Death of a Major Voice in Arkansas

R.C. Hall, The Arkansas Times, 1978

The following newspaper article was sent to Ginny Stanford from Frank's mother, Dorothy Stanford, with corrections made by hand in the margins and on the text. The corrections are included here.

In June of this year a brilliant young Arkansas poet named Frank Stanford died by his own hand. He was twenty-nine, possessed a major talent and could have become one of this country's finest voices, for his ability was powerful and his vision unique. The poet Alan Dugan, a winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for poetry, called Stanford "a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman."

In the short span of less than a decade Stanford accomplished much with his writing. He was an outstanding writer in the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts program. His poems were published in several national magazines, including The New Yorker, and he was even anthologized. He became a maverick in academic circles by refusing to be part of the coterie. He founded his own press, and was the subject of and contributor to a prize-winning film. Ironically, his finest accomplishment came when he beat the academic poetry circle at its own game: brashly he applied to the National Endowment of the Arts for a grant to start up his own publishing house, under his control and on his terms. Although thousands of applications come to NEA yearly from reputable writers and artists, Stanford was granted a sizable sum of money from the NEA to begin his publishing venture. He simply overwhelmed the National Endowment people in Washington, D.C., with enthusiasm and nerve.

Some talented poets never find success; some mediocre ones do. Often it happens that commercially-oriented publishing houses in New York become married to parasitic "literary societies" based on university campuses. It is no wonder that most poets -famous or obscure - dream a melancholy fantasy of owning their own publishing houses where they can bring to light good, clean poetry.

Frank Stanford realized one of his dreams when he won the National Endowment grant. He founded Lost Roads Press, a name that tells us much about Stanford and the kind of poetry the press published and will continue to publish. Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to "reclaim the landscape of American poetry." But last June, Frank Stanford took up a gun and ended his life. It is not the purpose here to dwell morbidly on the myriad facets of Stanford's psyche. Let it be said that he was not your typical poet in love with the idea of death. But poets tend to kill themselves in every line they write, and many commit suicide. Sylvia Plath put her head in an oven. Hart Crane jumped off a boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. John Gould Fletcher, Arkansas' own Pulitzer Prize Poet, drowned himself in a pond near his Little Rock home on Highway 10.

An example or perhaps symptom of Stanford's rebellion can be found in a literary note. Several years ago, while still a student in the U. of A. writing program, he was published in the university literary magazine, Preview, about which he commented: "Everyone in this book is a tight-assed honky." Frank Stanford did not go the way of so many in academic circles - he did not become a professional student, nor a teacher or a womb-seeker. Instead, he started his own business. He was a land surveyor for many years in and around Fayetteville, and then he started publishing his own unique and startling poetry first with Mill Mountain Press, a precursor to Lost Roads.

Frank Stanford the man was strong physically, the kind of young man you might see playing football for a professional team or teaching martial arts to kids. He was a native of Mountain Home [No - Dorothy Stanford]and grew up as an orphan. [No - Dorothy Stanford] He spent most of his youth at the Subiaco Academy for Boys. Under the guidance of some of Subiaco's Catholic priests and brothers, he learned the world of books and about human relationships. Although Stanford was not a Catholic [was a Catholic - Dorothy Stanford] he was influenced by the priests. To those who knew him, he demonstrated a true catholicity in all aspects of his life. His poetry is strong~willed and lively, full of passions, and filled with a broadminded view of life.

There is a story told about Stanford by one of his closest friends. When Frank was a boy of twelve or thirteen [fifteen or sixteen - Dorothy Stanford] and living at the academy, he demonstrated his tenacious spirit of living: one night during a violent thunderstorm, while other boys in his dormitory were visibly frightened, Stanford grabbed two metal rods from a window and went charging outside into the storm, yelling, "Here I am. Come and get me, you bastard!"

It is simple enough to speculate on the tragic deaths of poets and what they might have done had they lived longer. Stephen Crane, like Frank Stanford, died at age 27. Perhaps Crane would have become the major writer of the 20th Century. Perhaps Frank Stanford would have been even greater. A film about Stanford entitled It Wasn't A Dream It Was A Flood won the West Coast Experimental Film Award in 1976. The title is taken from a line of Stanford's poetry, and it is the most fitting statement one can make about so rare a talent.

Besides manifold poems published in various journals and magazines, the published work of Frank Stanford includes these titles: The Singing Knives, his first book; Crib Death which is published by Ironwood Press in Arizona; and a big collection of poems entitled YOU All of these titles will be available through Lost Roads Publishers, Box 210, Fayetteville, Arkansas, 72701.

Frank Stanford's major book of poetry, however, is The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. It is the principal title being published by Lost Roads this year, under the National Endowment of the Arts grant, and it is one of the most ambitious ventures ever undertaken by any publishing house, major or minor. If you are used to reading poems published in little magazines or small books, you might be put off a bit with Stanford's monumental work. The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You is a booklength poem of 23,000 lines and 542 pages. It is worth reading every page, and if you give it a little time, it will captivate you. Not since Walt Whitman has any poet dared to be so bold, so arrogant, and be so good.

The reader cannot escape the Whitman comparison, especially in the sense of scope and poetic technique. Stanford writes with narrative force; at the same time his long poem builds with rhapsodic intensity. Some scholars say that Moby Dick is a long epic poem. If so, then Stanford's Battlefield is a saga, a compelling novel of epic proportions in poetic form.

This is the way The Battlefield begins:

Tonight the gars on the trees are swords in the hands of
knights the stars are like twenty-seven dancing Russians
and the wind is. . . I am waving goodbye to the casket of
my first mammy well that black cadillac drove right up to
your front door and the chauffeur was death...

The poem is a narrative told from the point of view of a 12-year-old clairvoyant boy. Stanford employs, like Whitman, Biblical devices such as initial, medial, and terminal repetition:

there is that life waiting for snow
there is that sail sheet of blood
there is that abode under the surface
there was the time I was a
sleepwalking baby
Here is the thicket of snakes and
honeysuckle where 1 kissed my hand
there are the dead and the dead and
the dead and the dead
like the Mississippi River
there are the dreams Huckleberry
never thought about telling I know
there are hovering over my hair dead butterflies
there are the shudders of the mothers
pleading for mercy
there are the times I've sung to the animals
there are the times I thought I was a saint
there are preposterous lies I can't
even remember come morning

The Battlefield is a truly democratic book, in the best sense of the word. It is also one of the funniest books you'll ever get a hold on, funny and raunchy and irreverent. Stanford will strike you as a poet who probably had more fun writing than any other poet who ever lived. You can open up his Battlefield and find a crazyquilt passage of humor or nostalgia or pathos on any of its pages. One favorite passage of mine is the story Stanford weaves about the one-legged dago who came to Arkansas to find a diamond. There is another story about a kid who caught a pigeon and let it roost on a porch so it would dump on the head of a New York man who wore lumber-jack clothes and ate lemon icebox pie in the middle of summer. The pigeon droppings settled in the meringue and the Yankee never knew the difference.

One could go on and on quoting from Stanford's book, but it is still next to impossible to capture the power and flavor of Battlefield. To use one of Stanford's expressions, the book is "easy as mud." Lost Roads Publishers, under the editorship now of C. D. Wright, will have several outlets around the state, including Publishers' Bookshop, where Stanford's books, as well as other Lost Roads' titles, may be obtained. You can't miss the book on the rack: it is published in quality paperback, is fat and juicy looking, and on the cover is a photograph at the airport at Saigon taken the last day of the Vietnam War.

I get the uncanny feeling, possessing a copy of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You that I am again in a privileged class. I used to feel that way about James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book that became a classic even though no more than a thousand or so people had read it. I stole my copy from a dusty library shelf; I gave it to my friends in Arkansas and Iowa and New York and Ohio. Eventually, Agee's great work reached a wide audience. If Stanford's book takes so long a time to reach its audience, I will feel privileged again to be in a small number of private librarians circulating a great book, letting people see what they are missing.

Frank Stanford is buried in a cemetery near the Subiaco Academy. At the funeral, Stanford's friends read briefly from his poetry, and a priest, Stanford's teacher and friend, delivered the eulogy. Stanford's friends want to put up a stone at his gravesite with a simple inscription: "It Wasn't A Dream It Was a Flood." When you read The Battlefield, you will understand. I am sure his close friends will not like this indulgence, but I don't care; people need to read his books, and if they do read Stanford they will see that we in this region of the world had a pretty good shot at greatness in such a poet.

The Arkansas Times, Ginny Stanford