The Thousand Souths of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford wrote an American South that embraced contradiction and celebrated the marginalized. Historian James McWilliams dives into the legacy of the South's Walt Whitman.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
If the South, as we rightly insist, is many souths—increasingly inclusive souths, maybe even innumerable souths—then Frank Stanford is arguably the most Southern poet you likely do not know.
By his own choosing, Stanford didn’t last long. He shot himself dead—three bullets to the chest—in 1978, at the age of twenty-nine. “Irreversible cliché,” the late, award-winning poet Thomas Lux, who lived and taught in the South for four decades, called Stanford’s act. But the man left behind a legacy of bone-fired poetry, marked most notably by the 15,432-line epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977). Nothing clichéd there.
Stanford’s feral magnum opus presents a kaleidoscopic array of vernaculars, ethnicities, races, genders, classes, characters, disabilities, and geographies. If a single line could be said to represent the poem as a whole, it would be the one where the speaker, a twelve-year-old boy named Francis (Frank’s birth name), idealizes what he wants from the multiracial utopia he has just founded: “I want people of twenty-seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing...”
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
I’ve long suspected that the idea of many souths is a generalized concept that—like justice, equality, and love—is easier to talk about than to experience. As nicely as the phrase rolls off the tongue, the notion of many souths, at least in my grudgingly academic experience, exists more as rhetoric than reality.
But my thinking changed when, as Frank Stanford’s biographer, I intimately got to know him and his work. I know reading books can change your life. It never crossed my mind that writing a book could achieve the same result. And I certainly never considered how an adolescent narrator, created by an adolescent author, might alter a middle-aged man’s sense of place and, in turn, sense of self.
But as I watched the child Stanford write his way into adulthood, the abstractions of self and South solidified. The deeper I got into The Battlefield and its connection to Frank’s life, the more that inner and outer geographies merged to reshape who I was and how I lived. This might be a strange pathway to a more honest identity—this wayward search for a poet, his poetry, his Souths—and it sure as hell is a weird time in life to be taking it. But I now haul my copy of The Battlefield with me like an evangelical Christian wields a Bible. That poem did something to me.
It all came down to this: My search to understand Frank Stanford and The Battlefield—both of which had gotten lost, in the way things can get lost in the South—opened me to those many souths, in ways I never could have imagined. That exposure, in turn, opened me to myself in ways I never could have imagined.
“I want people of twenty-seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing...”
—Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
I’d long thought I knew what it meant to be a Southerner. Turns out I had almost no idea. I was not sure where or how to look. No idea that sometimes you had to go outside to find the right way back in.
Memphis and Snow Lake (1952-1961)
Born and adopted in Richton, Mississippi, in 1948, Stanford lived his earliest years (1952-1961) as a rich kid in a stately home in a wealthy Memphis neighborhood. His social milieu was Sunday brunch at The Peabody Hotel, a legendary venue still known for its afternoon hosting of duck baths in the lobby’s fountain, the venerable club where his adoptive father kept an office with that prestigious and patrician financial institution known as the Cotton Exchange.
But summers in the 1950s delivered a shock to the system. When school let out, Frank and his family slummed it in all-Black levee camps, where Frank’s dad worked on-site as a levee engineer, designing and building huge berms to protect the South from flooding. The cultural difference between these vastly divergent souths caused cultural whiplash for Frank. Traversing divides of race and class, urban and rural life, going back and forth between upscale Memphis and dirt-poor Snow Lake, Arkansas...these journeys planted seeds for his maximalist approach to capturing the South’s many souths.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Stanford’s defining and thoroughly autobiographical work The Battlefield often notes the distinction between Memphis and Snow Lake.
“You live in the mansions and you live in the shacks,” the young protagonist Francis observes as the family returns to the city after a summer in Snow Lake. Francis internalizes the privileges of city life as much as Frank did. The Stanford family was so deeply mired in a Lost Cause interpretation of history and noblesse oblige paternalism—its own genteel form of racism—that no one knew to question it.
Employed by them were a full-time cook (“Emma”) and a chauffeur (“Charlie B.”), both Black, and both stock figures in The Battlefield. Memphis, Francis aptly observes, was “just full of automatic doors.” It sure was for the Stanfords.
But Snow Lake, where the family decamped in a large levee tent for long summers along the Mississippi River, was a sweltering mudhole teeming with trouble—much of it good trouble. Camp was dirty, mosquito- and snake-ridden, rural and violent.
Young Frank saw things he’d never see in Memphis. He witnessed his mother (who ran the commissary) attempt to whack a drunk and belligerent levee hand with an axe. Frank’s informal chaperone during the day was a fifteen-year-old Black kid (O.Z. Durrett) who holstered a pistol in case fights broke out among the workers. Prostitution ran rampant, especially on payday, a time when Emma made cakes for “the sluts,” as Frank’s mother called the loitering sex workers.
In The Battlefield, Stanford highlights the rawness of camp life when his narrator Francis attests, “my home part of the years in the weeds in the mud in the shacks in the tents....”
In The Battlefield, Stanford highlights the rawness of camp life when Francis attests, “my home part of the years in the weeds in the mud in the shacks in the tents....” Young Frank, by his own and other accounts, loved every moment of levee life. In an unpublished fragment of poetry, he described his reaction to leaving camp:
Whenever we broke camp I swallowed rat poison
Or stuck my hand under the floorboards
They had to tie me up in the back of a Lincoln
They gagged me and flew me out by cropduster
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Research interlude No. 1:
How was I going to learn about Frank in Memphis and Snow Lake? There was precious little to go on.
But then I learned that Frank’s adoptive father, who was thirty years older than his mother, had grandkids from his first marriage. They were roughly the same age as Frank and his sister, and they had often visited.
I went looking for them.
Eventually I found the granddaughter, Carole Hess, in Ellijay, Georgia, where she rented cabins to tourists. Two interviews with her in 2019 bore a lot of fruit about the grandeur of the Stanford life in Memphis and—as Carole and her brother also went to Snow Lake—the rawness of camp life.
Then Carole sent me to her brother, Frank Coleman, a gay man who was eager to talk. Frank C recalled spending long vacations with Frank S. He admired his uncle (again, they were about the same age) for his athleticism and willingness to welcome Frank C—who was pale and scrawny and awkward—into his group of cool and athletic Memphis friends.
Frank C, who knew he was gay at age ten, loved spending time in Frank S’s bedroom, where Frank C told me they frequently and consensually masturbated each other. The cousins went to the Memphis planetarium and the Mid-South Fair, a highly anticipated annual event in the city. The adult Frank C was kind and honest and generous with his memories.
He died in 2023.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford’s vacillation between the mansions and the shacks exposed him to a broad spectrum of people who wouldn’t be caught dead eating pimento cheese sandwiches while watching ducks waddle through The Peabody lobby, and some of whom would just as well shoot the birds dead for an honest meal.
These wonderfully rough-hewn characters are memorialized in Stanford’s poem “The Blood Brothers,” the first poem in Frank’s first published book, The Singing Knives. One example:
There was Ray Baby
He stole the white man’s gold tooth
He knocked it out with a two-by-four
He rode the moon-blind horse
Back in Memphis, Frank’s friends had familiar, vanilla names such as Billy Phillips and Howard Laskey. But down on the levee his friends were named Ray Baby, Born In The Camp With Six Toes, BoBo Washington, and Baby Gauge. These boys were poor and resilient, and they spoke a slangy version of backwoods English that Stanford, who thrilled in it, would later integrate into his poetry to make it howl.
Frank had his fifth birthday in a cook tent surrounded by his Black friends and his sister. He spent nights under stars with his Black friends. “It seemed natural to me,” he later said.
The kids fished, hunted, and, according to The Battlefield, “had pee wars sometimes.” Frank had his fifth birthday in a cook tent surrounded by his Black friends and his sister. He spent nights under stars with his Black friends. “It seemed natural to me,” he later said.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Mountain Home was all white, and its residents—who ranged from hillbillies to bourgeois suburbanites— preferred it that way. A roadside sign exhorted drivers, “Come Live with Us: No Skeeters, No Niggers.”
Frank, with his Snow Lake days behind him, went about his Mountain Home business unimpeded, much of that business in secret, and much of the secrecy involving an obsessive reading habit—an activity that did not necessarily translate in a town more Friday Night Lights than Dead Poet’s Society:
“I kept to myself a lot,” he later remembered. “I read a lot in boats.”
It took an unlikely meeting to liberate Frank’s inner literary compulsion. One afternoon in the summer of 1963, a handsome barrel-chested priest and high school literature teacher named Fr. Nicholas Fuhrmann showed up at the Lake Norfork marina looking for a waterskiing lesson. He and a few other Benedictine priests were in town on retreat from the Subiaco Abbey, a Catholic Abbey about 150 miles southwest, and Fuhrmann, an inveterate athlete, wanted to add another sport to his repertoire. Frank took the job and, within an hour, had an enthralled Fuhrmann skiing behind the family’s Chris-Craft.
Frank's mother, Dorothy, envisioned him thriving among these charismatic and bookish men she came to admire and subjected the family to a shotgun conversion to Catholicism.
The two hit it off. Soon, Frank’s mother Dorothy, a talented cook, was hosting Fuhrmann and his fellow priests for dinners. Later that summer, Frank’s father died, leaving much of his estate to his first family. Dorothy, who envisioned Frank thriving among these charismatic and bookish men she came to admire, subjected the family to a shotgun conversion to Catholicism and, in August 1964, shipped Frank to the all-boys Subiaco Academy, a grand boarding school wedged into the hills of northwest Arkansas. Frank settled in among manly Benedictine monks who were, as Dorothy predicted, eager to nurture Frank’s growing literary obsession.
If for nothing else but this, he’d love them until the end.
“They understand the vision,” he would later say.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Subiaco (1964-1966)
There was no need for secrecy at Subiaco. Frank brought his eccentric literary identity out of hiding like a rocket. Unfortunately, he integrated it into a South we’d all like to forget: the warped mores of the Old South he inherited from his racist upbringing.
Frank’s offensive (even if somewhat play-acted) Subiaco persona especially reflected his mother’s family’s old connections to Greenville literary lights such as William Alexander Percy, Shelby Foote, and Hodding Carter.
Letting his bookish freak flag fly, Frank became known by his amused peers as the “poet laureate of Subiaco.”
He made the most of the moniker, walking the campus with literature shoved into his pockets, shouting verse to the heavens out of his dorm window, and crafting, as he recalled, “several epic length prose poems.” It was all very heroic and romantic.
He tacked a Confederate flag to his dorm wall, sported a Confederate cap, and re-aligned his identity down yonder in Dixieland (Mississippi) rather than up there in posh Memphis or suburban Mountain Home.
At the same time, though, he tacked a Confederate flag to his dorm wall, sported a Confederate cap, and re-aligned his identity down yonder in Dixieland (Mississippi) rather than up there in posh Memphis or suburban Mountain Home. He once demeaned, in explicit racial terms, the only Black kid in his class. It was all very land of cotton.
Research interlude No. 3
This chapter in Frank’s life was largely inaccessible without the testimony of Father Fuhrmann, who, in 2019, was eighty-nine years old. In early August of that year, I drove from Austin, Texas, to Subiaco to interview him. Fuhrmann insisted I stay a couple nights at the on-campus retreat center Stanford’s mother once ran.
For two days, Fuhrmann had me tool us around campus in his janky golf cart while he told stories that vividly brought Frank’s last two years of high school to life for me.
The fact that Fuhrmann, although he still had a residence in the abbey, had been defrocked over molestation charges in the 1990s and early aughts, lent this interview an undercurrent of tension. I’m not entirely sure he knew I knew.
He wore a crummy green Izod shirt and a pair of worn black pants instead of the standard monk’s robe. We took all meals in silence with the rest of the abbey’s monks. Strange to be sitting next to an accused sexual offender and ex-monk in a silent cafeteria full of cutlery clinking into plates of overcooked chicken.
I interviewed Fuhrmann on August 9 and 10. He died of a heart attack ten days later.
My other gold mine of a source was Leo Lensing, a fellow student of Frank’s who was writing a memoir of his time at Subiaco. Leo, besides sharing his own memories, introduced me to over a dozen Subiaco alumni who had hundreds of Frank stories. Many had yearbooks signed by Frank.
To Leo, who was off to Notre Dame, Frank wrote, “Please retain a bit of your southern heritage as you venture off to Yankee land and join the Irish.” To another student he signed off, “For a return to the ideals of Robert E. Lee.” I spoke with that lone Black kid in the class. Fifty years later, he remembered that “Frank’s racism was a little above average.”
For all his stupid behavior at Subiaco Frank, under the influence of the monks, came to discern and appreciate the power of his rare intelligence. Back in the fourth grade, according to his mother, Frank’s IQ was among the highest in Memphis. English class with Fuhrmann was where his genius became most conspicuous.
He never took notes, he knew the history of literature better than any monk at Subiaco (by their own admission), and his ability to remember passages was nearly photographic. After one pass over Canterbury Tales, Fuhrmann told me, he could recite many stanzas of Chaucer’s text.
Frank read D.H. Lawrence, Melville, Coleridge, Milton, Eliot, Whitman, Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Keats, Byron, and Rimbaud— voraciously and thoroughly. But more than anything else, as Willett recalls, “he was drenched in Faulkner,” an observation that portends Stanford’s later boast that “I am going to be Jean Cocteau and William Faulkner at the same time.”
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
When Stanford graduated in May 1966, he did so having written reams of poetry—most of it quite good. The monks, all of them odd in their own ways, fanned the flames of that passion. They allowed Frank to skip study halls and physical education classes to write alone in the library attic. Despite the standard lights-out rules, they let him stay up all night to indulge his mania and explore other worlds through writing.
When Frank got ready to move out of the dorm to his mother’s house for the summer (she lived a mile off campus, as she was hired to run the school’s retreat center in 1964), his roommate recalls seeing on his desk a stack of poems under the umbrella title St. Francis and the Wolf. In it were nascent fragments from the sprawling epic he would spend the next decade building out: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.
The Summer of 1966
Before we follow The Battlefield to its maximalist fruition, it’s worth zooming out to appreciate the scope of Frank’s life experience by the summer of 1966. Family legends molded his sense of who he was. His adoptive father’s lineage linked back to rural Georgia and the Southern lament of forced displacement by that diabolical Yankee Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Frank’s adoptive mother’s roots were in the drawling and clubby blue-blood caste of Greenville, Mississippi, in the Delta, where her father owned a cotton plantation. It was also, however strangely, in the work yards of Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary where the family lived when Dorothy’s father’s stroke reduced him to working as a security guard. Hard as it is to believe, Dorothy’s two years at Parchman in the 1930s overlapped with the legendary folklorist John Lomax’s time recording the bluesmen at the prison. Dorothy despised their music.
Dorothy's unwavering opinions about Southern hierarchy, unexpurgated in their bigotry, influenced her son. As she told an interviewer in 1998, “As a child I grew up with the people who suffered so bitterly during and after the Civil War...the war has been in me always and I despise Lincoln.”
For all the narrowness of the family’s framework, Frank crisscrossed many boundaries within it. He had lived in the mansions of Memphis and the shacks of Snow Lake. He’d worshipped as a southern Episcopalian and then a southern Catholic. He had Black friends named Ray Baby and Baby Gauge and white ones named Billy Willett and Billy Phillips. He went to a rich (almost) all-white boarding school and a poor all-Black school. He won a city-wide poetry award in the fourth grade and got best dressed in the tenth grade.
He’d masturbated boys and girls (including his classmate Davilee [sp?] Nevius on February 25, 1964, after watching the Frazier-Ali fight). He secretly, and then openly, honed a rich interior life—namely a fierce commitment to literature—that mirrored an equally rich external one—namely a “motley boy” (as Joan Williams called him) on the lake or a judo master at Subiaco.
He missed nothing. He heard and saw and felt the entirety of it all. The late, Florida-born poet George Garrett, observing this quality in Frank, said that “he may see something the rest of us don’t.”
On the eve of attending the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Frank had never stepped foot out of the South. He was seventeen years old and had an accent that, according to a friend from Kansas, “would make a tree stop growing for a few seconds.”
Listen to the only known recording of Frank Stanford reading his poetry. The poem is called “Linger.”
But more than anything else, this: He fully absorbed every bit of his life experience. He missed nothing. He heard and saw and felt the entirety of it all. The late, Florida-born poet George Garrett, observing this quality in Frank, said that “he may see something the rest of us don’t.” And Garrett’s something, I submit, was Stanford’s everything. His only challenge was to turn everything into a poem.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
The University of Arkansas (1966-1970)
The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You reflects those seventeen years of everything through language that, according to the late, award-winning Arkansas poet C.D. Wright (with whom Stanford was having an affair when he died) thrilled in “so much wildness of heart, so much fury and hilarity.”
But it also reflects ongoing developments in Frank’s life while living as a young adult in Fayetteville--developments that expanded Stanford’s vision from Faulkner’s “little postage stamp of native soil” to infinite souths that transcended anything he knew before going to college.
The most critical development that allowed Stanford to conceive of a maximalist South was his decision to break the familial frame. In fact, Frank did not so much break that frame after going to college as smash it to smithereens and run like hell for the hills and hollows of Arkansas.
Frank always understood his father wasn't his biological father. His mother, however, never overtly told Frank and his sister that she’d adopted them. “My chosen ones,” she called them. Stanford scholars have long assumed that Stanford’s realization of his adoption around the age of eighteen was a jarring watershed moment for him.
I see the matter a bit differently. Frank was too perceptive and curious not to know that he and Ruth were adopted. At the same time, he understood the benefits of playing along with the unspoken fiction his mother wanted to sustain. He knew he was not, biologically speaking, of blue-blood ilk, but he also knew staying quiet about that fact gave him some advantages.
This kind of move would be very Frank. His strategic manipulation of his adoption story empowered him to break with his aristocratic heritage only at the precise moment he needed to do so. And it was after he got to college and began to skip classes to write poetry all day and night that he needed to do so. The great unraveling towards The Battlefield was, with this break from his past, underway.
All his college friends at the time confirmed this: Frank was somehow convinced that his father was Black. “He probably wished he were Black,” his first wife, Linda Mencin, later noted.
In short order, Frank quit his country club fraternity (not before stealing a mattress) and left the business school—both of which he had joined to please his mother and further her narrative. His traditionally well-groomed hair sprung into an unruly mass of curls, and he officially declared good riddance to the confines of his ersatz lineage.
In The Battlefield, Francis, nodding to this moment, notes, “I vanished to sing a blue yodel of that low born bastard / brought up by the finest of families.” Frank himself often vanished into his room for several sleepless days and nights to drink whisky and coffee and hallucinate and write poetry. To get it all down. Everything.
Frank understood his adoption’s implications. He told his publisher Irv Broughton that “to be adopted, for better or worse, is like the second coming, man.” His sister Ruth told me how “Frank realized that he wasn’t who he thought he was. He realized that he didn’t have the same Southern Mississippi blue blood as all our high society family. He just said, What the hell. I’m going to do what I want to do and be who I want to be.” In a random note where Frank doodled ideas, he reminded himself, “Create birth certificate.”
Whatever identity he invented, two new critical boundaries would be crossed by this free-ranging orphan of the South. One was from wealth to poverty. When Frank went his own way, his mother, who was already financially compromised after her husband died, cut him off. Frank was broke, and he would remain that way for most of the rest of his life, always lamenting the “God fucking buck.”
The other transition was from white to biracial. Frank knew that his biological mother had to be white because the home from where he was adopted limited services to white women. But—and all his college friends at the time confirmed this—he was somehow convinced that his father was Black.
“He probably wished he were Black,” his first wife, Linda Mencin, later noted.
All his mother would ever fess up about the adoption was that Frank’s biological parents were “a cheerleader and a football player.” But as far as Frank was concerned, this football player and cheerleader likely transgressed the South’s biggest boundary. And in doing so, they ensured Frank came from a home for unwed mothers in Richton, Mississippi. Not unreasonable, this suspicion.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Sherman’s Tavern (1968-1972)
Who Frank became after the revelation of his adoption had a lot to do with a Black man named Jimbo Reynolds. Reynolds was an older bootblack whom Frank befriended while having his shoes shined at the student union during his freshman year.
“He formed a real close relationship with Jimbo,” a friend of his recalled, almost like a father figure.
In 1968, Fayetteville had 596 Black people—just about two percent of the city’s population (today it’s only 6.8 percent). Jimbo ushered Frank to the epicenter of this fringe community by introducing him to Sherman’s Tavern, a dive bar located on E. Rock St. in a formerly all Black part of town known as Tin Cup. In that setting more than any other, Frank Stanford finally became the poet who was able to write The Battlefield. Through Sherman’s, his entire past—especially his memories of the levee camp days—poured into the present like a mighty stream.
Research interlude No. 4
Sherman's is gone, yet many of its regulars remain. Semon Thompson, a Sherman’s regular who was the first Black law student and first Black professor at Arkansas, stood out as a source who remembered Frank’s presence at Sherman’s.
Finding Semon was a small coup for me, the discovery of a new world, and I remember that when I was talking to him on the phone for the first time in the summer of 2022, I was quietly crying I was so happy.
As for Sherman’s, he said it was “a study unto itself in consummate racial respect,” a venue where, to enter, you had to “throw off all trimmings of bigotry.” Because he was a friend of Jimbo Reynolds, Frank was immediately in with the regulars.
Thompson remembered that Frank “was soulful...he was low-key, quiet, very introspective.” As for the possibility that Stanford was visiting the bar in an ironic way, Thompson, with a rise in his voice, said, “No chance. He liked being around people who did not have any pretensions about them.”
Frank was an undergraduate taking graduate courses in the MFA program in 1969-70 and many of his fellow students—all of them white-- thought Frank was hanging out with a bunch of drunken criminals at Shermans’.
Not so. The men Frank became close with at Shermans were citizens engaged in pressing civil rights issues—equity in schools, in sports, and in public services. Frank heeded their concerns and quietly raged against the injustices they suffered at the hands of racist cops, students, and courts. If it weren't for Semon Thompson, I wouldn't have known this.
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
The Battlefield (1970-1977)
By the early-1970s, Frank had replaced his early aristocratic identity with one rooted in both his experiences at the levee camps and his social life in the Black community of Fayetteville. In a letter to the late New York poet Alan Dugan, Stanford, albeit with some overstatement, wrote, “You probably think I’m fucked up with my ‘association’ with Blacks. This is the way I’ve always been: most of my life was not spent with white people.”
Exaggeration notwithstanding, conversion begat conversion. Frank’s integration into the Black community of Fayetteville was the gateway through which The Battlefield discovered innumerable souths, souths Frank had never before imagined, souths that lit up Frank’s ear, life, poetry.
Frank’s orphaned status, his freshly revived memories of the levee camp, and the gritty social scene at the tavern converged to imbue The Battlefield with the spirit of the blues, the quest for social justice, and a radical attentiveness to language’s lower and rougher registers—that is, the most exciting vernaculars honed by all races and genders and ethnicities throughout the South.
Once Frank got a taste of what was possible through the many cultures and languages of the South, once he explored (during wildly manic episodes of writing) the deepest interiors of these many souths to capture the infinite mysteries that thrived in endless cultural microclimates—be they the lingua franca spoken at Shermans, the backwoods idiom of white country folks, or the testimony of “swindled Indians”—his appetite for inclusion became the voracious quest animating his remarkable poem.
So voracious that, through a typically obsessive immersion into foreign film and poetry, Frank began to look outward, globally outward, to the languages, images, music, and expressions of Europe, Japan, and South America. (Remember that line: “I want people of twenty-seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how's the fishing...”)
With this orientation, The Battlefield not only imported and planted international expressions in Southern soil, but it fashioned itself into a poem that, not unlike Joyce’s Ulysses, had the audacity to take the Everything of Life and try to translate it into the Everything of Words.
The beautiful heterogeneity of the foreign artists Frank embraced informed the beautiful heterogeneity of this maximalist poem. Frank, who grew up adhering to castes and hierarchies, obeying filters and gatekeepers, was now fully alive with all his Whitmanesque “creeds and schools in abeyance.”
Many scores of dispossessed and outcast folks who take center stage in The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You reflect Frank’s predilection, which we might all do well to follow: “I take to / people that are all fucked up.”
Frank’s ever-lengthening arcs of cultural associations now harbored space for a panoply of local and alien characters, including knights-errant, Japanese warriors, levee camp cooks, Memphis fat cats, carnies, con men, bad cops, freedom riders, horsemen, bluesmen, gypsies, peddlers, rock ’n’ rollers, classical musicians, peckerwoods, sapsuckers, levee workers, Renaissance painters, horny housewives, medieval philosophers, professional boxers, rednecks, Jesus and his surly apostles, Hollywood starlets, Elvis, Sputnik Monroe...you name it and there was room for it.
“I go to the extreme,” says Francis in The Battlefield. And anyone wanting to directly understand the idea of many souths should be grateful for that.
Through all these developments, what began as a single conversion from white Southern aristocracy to existential orphanhood quickly bloomed into a radically multivalent understanding of many souths by a polymath genius with a near photographic memory who had been working since high school on the most expansive poem about the American souths ever written.
That might sound like a grandiose description of this astonishing poem. But it’s accurate. Underneath that description—and the poem’s 15,000+ lines—lurks this takeaway: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You—because of Frank Stanford’s past, his conversions, his friends, and his omnivorous mind—takes a stand.
Not in the way the Agrarians took their stand. But in the way any Southerner who craves a better South does. The Battlefield grasps the many thousands of souths because it has the guts to take a side in the cosmic battle for justice. Unequivocally, and with crazed violence and lunatic humor and unleashed passion, The Battlefield does nothing less than identify with—even glorify—the downtrodden, the marginalized, the misfits, the holy fools.
The mundane struggles of characters you will grow to love—characters such as Sylvester the Black Angel, Jimmy Lee, Mr. Rufus Abraham, Mama Covoe, BoBo Washington, Count Hugo Pantagruel the world’s smallest man, Charlie B. Lemon, Jesus Christ, Vico, Sonny Liston, the “infants of the wood,” Five Spoke, and many scores of other dispossessed and outcast folks who take center stage in The Battlefield—reflect Francis’s (and Frank’s) predilection, which we might all do well to follow:
“I take to / people that are all fucked up.”
Frank Stanford | biography | The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
Coda (2025)
Well Frank, so do I. Always have. Give me the lost souls over those who have it all worked out. They’re just more interesting to me. Their struggles are more tangible and democratic. I’ve always observed that quality in myself. I just never knew, until I found Frank Stanford and witnessed his quest to plumb the essence of the South, that it was also the essence of my identity.
Because I also did not know what the South was. I mean, I knew it was many souths, at least that’s what I told myself, but I did not really know what that meant for the South or for me. After studying Stanford and The Battlefield, I think I do. So, I’m going to end with an attempt to say, via Stanford, what it is. I don’t know if it’s exactly right—in fact, I doubt it is—but I’ll end with an attempt. And we can all just see what happens from there:
The South that Stanford presents differs from anything we have seen before. It is accessible and unpredictable. It rejects traditional values and classical forms. It is at its best when devoid of nostalgia and romance for the past. It struggles with race and gender and ethnicity and diversity, but it does so in less obvious, even idiosyncratic, ways, allowing all persuasions to exist through language linking them to each other and their landscapes—and to worlds beyond. It’s free of ideology and abstraction and deeply imbued with the sensuality of life: people, places, smells, sounds, sensations.
The South that Stanford presents differs from anything we have seen before. It is accessible and unpredictable. It rejects traditional values and classical forms. It is at its best when devoid of nostalgia and romance for the past.
“I don’t think people had seen anything like it,” said a friend of Frank’s about the South the poet envisioned. Or is it just that we just never knew how to look for it? Or never knew that when we found it, we’d run smack into ourselves?
