1978, the poet Frank Stanford shot himself three times in the heart. His second wife and his lover were in the next room.
During his lifetime, Stanford’s poetry never found a broad audience. The rare and worn copies of his published works were passed poet to poet. His short, autobiographical film, It Wasn’t a Dream, It Was A Flood has never been digitized.
What About This is the first collection of Stanford’s published and unpublished work in one volume. It is important not just for readers already familiar with Stanford’s poetry, but for the rest of us who have never seen our South with such a sharp eye nor heard it recorded by a pitch-perfect ear. His poems are pinched from the world around him, changed just enough that the lines are both familiar and strange.
Born in Richton, Mississippi, Stanford lived in an orphanage until Dorothy Gilbert Alter, a single mother, adopted him. In 1952 she married Albert Franklin Stanford, a levee engineer from Memphis and shortly afterward, the family moved to Arkansas. Showing poetic promise, Stanford was asked to enroll in graduate level courses in creative writing as an undergraduate student. But he never finished college.
It is easy for the exploits of a poet’s life and death to overshadow their work. The life and death of Frank Stanford is no exception. His self-destruction hums on every page. Death stalks his lines:
I am not asleep, but I see
a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost
of an anonymous painter
leaving the prints of death
on the wall… –from the “Transcendence of Janus”
Frank Stanford is a disguised intellectual. He is among us when we are knee-deep in mud and grass, he sits beside us on the front porch and cracks one open, he’s in the hot summer nights and the still air, and he watches as nothing much happens except the slow close of day. He sifts the banality of the every-day for poems that are more then they are.
His poems wade through dreams and reality. They are a surrealist vision of the muck and grime of life. Of the workingman. Of juke joints and women and rivers that govern the pace of living.
Throughout the collection, Stanford appropriates from Southern heritage. Jimmie Rodger’s Blue Yodel’s are reimagined into ballads of the hard life. In “Blue Yodel a Prairie,” Stanford captures the spirit of Jimmie Roger’s down-and-out songs, but with a poet’s sensibility toward images heavy with meaning:
Whenever I think of the shadows
Two oranges cast on the piano
When the sun drives a horse mad in a dry spell
I think of Virginia Day
Hanging up sheets in her backyard
She has a pair of blue jeans and a brassiere on
Holding the prairie
With a clothespin in her lips
A 20th century Walt Whitman, Frank Stanford sings of the South. In a place overflowing with literary voices, Stanford holds his own alongside James Dickey and Faulkner. He is a troubadour of the Mississippi Delta.
Nearly forty-years after his death, Stanford’s poetry is still a poignant and accurate depiction of the South. Our traditions hold us close to the ground. Our rivers roar and crawl, they overrun their banks and seep into the earth, but we keep a record; we remember our past.
So have respect for the dead my dear
And watch your heart like a jukebox. –from “The Visitors of Night”
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