An Interview with Frank Stanford

Irving Broughton

IRV BROUGHTON: What does the river mean to you?

FRANK STANFORD: The river is like a travellng friend who keeps going. You remember them and you forget them, but they just keep passing on. They are always strangers and always friends, and that's the way the river is

IB: What's your favorite river?

FS: I don't think I have a favorite river. I think I might have favorite small creeks or small bodies of water.

IB: Can you stand to be away from the water?

FS: Oh, I can be away from the river, but it's pretty hard to be apart from water. I like to be around water.

IB: Why?

FS: Because Lao-tse said water was the most powerful thing and it was the most passive thing - you could pass your hand through it quite easily, yet it can destroy cities and towns with its force.

IB: Have you ever felt the power of it?

FS: Yes. The power of it is like there is an eyeball you can't see and the waves come and loosen it out of a head - it's as if a horse kicked another horse's eye in and it's just waiting to pop out.

IB: What is strange to you?

FS: A lot of people have come up with some neat aphorisms and platitudes about reality and commonplace and inimitable and ineffable ways of living. But I think New York is strange; I think Cape Cod is strange, that Maine is strange. I don't think you should try to say the more experience someone has had the more varied experience, that therefore he is going to open himself up to strangers.

IB: When did you realize this strangeness?

FS: It took me a long time to realize anything about my past or experiences or that the way I wrote was strange. I thought it was just my way of doing something, and I didn't think it was stranger than what I was reading.

IB: When did you begin to realize this?

FS: Other poets, teachers, and editors pointed it out - people who read my things.

IB: Such as?

FS: Well, the person who thinks I'm the strangest would be Alan Dugan. A letter I received once from John Berryman - he thought my poetry was pretty strange. When editors reject or accept your poems they seem to put on mine - they say they like the music, the architecture, and the originality. But then, a lot of them put that it's no good at all. They don't like it at all.

IB: Do you think they understand it?

FS: No, and I don't think that a lot of them want to understand it.

IB: What would it take besides the desire for them to understand it?

FS: If you had a stack of poems that you had been reading all night I think you might as well reject mine, too. If a person is quiet enough inside he might be able to catch on to what I'm trying to do in my poetry.

IB: What are you trying to do?

FS: Although I don't want people at the end of it to say that this was obviously a poem, I want it to have the traits of a poem - as a symphony has the traits of a symphony. What I want to do is use movement and rhythm on different levels. I want it to be like the reader was going into the reading of the poem as they were going for a boat ride in some swift water, and each layer of the poem was a different thing you have to do. One was the river and one was the use of his paddle. Many of the poems around are too simple. They take us for granted. Our sensibilities have been taken for granted for too long. I don't think that much of it is really poetry. It's just a coalition of things that might take ten minutes or ten months to write. However, I do believe that maybe it's just that I don't keep up with what's going on, but there are a hell of a lot of good young writers. I don't want to say any names because I would be afraid of leaving some out or maybe not even remembering some of their names.

IB: Do you think you can really capture the strangeness of your work? Or the environment?

FS: I don't go out and say, "I'm going to hunt down what is strange, then I'm going to put it down on paper." You can't do that, and to do it would be like killing and mounting it, and there is enough of that being done. I want to just let it exist in the flux of things. It is the poetry of being awake and asleep at the same time. It's just not night or day, it's both.

IB: I think James Dickey points out that a line of poetry can be too good. Would you say that an experience could perhaps be too good - too strange?

FS: Yeah. I hardly ever use a direct experience. For one, I don't like to do that. For another thing, a lot of people probably think that what a person writes he has done. They are too strange, and it would require too much time, and I'm just not interested in doing that. There are things that have taken place that I couldn't touch with a ten-foot pole as far as using them.

IB: George Garrett said of Southern writers that they are a "race of storytellers."

FS: I know there are storytellers, liars, whatever you want to say. It's easy to be in a situation in a room - you're not getting out of trouble or you're not doing it to just promote yourself and company - but it's just as easy to offhand come up with a story. To this little tension of trying to keep the attention of someone else, I would say that he's probably right with those people who identify themselves as a group or a race of people. It's still hard for me to think of myself as a writer or a kind of writer - poet is about all. I don't mean this to sound self-effacing or naive, and a lot of people agree with this. But I do think of myself as a poet.

IB: How many drafts do you do of a poem?

FS: It depends. I might do a hundred. I might do one. On shorter poems - single poems that aren't in a series - I probably revise over and over and over, whereas the narrative poems under three hundred or four hundred lines, possibly forty or fifty revisions. But poems that are a cycle I tend to revise the cycle rather than the poem. In the case of a very long poem, say over ten thousand lines, there will be passages which will be very much revised.

IB: Do you have a short attention span?

FS: No, to the contrary, one of my problems is I can sustain my attention too long, thereby being spellbound or overwhelmed by a particular genre or a particular piece, which sometimes makes for neglect as far as other genres are concerned. I've done a little painting recently - just enough to speak of. No music, no filming.

IB: You do sumye painting. What is sumye painting?

FS: It's just a form of Japanese painting, and it's done very quickly. The staff is like a pin or a sword. You just sit there, and you may stare at a blank piece of paper for hours and hours, and suddenly you unsheath it and execute your strokes. There's no revision. I don't say this is analogous to my poetry, but I enjoy that painting.

IB: Who is your favorite violent person?

FS: Carl Orfi; the composer, and Muhammad Ali are probably two of my favorites. I would rather have been Muhammad Ali than T.S. Eliot. Or I'd rather have been Brando than Eliot.

IB: Dickey feels Faulkner strains too hard to be literary.

FS: Dickey might have the same problem as his crew of people and the people he was influenced by. They tried just as hard to strive to be non-literary. It's the same way Lawrence hated himself as an intellectual and he was always trying to deny this. His language is adverbs and adjectives and convoluted sentences that the reader would like. Both sensibilities can be accommodated.

IB: What about Dickey's characters in Deliverance; What did you think about the mountain people?

FS: I've seen this phenomenon take place. Take an old fast, fairly unknown river - except that people lived around it and turn it into a big reservoir. They have them all over the South now, mainly because Arkansas is one of the first Places they started doing it -and Tennessee. I assume you're dwelling on Dickey because he is a very popular poet and writer and a personality in the screenplay, and I would hope it has nothing to do with me. There is a similarity in some of our work -people have pointed that out. I think some of his poems are among the best written, especially the one called "Shark's Parlor." After all, we poets have to realize that, except for Agee and Faulkner - if you can call Faulkner poetry, that only a few of us have broken into the motion-picture industry. We have to do that. We just can't let these second-rate novelists and playwrights keep jumping the gun on us. Just think of this: if Galway Kinnell or William Stafford or Daniel Hoffman or some of these men could have a chance, maybe they wouldn't even want to do it.

IB: Getting back to the Deliverance characters. What about the mountain people?

FS: I've come across people that are ornery, and these people do exist. I don't think he intended to stereotype all mountain people like that. It reminds me of the Easy Rider film where the hippies get shot. All these things take place. It's not strange, I don't think what happened in the story was strange to Dickey. I think it's easy to indict a screenwriter or a poet for stereotyping, and it's easy to indict some kinds of novelists. But I give the author the benefit of the doubt that he's just not interested in the empty form where he can pull off something that he is interested in - the other man's character.

IB: What types of the novel would it be a problem with?

FS: We've had a lot of war novels - things that have a lot to do with the war. A lot of people label all Southern things as "Southern grotesque." They throw it in like that. I've had some Yankee say, "This is Southern grotesque." And I've seen men actively come out against anything that can be construed as Southern.

IB: What makes a genuine poet?

FS: You know that there are many poets around now. A lot of them seem to be fighting over this or that. I don't really know. I don't even know what makes me a poet. I certainly don't want anybody telling me what does or what doesn't.

IB: Do you ever concern yourself with the morality of dreams?

FS: Yes, I do. In reality things happen that we try to understand with our consciousness as a judiciary, and it's the same way in sleep. You wake up and you dreamed something that might not be any stranger than what happened to you the day before. You want to know why it happened, more than any psychological reason for why did I dream this. I want to know why did the action take place? What happened to this man? What happened to this woman? Is it good or is it bad?

IB: Does this trouble you sometimes when you don't know?

FS: Yes, it does.

IB: Can you trace your dreams to experience - maybe something the day before?

FS: You can come across things that may be insignificant during the day or maybe not insignificant, and they turn up in that state. But imagine this: that during the day a man is a cartographer for that geography, that terrain, those rivers and waters and all this land - topography of what he goes through at night. I don't advocate that we should abolish order and accept chaos of just sleep unless we just want to sleep all the time. I look to William Blake for instruction in those matters. When I comer across a problem I can't solve, generally, I'll read a poem by Blake - a very simple poem from something like Poetical Sketches, or maybe one of the longer things. I come to some realization. Then I might read something by Burns to lift me up.

IB: Who are your two or three favorite poets?

FS: I would think that most of the Old English and Middle English work. I'm talking about the English writers. I like all of the Romantics. I like Dickinson, Whitman, Rossetti. I believe I learned more about form from William Blake than anyone else.

Irving Broughton