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What About This is the first collection of Stanford’s published and unpublished work in one volume.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 20^th 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”

Hurray for April.  Yes, April is the ideal month to celebrate poetry, especially that poetry that raises the roof beams, making room for all the fresh, blooming air, pressing the bleak winter away while standing ankle high in mud puddles.  Puddles are the playground for spring madness and feet soaked in gooey earth just like e. e. cummings said in his poem In Just:

n Just-
spring          when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far          and             wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles
far
and
wee

Then came my senior year at Murrah High School, in 1965, with my great, good, four-leaf-cloverful luck having Bee Donley as my English teacher. She taught us that poetry mingled all the great issues of life in such a profound poem as Dylan Thomas’ The force that though the green fuse drives the flower (1934):

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

[Stanza One]

So as a young child I adored the pure innocence of e. e. cummings (not to mention the cool way he spelled his name in lower case). As a teenager, I was mesmerized by Ms. Donley’s eloquent teaching of Dylan Thomas and the depth and width and height of “real” life as captured in the great green force. Then as a mature adult (in years but not in heart), I was introduced to Mary Oliver at Lemuria mainly through our children’s manager at the time, Yvonne Rogers. Ms. Oliver became my official priestess of the higher arts, a word magician, and a most spiritual priestess who kindled the scared beauty of the earth and animals and filled my imagination with wonder as in this poem from her collection Dog Songs:

Every Dog’s Story by Mary Oliver

I have a bed, my very own.
It’s just my size.
And sometimes I like to sleep alone
with dreams inside my eyes.

But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepy
and I wake and am afraid, though I don’t know why.
But I’m no longer sleepy
and too slowly the hours go by.

So I climb on the bed where the light of the moon
is shining on your face
and I know it will be morning soon.

Everybody needs a safe place.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver is by far my favorite poem.

I love this poem because it makes me confront my own humanity. Why do I do what I do? And what am I going to do with the rest of my life, my wild and precious life? I’ve had many chapters in my life and I am sure that there are many more to come. Every time that I start the newest chapter, I say a little prayer and remember the iconic line at the end of the poem:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Reasons this poem resonates with me:

1. Its quiet beauty: no wasted words, nothing overblown.
2. Its devotion to honesty: at the end, Roethke freely admits he doesn’t know how to feel.
3. Its content: as a teacher who’s lost students, I’m comforted knowing I’m not alone. Neither father nor lover, but still affected deeply.

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse) by Theodore Roethke

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

[from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke]

Charles Simic always turns the familiar upside down; the poem is a coin flipped in mid-air, spinning over and over itself until you are no longer sure what is heads or tails. I return again and again to this poem when poetry becomes too serious; magic can live in the lines. So much of a story can be held in a handful of images.

Untitled by Charles Simic