Cult poet reaches the mainstream
SEVEN years ago, a tiny poetry journal in Fayetteville, Ark., held a Frank Stanford Literary Festival at the public library. Poetry geeks and graduate students half-filled a midsize conference room, giving up their weekend to celebrate the work of a little-known poet who died young nearly 40 years ago.
A few academics showed up for panel discussions. They were joined by Stanford’s high school English teacher and a childhood friend from Mountain Home, Ark. At the break, Stanford’s sister passed around his baby pictures. It felt like the gathering of a club — a small tribe who had discovered Stanford, who were in on the secret.
But now, in 2015, the mysteriously alluring poet has received two substantial nods from the greater literary world. This spring, Copper Canyon released “What About This,” a fat hardback that collects Stanford’s previously published work and hundreds of pages of unpublished poems and prose. And this summer, Third Man Books published a companion piece, “Hidden Water,” which digs deeper into the poet’s archive to produce photographs and handwritten drafts of poems.
It’s a lot of material, all at once, for a poet whose work has been elusive for decades.
Stanford has never been a household name, even in poetry circles, but he has floated, ghostlike, through certain segments of the literary South. In fact, some fans have tumbled into Stanford’s work backward, through the work of others. Referenc- es to his life and death appear in the songs of Lucinda Williams, the short stories of Ellen Gilchrist and the poems of C.D. Wright and others who knew him well.
These two new books are designed to introduce Stanford to a broader audience.
Stanford was handsome and charming; there was something feral about him. He made up stories and attracted admirers. He produced several slim volumes of poetry and one 15,000-line epic poem nearly impenetrable for its lack of punctuation. In fact, he didn’t have much use for punctuation at all, but he churned out dramatic, powerful lines: “I’ll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in”.
No academic, Stanford dropped out of the University of Arkansas graduate writing program and worked as a land surveyor. When he shot himself in 1978, he was 29 years old and had published seven books and written several more.
His images aren’t pretty; they’re earthy and raw, a vivid tumble of sex and death and violence and nature. In “The Wolves,” his narrator recalls a moment from childhood: “at night while the dogs / were barking / Baby Gauge and I crawled under the fence / with knives / we made out like the rattlesnake melons / were men we didn’t like ... I would cut a belly this way / he would cut a belly that way / the flies / came around the sweet juice / it was blood to us”
Readers who discover him often get pulled in by the story of his short life and violent suicide. It doesn’t hurt that his work reveals a preoccupation with dying. Death was a character in Stanford’s work, someone who wore shiny loafers, drove a Cadillac, worked odd jobs. “In the winter Death runs snow tires on his truck / He makes long hauls at night.”
In the decades since his death, Stanford’s legend has been more pervasive than his poems. If fans wanted more of his work, they had to search for out-of-print paperbacks and dig through archives on their own. But plenty was tucked away. As editor Michael Wiegers collected material for “What About This,” he realized it was too unwieldy, too massive for one volume. That’s when Third Man Books — a literary subdivision of Jack White’s record label — stepped in to publish the overflow. “Hidden Water” is a collection of rough drafts and personal letters, much of it given to Yale University by the two women in Stanford’s life: painter Ginny Stanford, his wife, and the poet Wright.
Both collections unearth some treasures. “What About This” contains a vast amount of previously unseen work. For devotees who have scrabbled to find Stanford’s published volumes, it’s almost overwhelming to be given so much new
unpublished poems contain the startling images and plain language for which Stanford is known. Hispoem “smiles of a summer afternoon” has a typical matter-of-factness, even as it devastates: “here comes a woman with a baby in her arms / a few years from now / she’ll be carrying / flowers to his grave / the guitar she saved to get to him / when he played / in that combo / in his sixteenth year / will go through several generations / of spiders”
“Hidden Water” offers a broad and beautiful collection of photographs, drawings, letters and drafts of poems with notes and edits scribbled in the poet’s own hand. It even features a partial inventory of Stanford’s record collection (John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Leadbelly) and a picture of the business card he used for his day job.
“The Cape” is the final poem in “Hidden Water,” the last we read of Stanford’s newly published work. He weaves a story from a dream, a vision of being kidnapped by a boat full of sailors and then ever powering his abductors, stopping the boat with the power of a god. “the steersman said by Jupiter / you’re a mad one with that cape and all / the crew leapt overboard / the boy with wild hair they called me / I turned the seamen into dolphins / steer me a true course home I told the one / I want to leave this dark place”
And in the end, Stanford’s voice is as clear, plain and death-obsessed as ever: “I wandered I sang / I made promises to death and I kept them / so having done / with my work in this world / I dove into that pool.”
Both books — thick, substantial, beautifully designed — make Stanford’s work feel legitimate, as though he’s been recognized by the academy and will soon take his place in an- thologies and high school textbooks. But then, part of the fun of discovering Stanford is in stumbling across a slim, out-of-print volume in a used bookstore, or hearing his name on another poet’s lips and seeking out his work.
Is Stanford’s work as wild and beautiful when it doesn’t feel like a private discovery? With the release of these two books, none of Stanford’s admirers can lament that he’s unrecognized, that he never got his due. It’s difficult to know whether that will enhance the poet’s irresistible pull or weaken it.