Frank Stanford

Richard Eberhart

The fact that Frank Stanford committed suicide is important in our estimation of him and will probably become more significant as time passes. He joins a number, almost a host, a small host of poets in my time who have taken their own lives, jumped off a steamer, put their head in an oven, leaped off a bridge, whatever, they are gone not into a world of light but of darkness. Thev trouble us too often to talk of their ends rather than of their works. I ask whether all these poetic and other art suicides are coincidental or whether they say something about our materialistic society, the impact of the harshness of the times on sensitive spirits less able to bear reality than other people. I never get a good answer, usually no answer. Comments run from feelings of the tragic to those of the absurd.

I knew Frank Stanford through Irving Broughton, but not well. They came here by car from Seattle in 1972, attended our daughter Gretchen's wedding (Frank and I took a swim in the Cherinton's pond in Meriden), and followed us to our place in Maine where they stayed a few days. Frank could be the most silent of men. He was remarkably silent. However, after a day or two in Maine he loosened tip and began to talk, was friendly and communicative. We liked him a lot and enjoyed his company. He told me once that he was wanted in Arkansas, I don't remember why. Maybe I did not want to know. He said he could not go back into the state. I remember him vividly and liked him a lot, had no idea of what would be his fate after a while. I am astonished not only by the originality and power of his poems but by his exit from this world.

Stanford speaks with a kind of authority absolute to himself. He is a realist, yet with a strange grace of language, often ending poems on a bizarre, thrusting, conclusive note. He deals with the life of everyman, a kind of simple Western-Southern Langland (c. 1330- 1400) but without his largeness of organization or breadth of view of the common man, and without his scriptural prejudices. Frank was not in a position to deal with subtleties of the academy, he dealt with the true realities of people and situations he knew and produced a remarkable, unforgettable body of work. His worth is more in what he says than in how he says it in the sense that you do not expect him to conduct a sestina, or originate a new style. His style is the basic truth of common things truly spoken, the brunt and savagery and grace too of what he knew. There is plenty of despair and death but all said with a cleanness and a crispness, a compelling liveness that leads the reader on and sometimes makes him breathless with the strength and power of the words, their swift management and direct flashings and their jabbing maturity of thought. It is a pain that this remarkable achievement should be cut short. He tells his poems straight. The language is taut and fine. The reality is there, inescapable. His work gives the satisfaction of a poet of authority.

All of his lines are typical, typically his own. This is easy to say now but hard to realize how he could be so good in so relatively short a time. Not a word out of place, remarkable hits, few errors. Truth and honesty throughout. In "Between Love and Death" (from Crib Death, Ironwood Press, 1978, p.32) all you have to do is to read it. It does not invite the kind of criticism practiced in the academies. It is about going, not going to a woman. "God I was crazy for not/Going to her door." "A bird sick of its tree, I despair." And the last five lines, something left unsaid, suggested, evoked:

She bled through the walls
Into my side of the house,
And they came with their lights
Asking did I know the woman,
And I said no, not I.

What a world of sympathy and empathy in the finality of the last line. This is only one example of the many splendid, incorrigible poems of Frank Stanford.

from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.