[Bill Carpenter]

This is an event. If I'd known sooner I'd have visited with the Copper Canyon folks at AWP.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/bo...ford.html?_r=0

[Michael Juster]

Agreed--although I don't get it.

[Bill Carpenter]

Review: ‘What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford’

APRIL 6, 2015
By DWIGHT GARNER

“When Daddy told me what happened, I couldn’t believe what he just said.”

That’s how Lucinda Williams begins “Pineola,” among the most bitter and potent American songs of the last 25 years. She wrote it about the suicide of the Mississippi-born poet Frank Stanford, with whom she’d briefly been romantically involved. He shot himself three times in the chest in 1978, when he was 29 years old.

Even before his death, Mr. Stanford was an emerging cult figure among Southern writers, the kind of man whose life is difficult to untangle from his work. He was charismatic — “as beautiful as the sun,” in the words of the Arkansas poet Carolyn (C. D.) Wright, who was also among his lovers. He was prolific, writing 11 books before his death, one of them a 450-page narrative poem, and leaving behind a steep pile of unpublished work.

He was enigmatic in a hundred ways. He didn’t do readings. He didn’t teach. He didn’t like big cities. As a baby, he’d been abandoned at the Emery Home for Unwed Mothers near Hattiesburg, Miss. His well-to-do adoptive father built levees along the Mississippi River’s tributaries. When Ms. Williams met Mr. Stanford, he was working as a land surveyor.

Photo

Frank Stanford in 1973. Credit Ginny Stanford

Since Mr. Stanford’s death, his cult has grown, but it’s never come close to metastasizing. In large part, that’s because his work has been hard to find, issued by tiny presses and often out of print. The long-awaited publication this month of “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” gives us a chance to see him whole.

It introduces to a broader audience an important and original American poet — sensitive, death-haunted, surreal, carnal, dirt-flecked and deeply Southern — whose promise, only partly fulfilled, it hurts to contemplate. His poems flick on a heretofore unnoticed porch light in your mind.

Among the first things you perceive about his work is that death is everywhere in it, often seen driving a very fine car or occasionally a truck with snow tires. Here’s a section of his poem “Death and the Arkansas River,” from 1976:

Everytime death gets a Cadillac

He wants to fight.

He wants to run the front door,

He wants cooking that will remind him of home.

If you try to forget

Death ties a string around your finger.

In another poem from the same year, a hotel of the dead has strictures against the following:

Wives and old coaches,

Ouija boards and certain cheeses,

Belts long enough to reach overhead pipes.

These repeated injections of darkness drive some readers away, as does Mr. Stanford’s pelting, nonironic stream-of-consciousness style. At times, he doesn’t so much flirt with incoherence as give incoherence a venereal disease. He stacks imagery like broken crockery, as in “What Claude Wanted to Tell Her” (previously unpublished, date unknown):

The deaf fish without luck all day, without bait.

Down a street they’ve stolen dark, run it off

Like a mad dog. They told you

Pick lice off the moon, and you grew your fingernails long.

Your love’s with the weevil.

You write off to the back of an ad

Hunting a cheap cremation. Drop me a line.

This same poem leads you someplace harrowing, as his poems so often do. The speaker declares: “How come you beg dimes for calls you never make?/How come friends you thought the earth of/Die alone/While you’re gone after a sack of pork rinds.”

Mr. Stanford, who attended the University of Arkansas but never received a degree, has sometimes been viewed as a primitive. He wasn’t one. It’s apparent in his poems that he had read and seen almost everything; his cultural memory was long. He was as likely to tinker with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s legacy as with Hank Williams’s. There’s something of John Berryman in the lurching swagger of his verse, some James Dickey in his rhetorically organized landslide of language.

While many of Mr. Stanford’s metaphors come from swimming, hunting, driving and fishing, his sensibility isn’t macho. He was not a rough cob. His love poems can sound like the cry of an angel falling backward through an open window, to borrow Dwight Yoakam’s line about Roy Orbison’s voice.

Mr. Stanford could lose his heart without blowing his cool. The offbeat warmth that can flood his poems is apparent in “This Conflict,” from 1973, printed here in its entirety:

A body with very few clothes

An old radio

Some apples

You get to eat

as many slices of bacon as you want

the morning of a home game

The way his sweater smells

It gets so hot it smokes

After awhile

just when Sam Cooke’s new song

comes on

Worms and a homely girl from Texas

who can read quicker than you

Good marks

and a lost crop

like a whole season

that passed without a letter

from my brother.

Michael Wiegers, the editor of “What About This,” has performed a vital and difficult task. He has included work from each of Mr. Stanford’s published books, including well-chosen excerpts from that 450-page poem “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” along with a great deal of unpublished verse, drafts and fragments. He must have felt as if he needed to be, at times, a multi-armed Indian divinity to keep track of it all. It’s to his credit that a book this size sits lightly on the lap.

The poet Dean Young provides an introduction that is charming but unhelpful. It provides no biographical information about Mr. Stanford, no publishing history and places him in no real context. Introductions are called introductions for a reason.

The biographical material cited in this review comes from Ben Ehrenreich’s perceptive reported essay about Mr. Stanford that appeared on Poetry magazine’s website in 2008 and from Bill Buford’s ringing profile of Lucinda Williams in The New Yorker in 2000, both of which are worth finding.

Mr. Stanford’s poetry comes to strange life in “What About This.” Not all of it works, but when it does, which is quite often, you can say along with him, at the close of one poem, “Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart.”

WHAT ABOUT THIS
Collected Poems of Frank Stanford

Edited by Michael Wiegers

Illustrated. 747 pages. Copper Canyon Press. $40.

[Michael Juster]

I actually read this review before. It's terrible--does the reviewer even know what "metastasizing" means? Or is that he doesn't understand metaphor?

The poems are also terrible. Frank Stanford was a troubled and very young man of no real ability as a writer who spewed out an enormous number of words in a sloppy fashion. He is a cult figure for his handsomeness, suicide and multiple now-famous female partners, but that doesn't make this volume any better than an oversized and overpriced doorstop.

[Bill Carpenter]

I didn't understand your response. Conceded that this review and these poems are not much. But battlefield is a great poem, and there are many poems of his of which I am very fond.

[Michael Juster]

Well, a forum is a place to persuade.

[Charlie Southerland]

Hey Bill, A poetry buddy of mine who knows some of Frank's people, just got a 26 minute video related to the book. There are some things that Frank did with words that transcends brilliance. Battlefield is or will be an iconic poem one of these days. Some of his other work is not so hot, but nobody bats 1000. unless they only write one good poem in their life. Who only wrote one?

Best.

[Bill Carpenter]

Battlefield is a grand work indeed, brilliantly constructed as the tale of a clairvoyant and empathic 12-year old that alternates between southern grotesque-romantic anecdotes and lyric floods. Certainly one of most successful American long poems of the 20th c. When I'm off my phone and back at my desktop I'll post some favorites. Do you know The Pump?

[R. S. Gwynn]

I knew Frank pretty well and taught him the rudiments of surveying when he worked on my party in 1970. Soon after, he pretty much left the planet. I liked the first book quite a bit.

[Bill Carpenter]

Here are a couple of my favorite Stanford poems that are posted on the Poetry Foundation website. I think the free verse works as understatement -- a casual register for imagery that is soaked in nostalgia. Sam, aren't these both from The Singing Knives? After battlefield, it made the deepest impression on me.

The Pump

There was always a lizard
Or a frog around the pump,
Waiting for a little extra water
Or a butterfly to light.

Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms.
I got the worms under the slick boards.
The pump would bite you in the winter.
It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go.

The blades of Johnson grass were tall
And sharp around the pump stand.
I had to hoe them all the time
Nobody filled the prime jar, though.

One time, I cut the tongue
Out of a Buster Brown shoe
And gave it to the pump.
It made a good sucker washer.

Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus.
I liked bathing buck naked
Under the pump,
Not in a goddamn washtub.


Living

I had my quiet time early in the morning
Eating Almond Joys with Mother.
We’d sit on the back porch and talk to God.
We really had a good time.

Later on,
I’d sort baseball cards
Or look for bottles.
In the afternoon I’d shoot blackbirds.

Jimmy would go by the house for ice water
And make the truck backfire.
Oh, I really liked that.
That was the reason he did it.

In the evening the cottontails ran across the groves.
I shot one and put him in the backseat.
He went to the bathroom.
Jimmy said I knocked the shit out of him.

At night we would listen to the ballgame.
Then to the Hoss Man.
Jimmy liked “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby”
by Jimmy Reed.

My attachment to Stanford, though, is mainly based on battlefield. I put up this introduction to it a few years ago.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...ht=battlefield

Here is a link to a 1979 essay by Lorenzo Thomas. http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors..._stanford.html