Some Thoughts on Frank Stanford

Franz Wright

I first became aware of Frank Stanford's poems while I was a student at Oberlin College. In the spring of 1974, which is when they first began appearing in Field. Not long afterward Stanford started to correspond with Tom Lux, who happened to be teaching at Oberlin that year; and as the grave, intense and startlingly voluminous manuscripts began to arrive, I was fortunate enough to get a look at many of his earlier unpublished writings. One of these manuscripts -apparently composed of poems completed before Stanford was twenty years old- stands out in my memory. Because it included a photograph of a young, strikingly good-looking man in his mid- twenties, facing the bank of a river in which he stands nearly waist-deep and holding afloat on the black water what appears to be a small coffin, one that's only large enough to contain a child. Also enclosed was his card. Frank Stanford: Land Surveyor. With my under-graduate aptitude for literary parallels, that struck me as funny at first. But no, this had nothing to do with Herr Kafka. The poet made his living as a surveyor around Fayetteville, Arkansas. There was genuine sunlight on his instruments.

One of the first things I noticed about Stanford's poems was his remarkable gift for the simile:

The wind blows through the trees
Like a woman on a raft.

The moon was swollen up
Like a mosquito's belly.

It was Lorca who noted that poets have to be able to use the image to fuse details of the infinitesimally small with astronomic intuitions. And Stanford's mastery over this particular facet of the poem is evident enough. He's usually careful to limit the frequency with which his startling similes occur, though. He doesn't allow them to shine too brightly, he doesn't let them become predictable or formulaic: in a successful poem they simply take their place in the constellation of qualities that make the poem as a whole enduringly mysterious.

"Wind Blowing On A Sick Man" provides some good examples of Stanford's range.

Much of this brief, plain-spoken poem's impact comes from the sudden subversion of the sort of expectations the title seems to set up.

The poem's constructed almost entirely without recourse to overt metaphor. Yet instantly the headlights (or their absence), the wind, the voices become interwoven and weirdly equated

The brevity of the poem allows for a sense of simultaneity, rather nightmarish, the insight that all things are taking place at once -as they of course are. In the world a bov is biting a thread off a new pair of dungarees. while somewhere else a woman's neck is getting broken. All innocent, kind or fastidious actions occur in an atmosphere of evil in general. A girl in love is looking at the stars and smiling into herself, meanwhile somebody's being tortured, someone's sitting alone eating in fear ...

Look at how the various connections (thread/rope; wind/darkened headlights/voices) are accomplished: by simply leaving the strange parallels alone, never drawing our conscious attention to them, and in effect allowing the reader to participate in forming the associations. The result is that the reader perceives the disparate elements of the poem all at once, and then, only later, their interconnectedness dawns on him. The process comes close to reflecting the relationship between the dreaming and the waking mind.

Then they go upstairs and hang a woman.

The power of this line -and of the poem as a whole- is the result of the chilling matter-of-factness with which it is uttered.

In the course of his long meditation on Georg Trakl, Heidegger makes the following observation,

Every great poet creates his poetry out of one single poetic
statement only ... The poet's sole statement always remains
in the realm of the unspoken. None of his individual poems,
nor their totality, says it all. Nevertheless, every poem
speaks from the whole of the one single statement, and in
each instance says that statement.

It seems to me undeniable that Stanford's is one of the great voices of death. A good many of his late poems, staggering for their courage and beauty, even appear to have been conceived in light of his own absence. The dead have told these stories to the living ... What remains "unspoken" -and thus constitutes the poet's central vision- has to do, I think, with the way in which his insistence on death, on its absolute apartness, seems everywhere to automatically suggest just the opposite: the miracle of our presence. Forced to face and ponder death, as I so often am in Stanford's writings, I'm also brought into the light of the realization: I'm alive, in time, in the luminous consciousness of my own presence. Even if I am nothing but the incarnation, so to speak, of my own nonexistence -I'm here. When I read "The Light The Dead See", for example, I seem to enter an area of my own mind where the approach of death no longer oppresses me; where, on the contrary, the thought of forever not being only heightens my sense of the miraculousness, the unutterable strangeness of being here in the first place.


from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.