Two Ceremonies

Leslie Ullman

When I first encountered Frank Stanford's poetry in FIELD a few summers ago, I felt the fine rush of hope and envy I feel occasionally whenever a poet's language pushes me far beyond my own. Unruly and urgent, the poems stood out from the quieter meditations around them as pure dream, possibly nightmare, curiously lit from within. Fifteen years ago while glancing through a copy of Sylvia Plath's ARIEL in an Underground bookstore, I was transfixed this way for the first time, jolted beyond an obligation to "understand" into an awareness of my entire body. The only response I could make to such poems, the first I'd ever read with real compulsion, was to begin writing poetry.

Like Plath's, Stanford's voice lets go without thought of where it will catch hold again, then gathers power as it dreams itself raw. After reading a large body of his work in preparation for this essay, how-ever, I am left in mid-air, as though I'd been forced to leave a compelling film before the end. Stanford's voice repeatedly flings itself out with a dazzling sort of courage, but often not far enough to make the arrival such courage demands. Too many of the poems collected in CRIB DEATH, YOU, and THE SINGING KNIVES seem to be warm-ups. Certainly, the enormity of the risks he took entitles him to a fair amount of near-misses; yet I am left, in a way I am not left reading Plath's work, with a sense of the poet's having died prematurely. Stanford still seems precarious in his own highly original landscape, still working toward the resilient, more finished nakedness I find in "Everybody Who is Dead" and "The Burial Ship."

These poems force me in entirely different ways to walk around death, to rehearse it, to lose all knowledge of myself as I confront the one mystery I perpetually arrange to forget about. In every respect, Stanford seems relentlessly to have tracked death; or perhaps it tracked him and he relentlessly refused to dodge it. Not only do I admire the poems individually, but I admire Stanford for having surrounded, with total commitment in each case, two contradictory versions of one subject.

"Everybody Who is Dead" shapes death into formal ritual. Like a virgin on her wedding night, the man in this poem puts on prescribed clothing and submits to the ministrations of "older men" who, like handmaidens, prepare him for an event of which they seem to have mysterious knowledge. During the preparations, the man "Remembers.... lying naked on a rock by the water" as though that moment of vulnerability and innocence were the first step, taken early in boyhood, toward this meeting with something which will claim that nakedness.

A reading of this death as a consummation, however, is obvious; what interests me more is the fraternal atmosphere surrounding it, which elevates its possible sexuality to something more individualized, more consciously willed. This death seems to be a pact of honor between equals. The assignation the man is about to keep is with "another man" who, in "looking for him," prompts him to honor ties that are more sacred than those with "wife" and "children." Everything he does in response, then, is voluntary; he "goes ... to let another man shave him" (italics mine). He "asks" for "the special lotion" which evidently is the final preparation towards passage. The lotion, utilitarian as it may be, appears also as a decorative or religious gesture as it is about to be applied, a "little" at a time, by "each" of the attendants.

The ritual in this poem finally reminds me of that which precedes a duel, a murder which is civilized at every step and seems designed, however misguidedly, to preserve some sort of human code. And in portraying death as a dignified and carefully arranged submission to the inevitable, the poem reveals a European sensibility; death is one of life's rituals, is the end of a cycle of rituals, is mysterious insofar as it is unmet, but not unacceptable. It separates man from elements of his life without negating the ambiance of that life.

"The Burial Ship," with its sprawling declarative sentences and lack of punctuation, evokes death as a jarring and uncontainable event that can only be stalked through the disorderly realm of superstition (as opposed to the more codified realm of myth). Here, Stanford's characteristic voice-haphazard and disjunctive, like that of someone talking in a violent sleep - lives up to its promise as it creates a sense of dispersal, of civilized modes gone awry.

Jimmy, O.Z., and the others seem homeless and river-wise, like characters from Huckleberry Finn. The "wolf cub" whose death they honor, although it belonged to Jimmy was probably half-wild. In place of rules, there are seemingly arbitrary non-rules ("no sacrifice no dead chickens" and "I wanted to sing The Blood Done Signed My Name but they wouldn't let me") and a motley array of props ("Nugrape bottle," "black masks," "dirty white gloves," "frog gig," "top hat") which, taken all together, suggest a desperate attempt to imitate any kind of ceremony at all. In place of a eulogy, there are keening, rhythmic phrases ("woe is the wolf" and "ashes to ashes dust to dust the devil be had if this old life don't get worse") that originate from no particular speaker and give this poem the wild eloquence of gospel music.

At the center of this pageant is the entry of "the blind child" who actually sees through his fingers and who, because "he didn't talk right ... made it sound like a song" Even more unanchored and vulnerable than the others, he nevertheless serves as a priest, or dignitary for their purposes as he applies "blind" sight to reveal "the fortunes of the future."

Whereas the first poem almost manages to enclose death in a measured approach towards it, this poem opens behind a death and leaves itself open in its final image of "the wolf's eye" that "cracked like ash" and "kept going towards the heavens." In the first poem, death is an appointment; in this one it is a journey with no graspable end. All these boys can do in response to it is propel themselves forward to something equally ungraspable, the future. Their ceremony is both a celebration and helpless gesture of ignorance. It is schizoid and eloquently frantic as Americans, a relatively young and rootless people, are said to be in the face of their own mortality.


from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.