Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (Lost Roads Pub, June 2000)Frank Stanford, The Light the Dead See: The Selected Poems of Frank Stanford. Edited with an introduction by Leon Stokesbury (The University of Arkansas Press, 1991)
'I wrote my death warrant like an opera based on a koan, what I wanted to do was get invited and then not show up'
«This is the Great American Epic Poem of the late 20th century. Seeing the world through Stanford's eyes is like discovering a new language. A classic work by a poet who died way too young, Battlefield predates postmodernism by decades - Stanford died by his own hand shortly after finishing the book in 1978 - yet its cut-ups, allusions, samplings, dreamlists and flat out rock’n’roll make this a book to reckon with theoretically as well as practically. Practically, its tales’ll have you roaring, rolling, wailing, whaling, and in general rework your synapses till you can’t speak any language but poetry. If you buy one for a gift, you’d better buy one for yourself, ’cause you’ll never give it away.» - Bob Holman
«There's no reason, really, why you should have read this book, published 20 years ago in a limited edition and long out of print. Even if you could get your hands on a copy, even if you're already a fan of Frank Stanford's poems, you might be daunted by what C. D. Wright has called a "542 page poem without line integrity, punctuation or even space to facilitate breathing and eye movement, much less narrative clarity."
Still, there's every reason you should read this book and hope, as I do, that it's reprinted. By turns earthy and incantatory, down-home and harrowing, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is also funny as hell and, to quote one of its nearly 20,000 lines, "sadder than the sea." A narrative crazy-quilt of porch swing yarns, deadly reckonings, and sexual misadventures, it could be called one of the masterpieces of Southern literature on the strength of its characters alone - narrator Francis Gildart, a 12-year-old clairvoyant; Jimmy, his hell-raising brother; Jimmy's running buddy, Charlie B. Lemon; Count Hugo Pantagruel, "the world's smallest man"; Vico, the deaf-mute who signs in his sleep; Sylvester, whom Francis calls the Black Angel; Bobo, Baby Gauge, Mama Covoe, and Tangle Eye, with cameos by Sonny Liston and Jesus Christ. It just might be our Ulysses and, were it not a poem, might justly be considered for the Great American Novel. There's certainly nothing like it in 20th-century American letters.
This is not to say Stanford's work is without ancestry. Stanford characterized his as "a vision not too unlike the ones Whitman, Blake, and the singers in the Bible had." Certainly he echoes all three when Francis prays for "the scoundrels and cowards," of which The Battlefield has plenty, constituting what our hero calls his very own "songs of the gross." Gross, most obviously, in the word's colloquial sense: vulgar, indelicate, even obscene, but deliciously so - as when Francis discovers an "electric toothbrush" hidden in the bathroom of a married woman's house; after she has seduced him and accidentally knocks him out, he awakens "naked and shivering on a large bed... / she was groaning and squirming around on me with that electric toothbrush / crammed up inside her." And there's the gypsy girl, the true object of Francis's desire, masturbating in the backseat of a car at the Drive-In while he, Jimmy, Charlie B., and Tangle Eye watch through binoculars from a hillside, having been denied admission because Charlie B. and Tang are Black.
These gross songs can, likewise, be graphically violent, as in the book's many incidents of retribution, like the one where the excluded foursome avenge themselves, demolishing the Drive-In with a bulldozer as the movie plays on, its ghostly image projected on trees. Yet this sordid saga is shot through with images that rival Lorca in their hallucinatory surfaces and symbolic depths ("chance the wise snowball that bleeds when I kiss it"). There are also incantatory passages on a par with Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," as well as an unchecked flow of cultural touchstones as varied as Beethoven and Beowulf, Chuck Berry and Charlie Chaplin. While such an appetite can result in material which is sometimes gross, taken with the poem's variable textures it reveals a vision which is itself a "gross" in the other sense of the word: an undivided whole.
"The gross and the blended vision," then, points both to Francis Gildart's "God given powah" and Frank Stanford's visionary stance. In his employment of overlapping narratives, interpolated tales, fantasies of sex and revenge, dreams and waking visions, Stanford defeats time through the sheer audacity of his chronological disregard. Francis must face a similar foe, as the astronomer predicts: "you will do battle / with the notion of time you will allow your person to plumb it so your / ship may pass through it again everything has already happened." Elsewhere, Francis likens himself to "a pursued man" hanging "on the hands of a lost clock." This "lost clock" refers to the heroic past Francis longs for, a moral system seemingly absent from his era. But it also heralds the loss of time itself. It is in Francis's battle against time and, finally, death (that clock whose ticking never ceases), that his story attains epic proportions.
Francis claims that his "dreams [are] without dominion," and the text of The Battlefield bears this out. His dreaming and waking lives conjoined, he steps out of time: "my past is simultaneous with my present." Earlier, he describes his life in language which explicitly obliterates time: "I live out my past so presently I can live with the pressure / like a diver has in his ears like the hourglass in the saddlebags / with the broken crystal." When Francis says he is a "blood brother of the fuse," he doesn't just mean the force that drives the flower or the spark that fires the machine, he means what Whitman meant when he said, "Who need be afraid of the merge?"
The fuse, the merge - whatever one calls it - celebrates the thrum of existence while signifying death itself. The body of work Frank Stanford left behind amounted to a lifelong quest for the "great poems of death" Whitman had called for a century earlier. Nowhere is this interrogation of death more substantial, and more sophisticated, than in The Battlefield. Indeed, the entire book can be read as the visionary flash that, as legend has it, attends the death throes.
Like Stanford the poet, Francis cites death as central to his song: "all I am," he says, "is a song sung to the dead by myself all my days." Soon death is no longer someone to be sung to, but a very real possibility: knocked unconscious by two men he caught stealing horses, Francis finds himself tied up "in a boat full of snakes." Rope also binds his mouth like a bit, flooding his mouth with blood; he surmises he'll be "dead in another hour if somebody don't come along." Bobo, a fisherman, shows up, ushering in a horrific and hilarious battle with a 200-pound catfish. One expects him to discover the boy, yet the passage ends with Francis still bound, the boat adrift now on the river.
Though his liberation is never mentioned, the narrative abandons the snake-filled boat for a "stray mule" which Francis mounts, his ride a motif that will recur as the poem rolls on. The beast belongs to a man called "Dark," and the ride his mule affords Francis is a singular one: a symbolic depiction of the deathward journey Francis undertook when he was placed in the boat, bound and gagged, where he has remained throughout the book's countless ecstatic episodes. Francis had foreshadowed this, saying: "I am the rider called death / I sit in the saddle with Dark the Negro / and his crazy blues sinks down like a diver into my belly of dreams."
Francis will receive, it seems, one last chance at rescue, nearly 450 pages after his plight in the boat is last mentioned: he is meditating on Charlie Chaplin (who he's convinced is his father) when suddenly Charlie B. says "untie him." Either this is mere fantasy or Francis has traveled death's trail too far to trace his way back: "I'm talking about / the other Charlie," he says, "goddamnit leave me alone I figured it out / it come to me in a dream." The dream, of course, flows on unabated; Francis has "stowed away in the ship of death" that is at once the boat in which he is left for dead, Lawrence's Stygian ship, and the fragile human body that dreams this dream and sings this song: "a vessel of death a gospel ship."
If I'm wrong - if our hero doesn't die as his hero Beowulf did - the poem remains a tour de force of imagistic power and experimental storytelling. But I like to think that, even at 26 (his age in 1974 when he first submitted this manuscript), Frank Stanford would have been dissatisfied with a book that does not reveal an architecture as remarkable as its material. His formal ambitions succeed by making death his prevailing theme and death the event that fuses this sprawling marvel into solitary fact, at once ephemeral and never-ending. This synthesis elicits a song of unparalleled breadth and beauty, one that, faced with brute mortal fact, somehow remains hopeful. "All of this," he assures us:
is magic against death
all of this ends
with to be continued» - Brett Ralph
«One afternoon last Spring, coming back from a so-so lunch in Little Rock, poet C.D. Wright handed me this bulky paperback volume, all of it in tiny type. On the cover it says The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, a poem by Frank Stanford. Yeah? She says it is a contemporary epic, and I nod yeah. Later that afternoon, Jim Whitehead also expressed appreciation of the tome, adding: "It's all just one sentence!" I nodded yeah and, secretly, dreaded reading the thing – especially for the sake of politeness.
A day or two later, back in Pine Bluff, I politely cracked the book.
Suddenly, I'm amazed!
This Frank Stanford is amazing: a Deep South student of Apollinaire, an ethnographer of cornpone/rockabilly types, a swamprat Rimbaud, a Pound of the Mississippi mud, a dadgum redneck surrealist!
By the next day, I would read his lines aloud at breakfast.
Stanford, it seems, writes black and white Southern conversation so as one can hear it; and his five-hundred-odd-page poem structures itself around the question of the reality (relative, of course) of reality and dreams. Like Ezra Pound of The Cantos or any overzealous student, he trots out the entire cast of characters of second-year Contemporary Civilization, to the extent of making Vico and a reluctant castrato bear the weight of personae. Of course – like it or not – these characters must mix with good ole boy backroom joke negroes (one of whom manages, in the Stanford version, to retain a great deal of dignity and trickster strength) and wild boys with their CAMELS wrapped up in their T-shirt sleeves. The poem flags and lags, has corny jokes and steamy sex scenes and, somehow through all five hundred-odd pages, seems to work
It's almost ridiculous to quote excerpted lines from a poem of this length (or any length), but here's a random sample:
she wanted to balance the moon on her toes to keep
it from falling
but I knew all along it was the black cloud that
needed to stay in place
and so in that country where I once was and now and
will be before I was
where I spoke the words holy holy holy Lord God
Almighty all the earth
is full of Thy glory where the whistling swans ride
the backs of the white
horses of the river where the box-cars and skiffs
are full
of drunken troubadours where once I did lay awhile
longer the pavane
of whippoorwills while the pallbearers are strutting
in the ceremonies
of my sleep the passing bell nodding like a snake
charmer all far
past away deep behind the woods down the road where
I saw the lightning bug
in the country where my dreams are like bark
peeled off by lightning I was with her the girl with black hair
Or, yet more randomly:
he had those black dice made in Spain
he knew some gypsy talk
when he got back from the doctor he always had bad news
It's wonderful, but what? The recent notion of reviewing poetry by simple quotation uniformly fails all poets. Quotations, however arranged, can only give an idea of a poet's moment. One reads the critic for his or her considered judgment (regardless of considered by whom). One reads the poem to know what's really afoot. Stanford's book, I finally decided, is pleasurable and puzzling. It is almost too large for anyone to grasp, too slim in certain lines to merit much attention. Yet, the naivete and ambition evident in The Battlefield deserves checking against some of Frank O'Hara's spontaneously personal glossolaly, Kenneth Koch's longer works, or Richard Snow's The Funny Place (1973). Koch, burlesk master of classical form and childhood's Romantic popcult themes, often strays into outrageousness while Snow, for all his sophisticated audience's cynicism, can easily be read as an autobiographical four-square Bicentennital tribute (in the ancient sense of that last word). Snow's traditionally rhymed recounting of the prodigies of Coney Island (and investigation of the beginnings of the American entertainment industry) may, in fact, mask the same formalistic fascination with oddity that informs the works of photographer Diane Arbus, Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, and others. In any case, none of these writers compete with Frank Standford in bulk; and Stanford may have been more daring (or damned) than any of those mentioned in that his subject is the macho fantasies of white trash a cut below Faulkner's.
Frank Stanford's writing is about feeling, and he never seems to have seen a need to make it formal. The only formalism in his work is the need to distance pain, the deliberate fictionalization of true fact and feeling, and the necessary meditation upon the guilt one must own for such habits. Such concerns affect the structure of this poem and dictate its approach to to narrative and time. While Koch and Snow contain their verbal and conceptual pyrotechnics within chronology (like a safe but not-quite-sane 4th of July), Stanford determined to be an outlaw of omnivalent time. Read as a meditation upon actual and factual human death (as opposed to the poetic conventional "life is but a dream" derived from Moorish influence on Romance literature), one sees that the temporal discontinuities of Stanford's poem draw upon the same emotional sources that Ron Arias found for his touching and insightful novel The Road To Tamazunchale. In the imminence of death, time and real space have neither sequence nor consequential limits. As Arias' dying old man can have the Andes in the barrio of Los Angeles, so does Stanford's "clairvoyant" memory of childhood place Memphis, the Ozarks, and Mississippi delta towns in the same conceptual space.
There are yet more diverse ingredients in Stanford's stew Some of his poetic juxtapositions and much of his thematic content share an affinity with Tom Veitch's novel The Luis Armed Story. While it is known that Stanford enjoyed both the outraged tone and structural dislocations of narrative in Ishmael Reed's writings, the similarity between his work here and Tom Veitch's is of another order.
Growing up as an orphan in Arkansas' Subiaco Academy for Boys, Stanford was familiar with the lifestyle of the Benedictine brothers. "Although Stanford was not a Catholic," says B.C. Hall in a recent issue of Arkansas Times, "he was influenced by the priests. To those who knew him, he demonstrated a true catholicity in all aspects of his life." The Subiaco experience certainly also informs the structure of The Battlefield. Tom Veitch, who was himself a Benedictine monk, and Frank Stanford share in these books a narrative and lyrical structure loosely (or, perhaps, rigorously) composed of shifting visions, meditations, omnivalent time and space, and dreams of holiness and innocence. All of these elements are thrown into violent contrast with delicious recountings of sin and hilariously comic diatribes against Holy Mother Church that are allowed to be uttered only by insiders.
Though Tom Veitch may be, as Richard Kostelanetz thinks, a dadaist, Frank Stanford is not; and while there are these really striking similarities in the two men's work, Stanford's differences are notable. His long poem also approaches discriminations energized by social dislocations (because of his origin in the South) that most of the other writers mentioned here have never had to deal with. And, though he was a nonprofessional in the sense that he maintained a day job as a surveyor in the Arkansas timberlands, Stanford also exerted a very powerful influence on some of the young poets in his circle and correspondence.
In June – after enjoying his book for several weeks – I received a letter from La Verne Manners telling me that, one evening while Stanford's wife and Wright were chatting in the kitchen of their Fayetteville home, Frank went into another room and shot himself.
I didn't ever have a chance to meet Frank Stanford and I don't know why that happened. Or why he did that. I do know that his long poem had amazed and intrigued me, and that it is worth anyone's reading and puzzling over. Whether it is ultimately a work of obsession or a treasure because it is what Stanford permitted us to have, it is a book that will reward our interest with much enjoyment and insight.
II
Past high water marks, past wildest conjecture — Sterling A. Brown
The more than five hundred pages of The Battlefield contain poetry arranged in the epic manner. Vernacular conversations, narrations of dreams in both everyday language and self-consciously "literary" diction, small-talk, tall talk, and lists of ordinary and extraordinary items alternate with narrations of humorous and tragic events. As in any other epic, nothing much happens (just the usual unusual tragic & comic events), which means that everything transpires. Yes yes, semiotic baby, the entire Dr. Zorba repertoire of signs.
Stanford's largest debt seems to be owed to Guillaume Apollinaire, and his own greatest contribution seems to be his handling of the vernacular speech patterns of the people of the Mississippi delta in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. He's no blues singer (in fact, he's more like an intellectual in disguise), but the phrasings and nuances are close enough for authenticity.
"I am not content in just suggesting things by the use of words," he once wrote, "I want to show the origins, the metaphors of reality, the free movement of the spirit." The result of this desire, in this long poem, is that there is little attention to the line itself, or the syllable but a great deal of concern for the affective segue of situation and image, and an insistence on the veracity of the vernacular word in context.
Stanford's use of delta and "Ark-La-Miss" white dialect expression is honest and freely metaphoric, almost naif. It does not sound like the tongue-in-cheek entendre of Randy Newman's lyrics; it sounds like Stanford's natural for real. At times, Stanford sounds as if he is transcribing taped conversations... but the matter of the utterances is so often troubling, intimate, and of painful intensity that the presence of a Sony would have denied such witness air. It seems, then, that much of Stanford's writing moves between conversations with an "imaginary friend" in delta lingo and a prodigiously modernist reconstruction of memory; and some of his own comments on his method of composition will support this idea. Of the poem "Death And The Arkansas River," he wrote:
I had a year with this poem; everyday in the woods at
work I would say it. I never wrote a word down until I had
it right in my mind. It became what they call a floater.
That's a work song, a chant. Once I thought it sounded
right, and undramatic, I wrote it down without changing
a word.
Men sing when they work, or at least they used to. I'm
liable to talk to myself.
That's what he says.
A "floater." The word may come from the Depression era slang for someone who loafs on the job; making up poems, no doubt. It's an interesting turn of phrase. But Stanford's poem is obviously well worked out and contains a passage in which it remembers the circumstances of its own generation, interesting lines that are a filigree around the poet's idea... like trumpet creeper radicans snaking around a tall old oak or pine:
Even if you couldn't hear
The sound would carry
Like a truck on a bridge, like a flower
Given at a ball, a sound in place,
The tradewind called Death
Some may look at "Like a truck on a bridge, like a flower" as a pat Surrealist line, but the fact that the flower is "Given at a ball..." will remind those who know anything about the South that this is reliable reportage. Such balls are still given in Memphis and Greenville, incisively discussed, described, and criticized in Florence King's Southern Ladies And Gentlemen (1975). The mythology of the pickup truck, the 18-wheeler, and the CB radio is unreeled each evening in countless drive-in movie epics; and, no matter where in the South, the niggers still live (conveniently) across some set of tracks. All of this is truth and immediate, And simple, even if the poem is not.
This poem is, in fact, a portrait and appraisal of the mystery named Death, which is seen here as both an absent center and a missing other. In the presence of such a mystery, one need not go to the creative extremes of Surrealist imagery to describe ordinary life as it is. Just say it as it is is enough. And Stanford does just say it.
Just so, "Death And The Arkansas River" also provides a tintype of the character who, as Jimmy, shares the focus of The Battlefield with its dreamy unnamed narrator:
Death, for instance, was looking
To cold-cock my brother.
My brother thought he pulled a fast one.
He played the radio and drank whiskey.
He raised hell
With women already married.
Do you know of anyone who's got the best
Of Death?
Frank Stanford's answer in "Death And The Arkansas River" and his longer poem is a distraught No; yet all of his poetry seems to be a meditation upon the imagined life and death of this "brother," this "Jimmy" (who might, in fact, be the idealization of Stanford's "other self" or the twin that died early).
Whoever he might actually be, the particulars of this character's "fast one" with Death are deeply explored in the dream narratives, lists, and man-to-man (or man-to-boy) conversations recorded in the longer poem. Stanford's problem is, of course, the logical confrontation of guilt, innocence, and experience. The dreamer dreams and pains himself for mindful lusts; another man (or boy) leaves care to the devil himself.
The other writers that we've mentioned as comparable with Frank Stanford can be instructive here. While Ron Arias' protagonist in The Road To Tamazunchale confronts the aged and didactic delirium of Job, Stanford's characters and the protagonist of Tom Vietch's The Luis Armed Story are (like Kenneth Koch's epic Eskimo baseball player) all innocents whose ambitions and simperings to be John of Patmos are inexpicably (though not at all unexpectedly) destroyed by their hidebound neighbors' stupidity. Smack up against the people of the world's best selling book, the idea finally communicated is that mad senility, saintliness, and vice are all equal when compared to the total insensitivity that is the norm.
Then, in this noxious atmosphere, what about John? What about the trickster negroes, dreaming Francis, wild boy Jimmy, and the other characters of Stanford's effusive dreams?
When one has come down from the mountaintop. dream, or vision, unto whom (among these dull estupidos) must one speak? To passersby in front of the motel in Memphis? Unknown Sardis or Enon in the woodlands of southern Arkansas? Grannis? Philadelphia and its racist Rizzo?
Neither new nor unique, the moral and real dilemma Stanford confronts can be read in much of the literature of the Deep South. In a region where everyone has been taught that the wages of sin is death, how (given the officially historic sinfulness of its mixed-up racist heritage) does one deal with the solitary sinner whose aim seems to be to actually draw more wages than the reaper? In other words, can a loser ever win?
The racial, cultural, economic, and social conflicts that define the history of the South find their way into the region's letters in many forms. Shadow dancing – a lightshow of faded dreams and dreams deferred, a magic cauldron glow – not the Lake poet's glory, but the bayou writers', takes on the intermittent mists that rise from the ground at night and the parasitic Spanish moss that eerily festoons the trees around the big house on the old plantation.
And, then, there is the fog in human minds, which Frank Stanford's Surrealist jumble of words and views "clairvoyantly" attempts to clarify. Not a new effort, at all, The detoured sexuality in the works of Tennessee Williams and early Truman Capote depicts part of the problem... the spectrally exact precision of Albert Murray and Alex Haley deals with it... and the sardonic sophistication of the blues is the true depiction of an understated but histrionic madness that is identified with the South but is a true picture of this entire country.
Bill Zavatsky and I discussed this once and couldn't make heads nor tails of it. But, now, it's not so hard to understand. These United States changed from plural to singular only after the Civil War and the establishment of a firm federalist government The romantic South (like Spain and Portugal) has never quite recovered; but, romantically, the South has borne the emotional burden of the entire country. Foreign car mechanics in Texas wear cowboy boots, as if to prove they are still involved in the grasp for this land, still involved in the American dream Similarly, the South's people – after the experience of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period – understood, the hard way, that freedom was a function of mythological interpretation. Indeed, they brought that realization upon themselves, when (like their mercantile counterparts in the North) they thought that crinolines could be endlessly fluffed up by slaves in tatters.
The history of the United States is, like Frank Stanford's poem, a vast and complicated attempt to abolish chance and find some reason for continuing existence. The land resists and our history (even the nightly revelations of the NEWS) increasingly suggests disaster and failure of nerve, Yet, like Porsche mechanics wearing cowboy boots, we persist in buying myths and building personalities that promise to seize the time for our dreams. When it doesn't work, we try again.
And again. And when that doesn't work, we are sometimes privileged to view the real barbarism inside of us. See it now – the World War II decision to destroy the whole world before one bomb should drop on Nebraska; the Civil War resolve to end rebellion less'n everybody think they gots a turn; the reconstruction of the Klu Klux Klan in places like Boston; the idea of the revolution's plotters that a serpent must be whole to strike, that each piece won't writhe until sundown (at least) and, maybe, grow a head.
The truth, of course, is quite the opposite of our yearnings. This land – beyond our ruining of it – is cursed for us; and we are, all of us, a rotten people. Down South, because of guilt and circumstance, all of this is understood.
Most good Southern writing comes from such a dismally correct and directly empirical perception of our land and its people. The mythic naturalism of Faulkner and Carson McCullers, the matter-of-factness of Eudora Welty, the embattled and despairing classicism of Walker Percy and the New Critics, the maroon subtlety of Jean Toomer and his spiritual disciples, and the semiotic realism (that is, surrealism) of Ralph Ellison and Frank Stanford speak for the South. These writers share the same sources and (for different reasons) similar frustrations; and, in fact, their messages often seem like pigeonhole interchanges; cloverleafs made crimson by some madness and frustration in the hideous spiritual history of the South that results in what Georgia poet David Bottoms has called "recreational violence."
Frank Stanford's poetry is deep into that, for good reason. But there is also sweetness, and, in his desire to see black and white recognized as equal in both folkways and human fragility, a yearning for enlightenment.
Frank Stanford's poetry is a song of the South, a place where there is abundant time and spaces that sometime drive people to desperation, a place where folks have time to think (in some cases, perhaps also mine, too much time), and a tradition of language in which the slowness of utterance represents a convention of choosing words carefully. That, surely, is a legacy of slave tricksterism and pioneer ideas of privacy: but it is a valuable and viable approach to language. Time to think and think before you speak, as much as the weird sociopolitical heritage of the South, has made the region's literature remarkable.
III
'Our dread and torment in this life we lead
are its apartness, its eternal isolation. We
try to rid us of ourselves by love, by prayers,
by vice, by the Lethe of activity, and we
never wholly succeed.' — William Alexander Percy
Michael Cuddihy, editor of Ironwood, wrote an eloquent obituary for Frank Stanford. "His poems," Cuddihy wrote, "enriched by an abiding sense of the cosmos, remain down to earth, written in the vernacular of his own region. His gift for metaphor... was spontaneous, exhilarating, often miraculous.
This is true. One of Stanford's poems contains the marvelous lines "Swallowing cold weather/A fish hook at a time." This is not the result of a simple Creative Writing exercise in imagery, yet it seems a bit too artful to be a genuine vernacular parole trouve. Like Cuddihy, I read such lines as evidence of the author's technical skill given dimension by his fluency in the vernacular. He knows the weather and the atmosphere, and it was Stanford's gift to constantly express his knowledge more vividly and accurately than most Perhaps what he achieved is what the vernacular seeks. I once asked Texas folklorist Bill Brett if he thought that the laconic and colorful expressions of oilfield "roughnecks" was a conscious exercise in metaphor. "Naw," he replied, choosing his words carefully, "that was just the result of some illiterate men trying to describe things as best they could," I'm sure, however, that such men valued miracles of wit highly enough to repeat them into formulas; besides that, everyone in the South shares a tradition of verbal improvisation.
Stanford's closeness to the South's traditions (remember Bottoms "recreational violence") goes beyond the language of conversations filled with hyperbolic metaphor. The poem which provided the lines I've just quoted is a piece about a sniper who shoots down people's weathervanes out of desperation and boredom. The poem is as much about adolescent restlessness as it is about the stresses that produce violent misfits like Texas' Charles Whitman and Louisiana's Mark Essex, or New York's David ("Son of Sam") Berkowitz.
The United States is, with its dynamic and ambitious optimism, also a nation of desperation and apple pie violence; a place where businessmen are conspirators, trade unionists are characterized as thugs, and public officials are often convicted or pardoned felons by the time they leave office; a nation whose morbidity produces distraught artists, the detective story as an art form, and scholars who produce books like Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip documenting a history of aberration.
Stanford fits (as who among us does not) as heir to this confusion. While concentrating upon the reality of the place in which he lived, his poem "The Boy Who Shot Weathercocks" tells us a great deal about the spiritual exhaustion this country merchandises. Stanford wrote:
I don't kill them, I just knock them off
The iron branches of the houses,
And they fly off, ahead of the bullet even
* * *
Then they swoop over orchards,
mess On the lovers,
then they are far away,
Such a distance a cripple
like me Can't imagine.
That's what he wrote; and maybe it is language that powerful that can tell us what Whitman, Essex, and Berkowitz were all about.
Perhaps the very anonymity of Stanford's speaker explains the notorious ones among us whose actions strain belief, We live in a dangerous place, a country where finders are losers. Another of Stanford's poems, "A Milk Truck Running Into A Crazy Maid At The Corner Of Getwell And Park." speaks of an accidental traffic fatality which is haunting because it is brought about by madness, and therefore, is not ultimately as accidental as it is dementedly premeditated. The poem is addressed to similar questions of personal dementia, racism, and a social madness that is peculiar to our lifestyle. It must be quoted in its entirety:
They pull a coat over an old woman's eyes.
They ask one another who the old woman was.
No one knows but she worked everyday
And was carrying a sack
Of newspapers and a carton of eggs.
So they say what happened
And someone says she got up
Off the bench and shouted,
When a cow drinks water we get milk
When a snake drinks water we get bit.
She lifted her white dress
And waded out into the intersection
Like it was a river.
They lick their thumbs, write down what is told.
The other maids are getting off work
Standing around wondering what got into her.
The cats from Memphis State are sitting on the bench
Talking about the new Ornette Coleman album
Waiting for the bus,
And the servants of the people are pulling out of parking lots
And into their driveways,
A beer in their lap
Smoke from a dead cigar in their eyes
And desire and desire and desire
Like a long way to go in a bad war,
So they eat a big supper tell everyone what to do
Send the children to bed early have words with their wife.
They set the clock and lie back in the sheets.
They think of toes being slit
And blood that can be heard like a bad tap.
They draw their coats over an old woman's eyes
And think about standing in a warm pool
Awhite sheet wrapped around them
An old woman holding them
Taking them down into water.
Stanford's consideration of the rule of senselessness might bear comparison to Michael McClure's recent poem "The Death Of Kin Chuen Louie" which describes a small-time gangland slaying. The description gives the author ground for a Buddhist lecture on human insensitivity and helpless faith before inexorable questions. Stanford's poem is a witness, not a sermon. The incident he reports is even more irrational than McClure's and his understated conclusions are, like the Rolling Stones' blunt answer to "who killed the Kennedys." chilling. Here, the enforced yet matter-of-fact anonymity in Stanford's landscapes (actually vignettes that, for whatever space of time, fade in and out of focus even in the poet's attention) places each of us at the center of the scene and the experience. There, we are ourselves – with no further need of a poet's framing, as if Stanford would provide further assistance – must take account of the unfolding dimensions surrounding and within.
Finding ourselves at this point, it is possible to fault Stanford for lacking a creed: but recent philosophers have taught us that choice is perspective (if not salvation)... and ancient ones professed perspective to be argument. All authorities, creeds, and assumptions of knowledge fall – at their peril – into the mad dance between these alternatingly affirmative and negative poles.
Frank Stanford wrote about a certain sensibility that is American and universal. ln many ways, his life and works are shocking. Troubling and truthful, his longest book stands almost as a challenge to our current ideas of literature and reality. Because he chose to utilize a Surrealist tone and form, some of what he says is both alarming and instructive. When we have time enough to study deeply and discuss this huge and marvelous poem called The Battlefield and new collections recently published by Lost Roads Publishers and Ironwood Press, we may focus on new images of all our selves armed with Stanford's unique vision.
If there is any such thing as delight in this sort of poetry, it is the delight of recognition at the crossroads, hopefully, before we have to suffer all the rest. There are many images and turns of phrase in his 23,000 line poem that will enhance Frank Stanford's reputation as a poet and testify to his insight. Again – from his long, beautiful poem – at random, I chose these lines:
I thought about where I come from murder
and miracles occur without headlines
my past is a field of sleepwalking majorettes
too poor to buy white boots
These lines are quoted here, randomly and out of context, simply for their striking incompleteness, like the open-ended suspense of country conversation which has been elevated to the premeditated and poetic tentativity of the Blues. I presume no improvement upon the eulogies of his friends (who chose to quote his poems during his obsequies at Subiaco), I only want to indicate that I heard that; that I recognized his accent; and I have been trying to understand some of the things he said about himself and you and me.» - Lorenzo Thomas
Frank Stanford, Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away: Tales (Lost Roads Publishers, February 1991)«Most, if not everything written about Frank Stanford's writing and life has been about his poetry, about Frank Stanford the poet. The truth of the matter is that he possessed an equal facility in the writing of fiction. The 11 stories in Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away are proof that Stanford was a writer who was able to bring poetic moments and images into his narrative writing as easily as he was able to bring a sense of story, character, and place to much of his poetry.
A character in one of the tales tells us "I plan to leave behind a book of essays dealing with the imagination." Conditions Uncertain is just such a book, for each of the stories in the collection - some just a few pages long, others approaching the length of short novellas - are filled with not just an interesting assortment of strange characters, narrators, and situations, but with language-rich descriptions of the reality these characters inhabit, making a claim for the argument that the perception of the kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory nature of reality is also the most honest way of depicting it in writing. In one of his letters, Stanford wrote: "I'm off my bearing, maybe, but you understand: you know what real is, so you don't have to describe what you don't understand as surreal (like others do)."
These tales go beyond the surreal by weaving the twisting and bending webs of their narrators' stories with a chiaroscuro of dreams, nightmares, paintings, music, and stories within the tales themselves. In "McQuiston's Tale," for example, the narrator visits a blind man named Shing who claims to have a ventriloquist son with a dummy named Arimathea. Shing drinks a bottle of tabasco and, even though he is blind, likes the color blue. In "DeMoss's Tale," the narrator is taken by Silent Night, the ice truck man, to have his hair cut by Rudy in the icehouse. He puts a frozen minnow in his pocket and goes to the carnival to see The Devil. "Ansar's Tale & Luper's Note" is the story of an astronomer who goes blind and, while being taken care of by two young boys with an interest in the stars, remembers the stranger who arrived in his town when he was young and left books for him to read in his outhouse. "Merton's Tale" out-Lynches the strangest moments in a David Lynch film, as a man whose only possessions are a tape recorder and his collection of classical music spends a few delirious nights stranded by a snowstorm in a strange town.
Stanford's characters are consumed by the weight of their dreams, memories, and experiences, and the reader isn't always sure if their perceptions of reality are the right ones to hold on to. As a result, his stories are like those dreams we sometimes have that are filled with very strange people whom we have never met, but who inhabit the world we often toss and turn through in our sleep. His fiction reminds the reader that memories are as real as the experiences that shaped them, and that dreams and nightmares are experiences that can also shape or bend our perceptions of the past and present. With lines like "I felt the watch ticking against me all night like a grasshopper nailing a coffin," Stanford taps into a reservoir of surprising and jolting images and similes to create fictions that are at once disorienting and exhilarating to read. In Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away, he has successfully fulfilled one of his own character's statements: "I worked and worked the ore of my dreams until it was a fine radium."» - Greg Bachar
...Death is a good word.
It often returns
When it is very
Dark outside and hot,
Like a fisherman
Over the limit,
Without pain, sex,
Or melancholy.
Young as I am, I
Hold light for this boat.
...When Jimmy cut a throat
The eyes rolled back in the head
Like they was baptized
I tell you
When he cut a throat
It was like Abednego's guitar
And the blood
Flew out like quail
He had the red ...
...When you take the lost road
You find the bright feathers of morning
Laid out in proportion to snow and light
And when the snow gets lost on the road
Then the hot wind might blow from the south
And there is sadness in bed for twenty centuries
And everyone is chewing the grass on the graves again
