Prolific American poet Frank Stanford was born in Mississippi on August 1 in 1948, he was taken out of a Mississippi orphanage and was adopted by Dorthy Gildart, who was single. In 1950 his mother adopted a daughter Bettina Ruth, and in 1952, his mother married Albert Frankin, a much older civil engineer contractor in Memphis., Tennessee, where the family relocated, and Albert adopted Frank and his younger sister. Until his death eight years later, Stanford raised the young boy as his own. When he was 21, Frank discovered that his mother had adopted him he had always believed, or been led to believe, that she was his birth mother. His birth parents are unknown. The orphanage from which a single mother adopted him burst into flames, destroying his record.
Standford spent summers in labor camps run by his father, and worked side by side with African Americans building levees on the Mississippi River, absorbing his co-workers’ vivid storytelling, their music and their fatalistic point of view. Asked once what he had learned from his co-workers, he said simply: “how shitty white people were to them.”
In 1964, Stanford entered Subiaco Abbey and Academy near Paris, Arkansas, a boys' prep-school run by Benedictine monks who provided a rigorous liberal arts and physical fitness curriculum. After graduating, he entered the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in the fall of 1966, pursuing a civil engineering degree as his stepfather had done at the same institution some fifty years earlier. In January 1969, the spring semester of his sophomore year, Stanford changed his field of study to English and was allowed to enroll in the graduate poetry-writing workshop, an uncommon occurrence.
Stanford‘s personal life though was rather tumultuous, after leaving University without a degree in 1971,he married Linda Mercin , but the marriage ended within a year. In 1973 he married a second time to painter Ginny Crouch. They had no children.His preoccupation with his loss of identity and his perpetual quest for identifying origins, manifested across his poetry. His subject was mostly childhood, and particularly the childhood spent growing up in a Southern community at a time when the South was on the brink of tumultuous change. He writes of childhood memories viewed through an adult lens, memories recalled with a grasp that is fond and loving but also understanding and at times shocking. Much of his poetry is about growing up in the 1950s South. His language soaked in a Southern vernacular and deeply American.Long poems set with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape drawn from his childhood in the Ozark mountains and full of wild embellishment.
Stanford was a writer unlike any other American poet of his time. He was heavily influenced by French and Latin American Surrealism, and he was dubbed "a swamprat Rimbaud" by the poet Lorenzo Thomas and "one of the great voices of death" by Franz Wright.Stanford consistently took two of the most ancient poetical themes, love and death, and infused them with a freshness with his language and imagery. His poems remain haunting,primal, otherworldly and powerful to read, full of raw emotion and passion, and despite the preoccupation with death are strangely beautiful.
On June 3, 1978, Stanford walked into his home in Fayetteville, Ark., to be confronted by his wife, painter Ginny Stanford, and his mistress, poet C.D. Wright about his sexual liaisons. There were at least half a dozen other women at the time.After confesing his infidelity to his wife, he had suffered from depression and threatened suicide on previous occasions, he stepped into the bedroom and shot himself with a .22 pistol. He is buried at Saint Benedict's Cemetry near Subiaco Abbey.
Stanford wrote ten books of poetry, eight volumes in the last seen years of his life, which is pretty impressive for anyone, his books include The Singing Knives, Ladies from Hell, Arkansas Bench Stone and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I love you, a mostly unpunctuated poem that is more than 16,000 lines long.
He published prolifically and was acknowledged as one of the most talented and uniquely inventive poets of his generation, however after his death, with his literary estate split, a rift between his widow and his mistress left the majority of his work inaccessible to all but determined seekers. But in the years following his death there have been a number of posthumous collections, and though a underappreciated and neglected artist, who has been almost entirely absent from poetry anthologies he has certainly developed a cult following, and now with his books being republished, it has meant that his legacy, in recent years, has at least continued to grow and for him to be at last recognised as an undeniable force in contemporary American poetry. He cared about the lost and forgotten , the poor and afraid. And he bought them into his poems. where their despair and hoplessness could shine clearly. His poems should be a wake up call for all of us, and long shall they not be forgotten either.His grand imagination has flared in the imagination of a new generation of readers and writers and he has since been written about in at least two folk songs - the Indigo Girls' "Three Hits" and Lucinda Williams' beautiful song "Pineola" who was a close family friend of Stanford who was a staple in the Williams household in the 1970s.
The Light the Dead See - Frank Standford
There are many people who come back
After the doctor has smoothed the sheet
Around their body
And left the room to make his call.
They die but they live.
They are called the dead who lived through their deaths,
And among my people
They are considered wise and honest.
They float out of their bodies
And light on the ceiling like a moth,
Watching the efforts of everyone around them.
The voices and the images of the living
Fade away.
A roar sucks them under
The wheels of a darkness without pain.
Off in the distance
There is someone
Like a signalman swinging a lantern.
The light grows, a white flower.
It becomes very intense, like music.
They see the faces of those they loved,
The truly dead who speak kindly.
They see their father sitting in a field.
The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended.
There is a towel around his neck,
The odor of bay rum.
Then they see their mother
Standing behind him with a pair of shears.
The wind is blowing.
She is cutting his hair.
The dead have told these stories
To the living.
Time Forks Perpetually toward Innumerable Futures in Your Enemy - Frank Stanford
I am going to die.
Friends who made good,
Friends who did not,
I am going
Down into the Egypt of your sex,
The lands of your mystery and death.
Do you still want me
To find you
Somebody to love?
I cruise through the delta of your love,
Paradise on Sunday,
Cold as ice on Monday.
A hundred pounds of it on the tongs,
A butterfly at the center.
Going home I cross the bridge
And throw a bottle out the window,
Hit all my friends in the head.
The crickets under the straw
Like old folks spitting in a paper sack.
Now my life the Sphinx
Laid by slaves,
My death the promised land.
A light rain falling, a split tongue
And sad eyes, no lie,
I’ve got you by the tongue.
I park my Cadillac outside your temple of madness.
You are worshipped there.
Look at your face, swollen from sleep.
Are you waiting for me
To unwind you from your last clothes,
Do you want me
To bury my long ship in your heart?
Your lineage like gravesites for the stars,
Way stations for great dreamers.
There is a six foot rattlesnake
Asleep in the birdhouse.
Are you taking crumbs to the warblers tonight?
Death is an isthmus, you can get there on foot.
But love had made its island.
What of the young?
I hunt them down,
Good winds in the desert,
Blue eggs in the junipers.
You - Frank Stanford
Sometimes in our sleep we touch
The body of another woman
And we wake up
And we know the first nights
With summer visitors
In the three storied house of our childhood.
Whatever we remember,
The darkest hair being brushed
In front of the darkest mirror
In the darkest room.Frank Stanford, What About This:Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Port Townsend; Copper Canyon Press, 2015
Pineola - Lucinda Williams
