A Frank Stanford Poem

David Young

Isn't it one task of poetry to root itself firmly in the commonplace and then transcend it? What I find irritating these days is the thoughtless praise of poets who talk about transcendence but never accomplish it, while poets who perform that difficult feat are overlooked or patronized or misunderstood. Perhaps it has always been that way. In any case, it's a pleasure to look at a poem by Frank Stanford that helps remind us how poetry should work, and exemplifies his experiments with different ways of handling the interaction of the ordinary and the extraordinary. "Allegory of Death and Night," which FIELD, the magazine I help edit, published in 1975, seems to me typical of Stanford's talent at its best, and of his too brief career at what might be called its peak:

ALLEGORY OF DEATH AND NIGHT

When he comes home from work
He washes his hands
And sits down at the dinner table
And eats. He doesn't say much,
He drinks from an old bottle.
What he doesn't eat, the dog does.
And while the hound is licking
The man is snoring at the table.
The woman slaps the oil cloth
With a fly swatter, and he comes to.
A milksnake is crawling
Along a rafter in the barn
And a storm is making in the east.
There is a bird flying high
And the shadow of smoke
From the last fires in the moonlight.
He's laying crossways over the bed
On his belly. She's taken off
His pants and unlaced his boots.
Whatever he dreams he keeps to himself,
Like a prayer sent up for rain.
When he's dead to the world
She reaches into the pocket
Of his trousers for a white pouch.
She rolls a cigarette with one hand.
She smokes in the dark. Clouds
Go by, turning under the soil.
She turns a flashlight on
The man's body, looking for seed
Ticks that have been there since dawn.

Reprinted from You (Lost Roads Publishers. I979) with permission.

The tension that is set up between title and text is calculated to keep the reader off-balance. The title is an oversized gesture, comic against the dreary routines the poem depicts. but it makes us approach these people and their lives with less of our usual condescension and assurance. Imagine the title as something like "Uncle Henry and Aunt Lucy" and you can measure the difference in your attitudes and assumptions. The title makes us look at everything in the poem a little more carefully. We don't know why it should be an allegory: after the title there isn't one clear allegorical signal through the entire poem. The rest of its texture is "realistic," as opposed to "allegorical." What's more, we don't know whether Stanford wants us to think these two characters are Death and Night (and if so, which is which) or if the routine of their lives -his coming home from work, eating supper and falling asleep, her matter-of-fact ministrations- is meant to be an allegory of death and night in the way that an emblem can summarize or embody abstract meanings. Because we aren't sure, we enter the lives of these country people, working people, with less assurance, willing to see them charged with a magic we might otherwise fail to notice. Once that begins to happen, the details of their routine -table, bottle, hound, boots, seed ticks- and the juxtaposed events from the world around them -the snake in the barn, the storm, the bird- begin to acquire a fascination and importance that makes for that successful mingling of commonplace and wonderful, profane and sacred, that I have said is the mark of successful poetry.

Once we have entered the world of the poem and begun to see it in this way, we can leave the questions raised bv the title to one side. The title is a husk, the device that got us into the right imaginative relationship with the material, rather than the poem's real focus. Stanford is not interested in writing allegories of death and night, or of anything else: he is interested in finding poetry, the poetic, where we didn't expect it to exist: in a tired man and a bored woman on a hot summer night (I think) in Arkansas. There's a kind of flat, deadpan comedy in the poem -the flyswatter startling the man from his afterdinner doze- and we keep expecting something violent or special to happen: where is the snake going, what does the storm mean, what is the woman looking for with her flashlight? That it doesn't is the point: death and night are nothing special, and the poetry we want from life is all around us, rising up out of the uneventful, before we know it. Two lines in the poem, though, seem to have a special reach and mystery, and I ponder their meaning even after several readings. One is the image of "the last fires in the moonlight," which has a more apocalyptic ring than most of the poem, and, for me, less focus, The other is the image that has the clouds going by, "turning under the soil." Are they turning the soil under, like a plough, or are they somehow underground? If the latter, then this is a reversed and insubstantial world, for all its flashlights and seed ticks and milksnakes. The "turning" of the clouds does set up the "She turns a flashlight on" of the next line nicely, and I'm just not sure whether my uncertainty about it is a failure of my reading or a weakness of the poem. It may not help to inquire too closely into such questions. Stanford was working quickly and freely, and quite possibly without too much regard for exactness of meaning. He was prodigal and copious, an impressive talent, but for reasons we may never understand, he didn't develop much as a writer and he chose not to survive as a human being. Questions about what kind of artist he might have become may be interesting to speculate upon, but they can't, alas, ever have definite answers.


from Ironwood 17
reprinted with permission.