The Fevered Genius of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford burned through life with wild creativity, relentless honesty, and perilous passion. This excerpt from James McWilliams’ biography drops you into Stanford’s turbulent final days—and introduces you to his monumental legacy.
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Prelude
“Death doesn’t fuck around.”
—Frank Stanford, “Lost Dog and a Wild Hair”
Early morning June 3, 1978, an uptown New Orleans house at 519 Webster St. Frank Stanford got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and wrote in black ink a message on the wall, just above a tacked-up poster of Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment.”
“What is Frank looking for?”
He got dressed and took $10 and an old suitcase that belonged to his friend and fellow poet, Ralph Adamo, in whose house he had just spent the night. After packing his clothes, Frank went to meet the writer Ellen Gilchrist for breakfast. They ate on Magazine St.—possibly at Tranchina’s. “This is goodbye,” Frank said to her after breakfast. “This is really goodbye.” Then Kay DuVernet, a poet and photographer with whom Frank had spent the night, picked him up and drove him to the airport to fly home to Fayetteville, Arkansas.
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What was Frank Stanford looking for? Impossible question. Nobody will ever fully know. But on this morning at least, he wanted an escape. Typically he was good at it. Frank escaped having to ask his friend Ralph for money. He escaped whatever expectations DuVernet, a woman whom Frank had known for many years, might have entertained about the poet she had loved through the night. But most notably, Stanford, by sojourning in New Orleans for over two weeks, escaped facing in person the anger of his wife, Ginny Crouch Stanford, and his lover, C.D. Wright.
Because the jig was up. On the day or two after Frank left for his trip to New Orleans on May 18, the two women had discovered that they’d been deceived by the handsome and charismatic poet. Frank had told his wife Ginny that his relationship with C.D. was a working relationship; and he had told C.D. that his marriage with Ginny was one of convenience. But the facts were otherwise: he was in love with and sleeping with both women. And now these women were letting him know that they knew. They also made it clear that he would suffer consequences. When C.D. and Ginny met at a mutual friend’s house in Fayetteville to discuss the matter, they were, according to this friend, “holding each other up for support, and they were really angry.” Frank Stanford was not eager to head back home, whatever that word now meant to him, into a maelstrom of emotion.
He must have known the discovery was going to happen. Ginny evidently found love letters he’d written, presumably to Wright, in a file of his poems to which she had ready access. “It felt,” Ginny recalled, “like the end of the world.” Almost twenty years later Wright recalled Ginny’s immediate response to her discovery of the evidence: “Within two hours she was at my door.” Frank had kept these two talented and intelligent women in the dark about each other—or at least about the nature of his relationship with them—for nearly two and a half years.
No artifice, much less art, could free him. For perhaps the first time, Stanford finally knew the answer to the question he had written on the wall: “What is Frank looking for?”
Ginny and C.D. bonded in their pain and desire for retribution. “There was a lot of tenderness between them,” recalls the friend whose kitchen as they met in.“We talked for the next two weeks and there was a lot of driving back and forth,” Wright said about her meetings with Ginny, who was living in southern Missouri. As they waited for Stanford to return, the two women planned a reckoning. Once the legendary poet returned to Fayetteville, mustering whatever it took to come through the door at 705 Jackson Drive, he would face that with which he had always had a complicated relationship: reality.
So, on this morning of June 3, 1978, standing in Ralph Adamo’s bathroom, Stanford was in an unprecedented position: the poet was trapped. Reality—something he’d long eluded, or at least kept at bay—now had him in a vice. No artifice, much less art, could free him. For perhaps the first time, Stanford finally knew the answer to the question he had written on the wall on June 3, 1978. He may have even penned those words as his epitaph.
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In the lead up to this moment, Stanford twice delayed his flight home. On May 31, he had written to his mother, “I’m fine and having a very good time. This [New Orleans] is a wonderful city full of wonderful people.” Frank had gone to the coast with friends—to a town called Pass Christian and possibly others. On June 2, back in New Orleans, he'd spent the night at Adamo’s house, with DuVernet, who thought Frank “was full of holy water.” At some point on June 2, Frank arranged to have flowers sent to Lucinda Williams, a woman he had only known for a few months but who said, in her memoir, “I was enamored of him. I was in love with him.”
On June 3, after breakfast with Gilchrist, Stanford took an 8:45 a.m. flight to Little Rock, where he transferred to a 1 p.m. flight to the NW Arkansas airport. He opted for window seats. It was most likely on this plane he wrote on a white legal pad that “I would not be honest if I said I was just totally free of fear and sadness. There is sadness and there is fear.” He arrived home at 705 Jackson Drive in the mid-afternoon. The rental was a small ranch house at the end a quiet street. Honeysuckle vines threaded through a chain link fence. The lawn was freshly cut and manicured. In the covered garage stood the bulky hardware of the literary press—White River Printers—that he and Wright ran together. Between the garage and the house stretched a laundry line to which the pages of poetry books were pinned to dry before being bound into volumes that would launch the careers of other young poets, many of whom Frank selflessly nurtured into maturity.
As Frank approached the front door he saw on the dash of his white 1977 Datsun pickup truck a foreboding tableau of objects: from the rearview mirror hung a pair of women’s underwear and cut-up pieces of his father’s Stetson hat; below it was a cover of a Lightnin’ Hopkins album. This was a dark shrine designed to haunt and mock the man for his infidelities, his uncontrollable passions, his lies. It was to presage the “spite and rage”—as Ginny put it—he was about to face.
When he entered the house Stanford encountered two deeply pained women. Ginny later recalled that he had on a new white shirt and khaki pants and was very tan from his beach venture. His face looked thin and “he had the distant air of a man just back from war.” Frank tried to hug Ginny but she refused him. He told her he loved her but, for the first time, she did not respond. His belongings had been shoved into boxes. Ginny reaffirmed that she had filed for divorce. From home and marriage, Stanford was now estranged. Then came the fight. “We had this verbal showdown, the three of us for hours,” Wright recalled. Soon she was vomiting in the bathroom and Ginny was sobbing in the kitchen. The emotions continued to mount. “I wanted to put him through a wall,” said Ginny. She added, “We proceeded to slice and dice him.”
“In the span of the longest five or six seconds I have ever lived through, Frank fired three shots into his chest. Three pops, three cries. ... After the third cry I knew he was dead.”
At this point, around 6 p.m., Frank, who had spent his entire life avoiding confrontation, said he needed to go to his office at the surveying company where he worked. In his absence, paperwork had piled up, and he needed to check in, he said. They made the two-mile drive to the office at 118 Center Street. C.D. Wright says it was just her and Frank in his truck; Ginny says it was the three of them. Either way, both women agreed how strange it was for Frank to leave the office wearing a red hoodie sweatshirt, his head down and his hands jammed in the big front pocket.
Not long after they returned to 705 Jackson Drive, Frank said he needed to rest for a while and went into the bedroom right off the kitchen, shut the door and laid down on the bed he had shared with C.D. for nearly two years, a bed that once belonged to her grandmother.
Minutes later the phone rang in a hallway about five blocks away. Jim Whitehead, former teacher of Frank’s and a founder of the MFA program at Arkansas, walked from his home office—the very spot where Frank and C.D. had met less than three years earlier—to answer it. His daughter was in the house at the time and remembers her dad picking up the phone, pausing, and yelling as loud as she ever heard the big man yell, “Goddammit!,” before rushing out of the house.
What Ginny heard from the bedroom, around 7 p.m., sounded like Frank was hitting something with a piece of wood. She later described what Frank did to himself with the .22 revolver he took from his boss’s desk and hid in his hoodie. “In the span of the longest five or six seconds I have ever lived through, Frank fired three shots into his chest. Three pops, three cries. . . After the third cry I knew he was dead.” Ginny ran across the street for help while C.D., standing over Frank’s body, screamed and screamed. When Ginny came back she straddled him, pumping his chest while C.D. breathed into his lifeless lungs. Ginny remembers that his eyes turned “from hazel to porcelain green.” She remembers thinking: “This is real this is real this is real.”
Coda
“He died like the last note of Neil Young’s guitar, he died like the first breeze off the ocean in the morning, he died like the water trickling out of an old clay pot, he died like my black cat howling at the window, he died like the drunks at sixth and Mission, he died like the smoke filled rooms that choked me last night, he died like the sad harmonica player, he died like the hands of the clock I couldn’t see moving.”
—Ginny Stanford, c. 1993
Introduction
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“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.”
The words of poet Jack Gilbert—who Frank never knew but should have—remind us that a death does not define a life. At least it shouldn’t, especially for a life as actively lived as Frank Stanford’s. Stanford shot himself three times in or near his heart at the age of twenty-nine. Like so much about his life the final act seems almost impossible. His was a dramatic exit, and those who know Stanford cannot avoid speculating why it happened. But those are motives only one man will ever know. For all his obsession with death, this book is not an attempt to understand Frank Stanford’s suicide. As one of Frank’s friend’s put it, “Of his death we should have little to say.” With this I agree.
Stanford’s nearly thirty years were full of life. He was an orphan who never met his biological parents; a summertime resident of Mississippi levee camps staffed by Black laborers; the educational product of Benedictine monks and an autodidact reading habit; a teenager who lived a comfortable bourgeois life in a lakefront house; a prodigious and promiscuous lover; a student of cultures local and global and high and low; a child prodigy; a land surveyor; a muse with a near photographic memory; a devotee of jazz, blues, film, and classical music; a barfly, a karate and judo expert; a publisher; the founder of a small press an exacting gardener; a savvy editor. And when it was time to tell the big lie, he was astonishing. So, yeah, Icarus flew.
Stanford was a chameleon. As a kid he fashioned himself into a southern aristocrat with Mississippi heritage and roots dating back to England (to Earl of Sandwich peerage, no less). Later, he became a periodically reclusive and often brooding artist from Northwest Arkansas, a charismatic and well-read Ozarkian hillbilly who wrote poetry that, if only for a few years, proved irresistible to the nation’s leading journals (the elite “little magazines” especially); towards the end, he buttoned down, cut back on his drinking, and acted as a professional editor of his own small publishing company, Lost Roads Publishers, where he ushered young and underrecognized talent toward future success in a spirit of wisdom and guidance. Finally, ending the journey with what his friend and the poet Thomas Lux called an “irreversible cliche,” he became a writer whose reputation has been overly defined by a striking, self-inflicted, and fatal act.
But there was and always will be the poetry. From a very young age, it was a constant in Frank’s life. Accolades from contemporaries never wavered. Allen Ginsberg praised Stanford’s writing and urged him to send more poems to him. Alan Dugan deemed Stanford “a genius” and “a true poet.” Thomas Lux admired his correspondent’s “rare talent,” deeming his poems “goddam terrific.” Franz Wright called Stanford’s poems “staggering for their courage and beauty.” Eileen Myles said that his poetry was “lurid” and “mythical.” John Berryman, Terrance Hayes, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (“I do dig many of your poems”) have all praised Stanford’s work. Richard Howard, whose own poetry could not have been more unlike Stanford’s, taught Stanford’s poems in his Columbia University classes. C.D. Wright noted that “everybody who met him stirred to his vision.” Ellen Gilchrist summed up the poetry world’s feelings for Stanford when she wrote that “everybody worshiped him,” adding that “he was a genius, a true, complete and total genius.”
Such affirmation might go to anyone’s head, and Stanford was hardly immune to the allure of praise. His personal struggles were one thing, and they were reliably mercurial and intense. But his faith in his own poetry, even before he began to publish it, remained steadfast. In the early 1970s he typed out the claim that “my feet will fit sweet William Faulkner’s boots like a glove,” noting how he planned to “whip every poet under thirty.” In this same typed note (seemingly written to himself), he flexed even more, saying, “I’m going to be Jean Cocteau and William Faulkner at the same time.” In 1970 he bragged to a fellow young poet that, “Pablo Neruda spit me into the ear of Jules Renard.” A few years later Stanford wrote to his publisher, “Poets of all persuasions, so far, have liked my work—that means I’m writing poetry.” His feelings were unequivocal: “I like being accepted by all phases of the literary scene.”
Egotistical, yes, but not necessarily wrong. Frank Stanford was writing bold and original poetry, and few readers knew about it. He was writing poetry that led Jim Whitehead, his teacher at the University of Arkansas, to call him “the most brilliant poet of his generation.” It was poetry that led Frank’s friend and poet John McKernan to tell Stanford scholar A.P. Walton that “he is the best poet of his generation. Period.” Poets so disparate in style, background, and artistic temperament as those listed above universally shared high admiration for Frank Stanford. This kind of admiration affirms his broad if undervalued influence on the modern American literary tradition. Stanford has had important fans, but he still lacks a wider readership.
“He was so prolific,” according to an editor he worked with, “that, for all I know, there might be whole drawers full of secret treasures.” In fact there were.
And there’s a great deal to read. To say that Stanford was prolific is an understatement—he produced in a decade what would comprise a career’s worth of writing for most poets. “He left an astonishingly large body of finished poetry,” his friend Ralph Adamo writes in a 2000 edition of the Asheville Poetry Review. “He was so prolific,” according to an editor he worked with, “that, for all I know, there might be whole drawers full of secret treasures.” In fact there were. In addition to poetry, Stanford wrote short fiction, novels, screenplays, plays, and essays, leaving many of these manuscripts unpublished, some of them inaccessible and many of them, as we’ll see, burned to ashes. But he wrote all the time. Even the work that is easily available—thanks in part to Copper Canyon Press’ 2015 publication of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford—astonishes in its volume.
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The bulk of Stanford’s output consisted of relatively short lyric poems. Many hundreds, and likely thousands, of them. The themes in these poems vary but, in significant ways, they collectively track Stanford’s evolving persona and disposition throughout his brief adult life. Across nine published chapbooks, there was a burst of youthful vibrancy in the beginning (The Singing Knives), the heavy onset of darkness at the end (Crib Death), and an autobiographical continuum of emotions in between. Throughout it all Stanford, like one of his idols, William Faulkner, created a fictional universe where familiar characters experienced themselves in the flow of Southern time and place. His poems integrate figures familiar and exotic into the same Delta landscape that preoccupied Faulkner. The entire creative process rejects sophisticated urbanity in favor of common and countrified voices—voices that reflected in Stanford’s work what John Stuart Mill had called “utterance overheard.” The lowbrow backcountry registers thrive on language, music, humor, and violence that achieve a kind unforced Southern sublimity. For all their wonderful strangeness and sympathy for the grotesque, Stanford’s poems are so accessible they can find you before you’re aware of it. Bill Willett, Frank’s lifelong and best friend, said that, while he was never a formal student of poetry, Frank always “wrote about things that almost anyone could find some familiarity with, something that was real down to earth.” One of Frank’s many girlfriends recalled how she “loved...how he could find simple words to get his point across.”
But as A.P. Walton has observed, while Stanford “spent nearly his entire brief life in the relatively finite radius of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and northern Arkansas,” he “is a world poet.” Stanford’s wildman-from-the-backwoods persona—fueled by his comments such as “I’d rather have knocked out Sonny Liston than written ‘The Wasteland’”—should never obscure the fact that his curiosity and attention focused heavily on literature, art, film, and music from Europe, South America, and Japan. This “redneck surrealist” immersed himself in the foreign venues of international writers, poets, and movies—especially those from France, Spain, and Italy. He was familiar with the ancient Greek and Latin works (all translated), mythologies (Norse, Irish, Greek, Native American), and Medieval epics. He knew the Old Testament like a Biblical scholar. His interest in foreign themes and images was driven by an insatiable desire to hear new voices, as well as an occasional sense that, as he complained to an editor about being stuck in a writing seminar in Northwest Arkansas, “I feel like I’m living in occupied territory!” While he could be quite comfortable being occupied in that territory, he constantly broke out of it, if only in his mind, to experience worlds beyond the South and, in ways that affirm his bold experimental impulse, to bring those worlds back to Arkansas.
Frank’s free-ranging Romanticism further prevented him from simply being labeled a regional voice with a cult following. As with two of his idols Byron and Keats, the theme of death, hardly limited to the South, was his lodestar. In Stanford’s work, a vast collection of characters comes and goes, scenes shift from Mississippi to Memphis to Arkansas, and throughout it all the small dramas of otherwise unnoticed lives dance in the moon shadow of death. Calling Stanford’s verse “her first living poetry,” C.D. Wright admired “his beautiful sepulchral language.” The poet Franz Wright called him “one of the great voices of death.” These death-obsessed poems, most of them published between 1974 to 1977, allowed Stanford to nourish his muse, one sustained by his inherent awareness of life’s ephemerality in its becoming, its being, its ending. He did this while creating a poetic world he owned, even dominated, through a polyphonic, southern, global, and wildly inclusive language marked by limitless space and unshakable faith in the power of youthful genius.
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Stanford’s lyric poems, which appeared in the nation’s little magazines in the early and mid-1970s, stand on their own terms as an impressive literary achievement. But they emerged alongside and conversed with a single and far more defining literary accomplishment. Whereas Melville had Moby Dick, Whitman had Leaves of Grass, and Ginsberg had Howl—and Frank knew each of these works well—Frank Stanford had The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. No artist, especially one as productive and diversified as Stanford, should have their career defined by a single poem. But because it was so thoroughly preoccupying and epic, so heavy and self-referential and autobiographical, The Battlefield, a poem that he worked on for nearly half his life, can rightly be called the touchstone of Frank Stanford’s career.
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It is one the longest published poems in the history of American literature. The Battlefield has earned Stanford comparisons to literary figures such as Rimbaud (Lorenzo Thomas called him “a swamp rat Rimbaud”), Melville, and Whitman. Some critics, not implausibly, believe his work exceeded the ambition of some canonized writers. There is a “cult of Stanford”—a cohort of obsessed fans who have known and read and studied and searched and believed in Stanford from the moment they encountered him. These acolytes tend to find each other and thrill in their shared discovery. The poet Leon Stokesbury called them “devoted disciples not / to be denied.” They argue that The Battlefield should elevate Frank Stanford to one of the twentieth century’s most important poets. They insist we are missing out when we overlook him. The poet Lee Upton recalled “the jolt I experienced when first reading him.” Writing me in 2020, she said, “Looking at his poems tonight, the jolt recurs.” When Lucinda Williams started reading The Battlefield she recalled, “Nobody had ever read anything like it.” It was, she added, “feral and on fire.”
Stanford’s adult life was, most of the time, deeply troubled. Perhaps because of this, he was prone to being mythologized. The provenance of The Battlefield is, as with a lot of Stanford’s life, shrouded in mystery and myth. Some legends insist he began writing an early version of it, as Frank himself sometimes suggested, at the age of nine. On its face, the assertion seems absurd. But C.D. Wright, for one, did not dismiss the idea. Whether it’s true or not—and I’ll explore the question in the pages ahead—the youthful energy that runs throughout the poem helps explain what Frank thought the poem would do to those who heard, consumed, and experienced it. In a 1974 letter he described his ever-evolving creation: “In a different mail you will find 375 pages of a 500 page ms. The original was over 1000 pages, but I got rid of half of it....The other 125 pages are lost somewhere in the mail. The poem, which in another version extended over 40,000 lines, is called ‘the battlefield where the moon says I love you.’” He then suggested how to read it: “This long poem will obliterate your eyes, so don’t read over ten pages a day.” It’s not the worst advice he ever gave.
The poem is, in its first published edition (1977), 542 pages of tiny print. Its first stanza is its last. It’s unpunctuated. It’s marked by erratic line length and seems (at least on the surface) to lack narrative cohesion. Reading it for the first time is not unlike getting mired in the thornier patches of Ulysses—and there are, indeed, many similarities with Joyce’s masterpiece (such as the fact that nobody in the epic is worth more than their last paycheck). Thematically and geographically, The Battlefield ricochets across a South so rural and carnivalesque it might even feel alien to Southerners. The protagonist Francis Gildart (an obvious stand-in for Francis “Frank” Gildart Stanford) explores dreamscapes conveyed in a shifting babel of sounds. The poem thrives on a mostly North Mississippi idiom that samples liberally from everything from Shakespearean tones to clipped countrified expressions to risqué levee camp slang to standard dozens-like banter. “His imitation of all dialects was uncanny,” C.D. Wright said. “He was,” she noted, “a major listener.” A “moving picture” becomes a “moom pitchu”; a lunatic becomes a “looney tick”; and Saturday becomes “Saddy.” Frank listened intently to how people spoke words. When young Francis gets uppity in the classroom, he does not declare to his teacher, “I need to use the bathroom.” That would be boring. He says instead, “Miss Fulgum this chevalier needs to piss.” Those of us who fall under the spell of such arch-irreverence, achieved by tinkering so boldly with the simplest language, a tinkering generally done without irony, cannot help but fall, often hard, for this kind of poetic playfulness.
Language and music and noises blend and dance and sometimes holler and reverberate. Careful readers will hear a South pulsing with the undertones of gospel music, medieval troubadour marches, blues riffs, jags of jazz, and backwoods slang.
Language and music and noises blend and dance and sometimes clash and reverberate. Careful readers will hear a South pulsing with the undertones of gospel music, medieval troubadour marches, blues riffs, jags of jazz, and backwoods slang. Describing the poem to a friend, C.D. Wright wrote, “I see it . . thoroughly under the influence of Beowolf and Sir Gawain, also by Chaucer, the Arthurian romances, all but the metaphysical writers, also by all the English romantics, the French and Spanish surrealists, Whitman, the Bible, and by very very few contemporary Americans though he read them all.” That was only the beginning of his influences. Also to be considered, Wright continued, were “European filmmakers and jazz musicians and anyone who talked to him or said something within his earshot; Japanese and Chinese literature was hardly foreign to him by the time he wrote the Battlefield.” Whatever the mélange of cultural genres, the lyricism intrinsic in the language, as well as speaker Francis’ innocently brilliant ability to tap it, turns the poem into something that seems more unimaginable with every reading.
On numerous occasions, Francis, a precocious wordsmith, fixates on and almost fetishizes a single term, letting it clang into a scene like a hammer on a gong. In this case it’s the word “cavalry.”
Jimmy circled his hand and pointed straight ahead like a charge
called by a calvary officer doggonit there I go again
tripping up on that word I mean cavalvalry I mean cavalry I know it like my name
ever since I missed it at the city spelling B
when the teacher called it out I spelt the wrong word I tell you I
know them both like the back of my hand I knew them then
it was bad elecution on his part I say it was the way he pronounced it...
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More is happening here than immediately hits the ear. Frank addresses his protagonist’s humorously fraught relationship with the word “cavalry” by having Francis stumble over its pronunciation (“doggonit there I go again”) and then exploring the source of the confusion. After several attempts to say the word correctly—“calvary,” “cavalvary,” and finally “cavalry”—he determines that the origin of the problem was an elementary school spelling bee where the teacher’s accent made the word sound differently than it was spelled. Adding to the confusion was whether the teacher was asking about Golgotha (calvary) or soldiers on horseback (cavalry). To further drive home the complicated relationship among the heard word, the spoken word, and written word, Francis criticizes the teacher for “bad elecution,” which might seem ironic were it not for the likelihood that Frank Stanford is only spelling the word the wrong way because that is how Francis heard it as it came out his mouth. Thus the misunderstanding comes full circle, leaving Francis so befuddled he never gets back to the story of Jimmy pointing ahead and yelling charge. We are, in short, dealing with a very different kind of literary experience, one where the sounds and meanings and even the sight of words get wonderfully stewed into a verbal gumbo that gets richer over time.
While tackling The Battlefield requires readers to make an adjustment, the poem is not as “obliterating” as Stanford described it. With a little practice, it can be fluidly readable. Those who persist often discover an accessible flow that eases the poem’s ostensible difficulties. This process of discovery, because the poem requires the reader to do the work of punctuation to find the interior rhythm, fosters a satisfying intimacy with the text, a closeness coming from direct involvement in the shared quest for poetic understanding. Whereas Joyce’s Ulysses asks the reader to examine from the outside in, The Battlefield says to the reader, Come in. Welcome. A literary scholar who did significant research on Stanford shortly after he died writes, “the realization of intensity or monotony in the battlefield depends in part on the spirit the reader brings to it.” Stanford, who once said “I can be completely seduced by just a voice,” invites us into the excitement of that seduction and asks us to work with him to make his words transcend the reality we are too accustomed to accept as all there is.
The tenacious reader is soon warmed by language that teems with originality, humor, insight, and pathos. “I have never met a student of poetry,” the poet Ralph Adamo has written, “who did not immediately and even ravenously respond to the words of one or another of many Stanford poems.” The Battlefield is a poem that, rather than limiting the reader to ten pages at a time, grows into a literary addiction. As one editor puts it, The Battlefield “sticks like glue,” and it “can really possess a soul.” The appeal derives in part from sensibilities honed far outside academia. Stanford disliked formal education and intellectual posturing and would not have lasted a long morning as a college professor. The formality of language alone would have spun his head off. Some of the most entertaining scenes in The Battlefield involve Francis throwing tantrums in the classroom. Accordingly, and perhaps empathetically, the reader’s initial response to the poem tends to be more emotional than intellectual. C.D. Wright recalled that on reading a draft of The Battlefield for the first time, “I felt absolutely helpless to so much wildness of heart, so much fury and hilarity. The poet Alan Dugan, who celebrated Stanford’s “amplitude,” wrote in response to excerpts from the poem, “You do my heart good.” (Trust me, as someone who reads the poem aloud two Saturdays a month with friends, when I say Dugan was right.)
Stanford declares in one poem, “I intend to sing here,” permeating the text with an ineffable charm and tenderness confirming the South’s overlooked tolerance for outcasts and outliers, weirdos and misfits, freaks and outlaws.
This emotion that the text inspires evokes what Whitman called “the blab of the pave.” Varied habits of speech among characters in constant and often chaotic dialogue root Stanford’s poem in both the patterns of Southern life and the expressions of European, Latin American, and even Japanese writers. Stanford’s “blab” enriches common experience in the rural South with both raw native expressions and avant garde foreign registers. His “pave” was more a muddy two-track road than a smooth hard top, but it barreled across the rural landscape with the assurance that wherever it went it defied the old slogan that “you can’t get there from here.” Francis Gildart covers expansive territory in the poem; Stanford’s language moves like a locomotive still on the tracks but maybe not for long. Tongues are country and dirty and urbane, delivered in multiple languages, sometimes through dead sign languages and arcane rebuses. Settle in, the thing says, be willing to wander through the fun house, but rest assured: no matter where you are, you’re there. And then you’ll keep going, deeper and deeper into there.
Stanford’s finely tuned ear missed nothing. It was, according to C.D. Wright, “virtually infallible.” He was enthralled by “people’s talk.” The blended lingua franca of hollers and levee camp shouts, circus tents and juke joints, Italian peddlers and French chevaliers, bar talk—all of it effectively replaces Whitman’s New York sidewalk chatter with something even more linguistically tangled. The Whitmanesque spirit of inclusion thickens; Stanford declares in one poem “I intend to sing here,” permeating the text with an ineffable charm and tenderness confirming the South’s overlooked tolerance for outcasts and outliers, weirdos and misfits, freaks and outlaws. Foreigners. Migrants. Midgets. Gypsies. One-legged daughters. Stanford’s language choices—or that of his characters—will sometimes hit the contemporary reader’s ear as crude and insensitive, if not plain offensive (the N-word is common in the poem). But Stanford wrote with arms wide open. Few artistic expressions, in the South or elsewhere, have harbored so much love for Flannery O’Connor’s “grotesques,” traveling carnival freaks, mad-dog-bitten Gypsies. It’s fun. But something deeper lurks. The Battlefield, a poem that C.D Wright called “historical and experiential,” highlights the South’s potential to seek more merciful forms of beauty and justice. “One day,” Alan Dugan predicted, “it will explode.”
