is his best but because I like it and because it reminds me of the Frank Stanford I knew. and now miss so much -the quiet, intense, sometimes outrageous figure sitting outside in rural Arkansas, by his barn, telling stories and drinking wine from a bottle. That bottle, when empty, would go to the antique dealer in Eureka Springs for forty cents more than it had cost full.

Irving Broughton