"Lost Recipe," Lost Connections: Frank Stanford's Vision

Bruce Weigl

The marriage of disparate things, metaphor, was for Frank Stanford a means of recreating the world. With Stanford, seemingly unrelated items mix and breed, resulting in a reflection of the inner self that is somehow universally compelling. He imitates the world and its felt realities in the old way, the way Aristotle intended in the Poetics: you feel the world because you become the world. This instinct for imitation stirs the imagination in deeply rooted ways. The archetypes begin to emerge; our essential commonality begins to take shape before our untrusting eyes: we are in a house somewhere in the woods; the smells from the kitchen, the music, the strangely familiar landscape of rooms and their inhabitants lull us into readiness. Though we are confused, even a bit uneasy, the poet's sureness of language and subtle suggestion that the poem's seemingly unrelated details lead to a chilling inevitability, a fate, compel us to move ahead into the poem as though into a long forgotten narrative of our own life:

She reads her twenty-pound bible
Full of secret ancestors
And the recipes of youth and luck,
While I lick plates
And grind out the ice cream.

Stanford lets the visionary experience speak directly through the self, the living voice the poet creates to speak the poem. What lasts long after we put the poem away is the sense that Stanford is irrevocably, personally involved with the substance of the poem. Like Keats in "Ode To A Nightingale" who cannot see yet who describes with careful clarity "the grass, the thicket, and the pastoral eglantine" through the raw power of the imagination, Stanford alters literal vision so the imagination can do its work. The primal water of the first line boils, "fogs up the windows" of the house. The sensual details "which follow this alteration of vision come to stand for the ingredients of the lost recipe, traces of which we find in the fat woman's "twenty-pound bible" in the form of the names of "secret ancestors/And the recipes of youth and luck..." But it does little good to go symbol hunting in this poem because it is written much too close to the bone of the poet's personal vision to translate entirely. When the imagination is on fire, when it burns the way it did for Frank Stanford for some fifteen-odd years, the poet is never reluctant to cheat actuality, to leap, as Bly calls it beyond the concrete restrictions of the logical world. But this is not a surreal poem. There is a precise unity of milieu in Stanford's work in the form of the rural South as place. Stanford's work has often been described as surreal, or disembodied, but in Crib Death, as in most of his work, he is grounded in a specific and often elaborately described place. What has been mistakenly called disembodiment is actually the effect of the poet's ability to transform his context so that he might personalize it: imitation which allows pleasure felt in things imitated. The effect is a continuing process of transfiguring reality.

"Lost Recipe" is no exception. We are in the woods, probably in winter, the cold causing the windows to fog up as the rabbits and onions boil on the stove. The poem takes place almost entirely inside the house of a fat woman. The poet has some obvious personal connection to the place; at one point he refers to 'my house," and at another to "my closet," but he is not a permanent resident. The old, fat woman reads from her twenty-pound bible; she lives alone and she is "a spayed stray," sexually vacant, cut-off from the chain of human continuity. The recipes that are lost are recipes of "youth and luck," and she walks through the house in a housecoat amidst the dust of closets and the remains of birds' nests. She has let herself go, and the speaker wonders out loud about why she lets him visit. Perhaps he is something of a lost soul himself. Regardless, the atmosphere is one of old-fashioned sickness: boiling water to disinfect, and cod liver oil, old remedies still used in the rural South.

If metaphor is the poem's dominant structural device, the process of free association recurs almost as regularly. We leap, for example, from "A burning tree," to "The matinee postponed due to lightning," to "A long-lost cousin making good" in the brief matter of three lines. These leaps, which come mid-way through the poem, serve as an axis on which the poem turns toward the poet's final reckoning. "And sometimes," he says, "When winter becomes/Such a deadly shot, I push away my supper." Any doubt about the poet's genuine and intimate involvement with the poem vanishes in the face of his sweeping, sympathetic response to the old woman's dilemma; the poet cares for her, and his lines are charged with that care and with the clear voice of love:

And women grow weary of the cold weather in their men.

They need a friend on the lake with a sailboat.
They need to take medicine and be alone.

Bad food and dead children are not forgotten.
They smell like cod liver oil
In a thimble on the fingers-
A fat lady in a housecoat
Walking through rooms with a cage,
Calling a bird.

The cycle is complete. We are back where we began, with the old woman in the house in the woods. It is her recipe that is lost; her youth and sex and luck and children are gone. What might otherwise seem an open-ended, ambiguous finish is saved by the richness of the poem's final ten lines which expose the genuine feelings the poet has for the fat old woman. The poem's greatest strength comes from this caring, and from the poet's honesty with regard to his own place in the poem, and from the manner in which the rural Southern milieu is so precisely summed up. Stanford risked sounding haphazard and even nonsensical so that he might capture for us the random richness of real life and real pain and real human caring: surely that is what making poems is all about.


from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.