Frank Stanford And One Of His Poems

Linda Gregg

Frank Stanford knew a world unfamiliar to me. The world of the South, the life of an orphan, going to Catholic schools, growing up with blacks mostly, and suicide. His poetry knows that world with an absoluteness. He has a remarkable ability to make it present in poems. I don't mean telling about it or describing parts of it. I mean he can make that world exist in his poems. Very few people can do that.

He seems, at first, like a good television reporter at the scene of an accident, keeping to the side and (at his best) refusing to take liberties. Graduallv it becomes clear he is after something in addition to the story. I am not sure what. Sometimes he makes me think of a jazz musician going after something hard and important, determined to make the very hardness become the beauty. Other times, there is a covert sad tenderness in the poetry. Sometimes there is a hint of something like cruelty which may be something else. It is hard for me to be sure. The texture of his spirit is so unfamiliar to me. It is easy to see his energy and abundance and originality, but there is something else I do not recognize.

In the poem, "A Milk Truck Running Into a Crazy Maid at the Corner of Getwell and Park," I keep imagining a bright full moon even though it is never mentioned. That's the way I feel about Stanford. What is he after? There is a kind of jive stance in calling her "Crazy Maid" which creates infectious energy. But it also makes me bristle. Maybe he means the title as an ironic reference to the unfeeling way newspapers often put flippant headlines on such stones. But I suspect he is using the title more ambitiously than that. My bristling may protect the poem from the automatic sympathy we feel for the flood of catastrophes and atrocities in each day's news. I think here and elsewhere in his poetry he is struggling to hold on to the particular reality: to the woman in the poem as real, human, special, herself. It is so easy for it to turn into the familiar poem of social injustice. (There is no doubt, of course, that Frank Stanford is concerned with social injustice. But I am focusing on something in addition to that.

However natural and admirable that quick compassion is, it risks losing this woman and her own tragedy. Frank Stanford may be using language and tone to keep her alive for me in the poem as a person. That may be important to him in a way that he struggles against her becoming an example of injustice.

The control of nuance in his work interests me as a writer. He has a special sense of words one bv one in relation to each other.

They pull a coat over an old woman's eyes

Woman could be the important word, or it could be they But it is pull and eyes that give weight to coat and old and woman. They PULL the coat over an old woman's EYES. (In a different way, the line may turn on the use of an instead of the.) The same feel for the words is at work in

No one knows but she worked everyday.

No one knows makes a hum, a buzz of many being asked and answering. Everyday has a softness and numbing like doing things over and over. The next four lines move like somebody dealing quickly with the facts, or going to a lumber yard and telling the worker what he wants. The line is laced in, held between the staunch preceeding line and the stupid, heroic, pathetic lines the woman says before she lifts the skirt of her white dress and makes her way into the highway as if it were a river for her death.

But even more, my mind keeps coming back to the mystery of Stanford's sensibility. To that invisible moon of what he wants. It is probably connected to what I have said is a hint of something like cruelty in his poems, or that element which is not cruelty but sometimes seems related. Maybe he looked on his often terrible material too much and it cost him. It is difficult for the heart to go through Hell even with the finest intentions. To go through and remain unscarred. Like the best people who saw too much of the wars. Their eyes change. Whatever the name is for the way all that changed Stanford, it is one of the special things about his poetry. And is probably why he seems to dread the easy sympathy which can be a lessening. Like the father in his poem who is being told of his son having just been killed at the sawmill and desperately anxious about it being violated by automatic language or emotion.

As in any really good poetry, all this goes together: the material, the craft, and the poet. A real Frank Stanford writes about something that matters and gets it to the reader alive. But there is something more. Stanford knows what everybody in his poems is doing and why. He knows what they will do after the woman's death. He even knows what they will think about when they are alone that night and the accident has been changed. Something almost religious, maybe a sacrifice, even a baptism. Maybe it worked out fine. Like the moon I imagined.

Linda Gregg