The Lost Boy

Peter Filkins

Leon Stokesbury, ed., The Light The Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1991 111pp. $22.00 (cloth)

Though Frank Stanford published seven volumes of poetry before the age of thirty, followed by two more posthumous books after his suicide in 1978, his is hardly a household name, even among writers. Part of his obscurity is due, of course, to his early death; despite its power and intensity, Stanford's voice remains underdeveloped, cut off as it was in the throes of its own muscular talent, without the time to mature and stretch itself. On top of this, Stanford's meteoric career was conducted exclusively through small press publication, thus making the books very hard to find. Like that of Weldon Kees, however, Stanford's early and dramatic end, as well as the unavailability of his books, has helped to create a mystique around his life and work for those who know of him. Many people feel that American poetry lost one of its premier young voices with Stanford's passing, though his voice continues to evoke its own wrenching pain and darkness in the poems that survive.

Now that Leon Stokesbury has edited and selected a volume of the poems, drawing on published and unpublished work, at last more readers will have the opportunity to come to terms with Stanford. Writing in his introduction that Stanford "was, at the time of his death, the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five," Stokesbury -both editor and friend- at first sounds somewhat overblown in his praise. Nonetheless, he does provide a brief and useful sketch of Stanford's life, which helps to fill out the context behind the poems. His selection is thorough and economical, allowing the reader new to Stanford to get to know him at his best, without becoming mired in the indulgences and miscues common to any young poet. Indeed, the volume proves a fitting commemoration of the talent and the life.

Born and adopted in Mississippi, Stanford moved at the age of twelve to Arkansas, where he felt alienated by the racism that implicitly condemned the mixed racial culture of his early childhood. Stanford sought to recreate and dwell within that childhood through his poetry. As Stokesbury points out, the characters and voices that show up in his work are often those of rural blacks, their rhythms and speech patterns informing the cadence of Stanford's verse. Add to this the poet's own powerfull imagination and his penchant for the deep image, often overheated by a nightmarish mania for violence, and what you end up with is a distinctive voice: Southern Gothic in its leaning towards thc grotesque, romantic in its tapping of childhood, urbane and sophisticated in its ability to maneuver delicately along the tightrope of a convincing image above a chasm of grief and loss.

Consider, for instance, a poem as small and seemingly innocuous as "The Minnow":

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

Like the bad boy at a family picnic proudly presenting a slimy frog from the creek just when the potato salad is served, this is a poem that won't quite allow itself to be ignored. Yes, there's a kind of grinning intensity bordering on mania, and yes, there's a kind of fascination with its own fascination, an involvement with the drama of its own sense of shock and display. And yet, could the poem be said any other way? Need we be convinced of anything more than the voice that speaks it? And is it not a voice that reverberates and is heard?

In a late poem titled "Instead," Stanford writes, "When the rest of you / were being children / I became a monk / To my own listing / Imagination." If it weren't for the arrogance, it's a statement that could well serve as epitaph for the poet's brief career, for Stanford is a poet who worships at the altar of his own imagination, though he's also just as quick to sequester himself within its private, stony cell. In a poem like "The Singing Knives," lines such as "I dreamed that rising sun was smoking blood" and "I dreamed he was so beautiful / He had to die someday," at times seem to mean more to Stanford than they do the reader, for they are at heart sentimental, no matter how compelling and incantatory. At the same time, Stanford's longer poems often carry themselves forward through the sheer energy of their surreal narratives, as in tour de forces such as "The Snake Doctors" and "I'd Been Walking for Ever So Long," both too long and involved to quote from here. In short, when Stanford is on, he is convincingly so, carrying the reader through the folds of his marvelous fabrications, but when he is off, the poetry has a tendency to hide behind its own sensational gushing.

Perhaps Stanford's greatest strength as a poet was his eloquence on behalf of those whom he felt would be lost to time. Given his violent landscapes of swamps and river beds peopled by hunters, bootleggers, knife throwers, and poachers, "eloquence" might not be the first quality that would come to mind when thinking of this poetry, but it's very much a part of Stanford's ability to keep a cool distance on his subject matter while at the same time infusing it with his own sense of loss, such as here in "Their Names Are Spoken":

Where the saplings come up
In the belly of the road
Nobody has travelled for so long
I found the place you bear east

And walk over the hills
Until the sun goes down
And come onto smoke and goats
And the music of no socks

For a gate they use the stead
Of a tarnished brass bed
The little winds that came up
Like a child soaping a saddle

We dream on
Now night a cool moss
On the undersides of the cold ground
Keeps growing on the stones

In a phrase like "the music of no socks," or even those "little winds" that sound "Like a child soaping a saddle," clearly we witness a sensibility both tender and evocative, yet also one very much on the outside looking in at the lives it wishes to portray. There is no great surprise in this, of course, for art always involves some kind of distancing, but part of the poem's emotional weight rests with the move from the "I" at the beginning to the "We" at the end. In fact, it would seem that the "We" is something of a "dream" in itself, both a wish for return and an urge for identification. Hence the elegiac tone, Gray's churchyard turned backroad shanty, and hence the eloquence that celebrates what was, what is, and what will be forgotten, despite the wish to preserve it through memory and dream.

For no matter how much we worship, need, or romanticize it, memory bears a direct proportional link with death. The more an experience dwells and grows within memory, the more it is distanced from us through time. For Stanford, this became a critical loss, all of his poetry having drawn heavily upon his childhood realm. The further that he grew away from it, the more he reflected on just how distant it became, rather than the content of what had once been there. As if abandoned by his own past and let out to sea, there was nothing for him but to turn the other direction and stare directly at what lay ahead of him. The result, of course, was a growing obsession with death, clearly an unhealthy terrain to explore for one whose poems already had their fill of violence and decay.

These explorations of death read very much like his evocations of a lost childhood- at times surreal, paranoid, and obsessive; at others tender, rueful, even mature. If such a swing between extremes sounds adolescent, that's because it is, or at least sounds so in Stanford. The same poet who can begin a poem with a line as directly morose as "Death is a good word" ("Instead") can also surprise you with the eerie beauty at the end of "Everybody Who Is Dead," where he describes a man who has chosen to face his end:

He puts on a clean shirt and a dark suit
And goes to the barber shop
To let another man shave him.

He shuts his eyes
Remembers himself as a boy
Lying naked on a rock by the water.

Then he asks for the special lotion.
The old men line up by the chair
and the barber pours a little
In each of their hands.

Once again, though, it would seem that Stanford didn't know his own best strengths as a writer. Despite his intense exploration of death, the best of his poems on the subject sound more like elegies for others who have experienced it in their everyday lives rather than confessional meditations on the part of the poet himself. If he had lived, Stanford might well have become a poet of mature sadness, one gifted in his observation of life's pathos and passing, much like James Wright at the height of his career. In "A Milk Truck Running into a Crazy Maid at the Corner of Getwell and Park," Stanford demonstrates just this sense of wisdom and empathy when in the final third of the poem he speaks of the witnesses to the maid's death. Here they are, later on at home, as they consider the event:

They set the clock and lie back in the sheets.
They think of toes being slit
And blood that can be heard like a bad tap.
They draw their coats over an old woman's eyes
and think about standing in a warm pool
A white sheet wrapped around them
An old woman holding them
Taking them down into water.

Intense, full of the trepidation Stanford must have felt himself as he faced mortality, the lines hold sway above the darkness towards which they are drawn. Furthermore, as in the earlier "Their Names Are Spoken," his language undertakes to embody the vision of those who think they may have none. If for no other reason, Stanford's early death remains a loss for what he still had to report about the Consciousness of the underside of American life as seen through the eyes of one who stood among the bereft and abandoned, attempting as best he could to lay down their reality in song.

Crib Death, then, would seem a fitting title for the last of Stanford's books, published the year after his death. In many ways he never left the childhood that inspired the nightmares and dreams of his poetry, nor did he ever quite have the chance to grow up as a poet. "I looked down the steep slope of those days / a skier getting ready for a jump," he tells us in "Fire Left by Travellers." This would be enough in itself to describe the abundant and explosive talent that Frank Stanford possessed. In the line that follows, the last one, he writes, "I had things to say." Certainly he did, and he would have had many more things to say had he lived. It is sad, very sad, that he is no longer here to say them.

Peter Filkins

from New England Review, Summer 1992

Email: Peter Filkins