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What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2015)"I don't believe in tame poetry. . . . Poetry busts guts." —Frank Stanford
The poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.
Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.
This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.
As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."
When It's After Dark
I steal
all the light bulbs
and hide them like eggs
in a basket
going to some outlaw
I put on the best I can find
I cover them with a swatch
of something
that swells like a bite
that bleeds green
cloth that smells
of a feed store
but looks
to of been worn
I go over to nasty willy's bridge
and throw them into the creek
there in the shade I listen
for them
to make nests to escape
agony and burst
The poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.
Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.
This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.
As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."
When It's After Dark
I steal
all the light bulbs
and hide them like eggs
in a basket
going to some outlaw
I put on the best I can find
I cover them with a swatch
of something
that swells like a bite
that bleeds green
cloth that smells
of a feed store
but looks
to of been worn
I go over to nasty willy's bridge
and throw them into the creek
there in the shade I listen
for them
to make nests to escape
agony and burst
764 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2015
50 people are currently reading
1467 people want to read
About the author
Frank Stanford
17 books93 followersFrank Stanford was a prolific American poet. He is most known for his epic, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You— a labyrinthine poem without stanzas or punctuation. In addition, Stanford published six shorter books of poetry throughout his 20s, and three posthumous collections of his writings (as well as a book of selected poems) have also been published.
Just shy of his 30th birthday, Stanford died on June 3, 1978 in his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the victim of three self-inflicted pistol wounds to the heart. In the three decades since, he has become a cult figure in American letters.
Just shy of his 30th birthday, Stanford died on June 3, 1978 in his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the victim of three self-inflicted pistol wounds to the heart. In the three decades since, he has become a cult figure in American letters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
May 22, 2019
Happy Hump Day, everyone! I'm reading poetry books, plural (hence the double review, this book's is the second of the two below so keep scrolling), on this positively sun-struck breezy day.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
The Art of Dying was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP awards showed it to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection Crib Death I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure. Meanwhile let me explain.
The Art of Dying was one helluva wallop. Y'all might remember that I fell in love with its cover, enough that I used A Canadian Friend's gift to me to procure a copy after the AUP awards showed it to me:
So I was reading the short, super-concentrated poems. "Self," I said to myself, "this is the Sh...tuff. This is why all those pretentious pit-sniffers whose only love is self-love (in all its meanings) write their vapid maunderings with silly line breaks."
Most books of poems are far too short.first two stanzas of poem 22
It's hard to get your money's worth.
How does it make sense in the marketplace
To pay twelve quid for sixty pages?
Or fifteen euros, or twenty bucks?
So poets are shit out of luck.
I know, right?!
Memento mori...and does Sarah Tolmie ever put memory through its paces. I was, and am, compelled to think deeply about ten-line word paintings. That's not the commonest feeling for me. "You too will die" is my preferred translation from the Latin (pace Latinists with exact translations) of the phrase and that thought is ever with me. I think a lot of people shy away from the idea of Death when what they actually fear is the process of dying. We're divorced from its realities by the medicalization of illness. The process is part of Life, not of Death...and that's a Tolmie thought that I think makes the whole fear industry tremble.
Hate to tell you, but you're going to die.
Quite soon. Me, too.
Shuck off the wisdom while it's warm.
Death does no harm
To wisdom.
It's the very first poem, in its entirety; it sets a tone for this collection that the remaining artistry very much delivers on.
You're not afraid of Death. I can almost promise you that you haven't thought about Death much at all. The pain and enfeeblement of illness are the things that inspire most people to flee screaming from the mere mention of Death. Its reality is possibly more terrifying: The Great Unknown, the place we're all going but no one has ever come back from to tell us about. (I am not religious and I don't believe y'all's bedtime story is in any way factual.)
It continues to be fashionable to mourn the death of ritual.first stanza of poem 10
We miss the Neolithic ochre, smoking censers, silly hats
Cthulhu and Harryhausen prayers, all the mystic flap.
A Facebook chat with an author of horror novels that I had very recently made me think again about why horror has no fear for me. The silliness of the rituals surrounding Death has always struck my funny bone. I save my sadness and longing for the living. They can make use of it, they can feel my empathy and my lovingkindness and my appreciation. The dead? I suspect they survive in some form. I doubt very much its a form we'd recognize. But the body horror and supernatural horror of the storytelling world, the world that this author and many like her inhabit, have little actual potency and their imaginative powers exert force on our imaginations in proportion to our fear of Death (which, I said above, I believe to be a fear of the process of dying).
Death looks a lot like success.Poem 42 in its entirety
As in, "I killed that test"
"She slays me" and the rest—
Though it's the act and not the state
Whose power we appropriate,
All us murderous wannabes
In our casual hyperboles.
The attentive will note my approbation of a rhyming-couplets poem.
Pick y'all's selves up off the floor at your leisure.
The New York Times photo
Then, after that delight to my literary sensibilities arose from the quantum foam, I read this article from The Millions and was reminded of Frank Stanford, whose 1978 collection Crib Death I found on my then-boyfriend the much older alcoholic abuser's shelf.
The Neighbor's Wife
Four a.m. and she's still gone
But I'm not going to call.
It's not so bad, until just before morning,
When I see a truck driver
Take a smoke out of his lips
And throw it out the window
And I watch it go to pieces
All over the road.
I read that as a teen and was shocked to my still-forming core that someone out there Got Me. The obsessive need for someone's presence. The intense internal fire that only comes to the surface when mundane reality offers a single, fleeting, unremarkable image of one's inner state and thus crystallizes reality in the same stunning, unexpected way that a chemistry demonstration creates shocking clouds of sharpness from water.
I don't mean to give y'all the impression that I can just *poof* summon up a poem from 40-year-old memories. I got the text from my memory of the book's and the poem's title and then checked out of the library What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. This kitten-squisher of a volume...750 pages!...collects a thorough and informed sampling of his magic mountain of work both published and unpublished. I got re-interested in Stanford after reading in the above-referenced article that Stanford had committed suicide at 29.
Twenty-nine.
Imagine the life unlived, the art unmade; the world's loss is incalculable when Death takes some unhappy or unwilling soul away from whatever Reality finally turns out to be. Assuming we ever find out, that is.
So the book...elephantine tome!...slogged home in my shoulder tote on a cold and rainy day. I sat right down to look for this deeply meaningful memory, but being a bookish sort, was unable not to read both the Introduction (by one Dean Young, previously unknown to me) and the Editor's Note by Copper Canyon Press publisher Michael Wiegers. I discovered this unlikely-to-be-memed aperçu in Young's Introduction:
Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood, in river mud. There is something thankfully unexamined in their execution. I say "thankfully" because we have been through a long century of self-consciousness and irony, and while their brand of rigor and suspicion have brought intelligence to American poetry they have also brought rigor mortis, they have deadened the nerves and made poets fear the irrational.
What is more irrational than Death? Dying is rational, can be subjected to analysis and quantification, is possible to construct a schema to slot into one's syllogistic understanding of Life.
Death is the Great Unknown. Frank Stanford got that, and wrote with its reality up front and up close and personal:
Putting Up Fence
I believe the moon wades a creek
Like an albino with a blade
Fixed to a stick.
It rises, red as a place
Where a chigger's been.
Voyeur in the loft, leaving your gum
Stuck to a fork in the barn,
Like a porter paid to listen
With his head in a portal
Of a ship returning before it's due.
Then I come down the road with ice.
An unpolished scream of a betrayed husband, a howl of the pain of being unwanted and still alive, a rage-filled hate-fuelled moment in time that Stanford lived and left uncollected in his paper alp. He's dead, he's dying in front of our horrified eyes always and forever.
Or is he the moon.
Or the chigger.
The reddener of millions of feet, ankles bending to bring them within frantic scratching distance of fingers long ago rotted away. The annoying, irritating, sometimes sickening (in all its senses) reminder that we're alive and Life is a Death sentence. Irrationally clawing at the reddened surface of our living corpses, we read poems by artists like Frank Stanford who just couldn't endure the long way home.
August 12, 2022
Well, "finished" as in the first half of the book--all of Stanford's published work. The unpublished stuff I might thumb through before returning this to the library.
If you're curious about this unique poet from the 70s, more expansive thoughts, plus three of his poems, are shared here:
https://www.kencraftauthor.com/frank-...
If you're curious about this unique poet from the 70s, more expansive thoughts, plus three of his poems, are shared here:
https://www.kencraftauthor.com/frank-...
November 30, 2020
Then I travel the low road
Combing the straw out of my hair
Keeping your scent black as caviar
I initially found Frank Stanford distant, practically unwelcoming. I read about a hundred pages and yet I wasn't sold. There was more. The heft of this collection can prove relentless. It was distilled and yet flowing. I pressed on throughout the holiday weekend, fascinated with the copious mounds of verse neatly packaged.
Then I bought into his mastery.
There was a breeze which inexplicably had calcified with shame. Many of these poems were jagged. Decomposition and regret flicker like roadside neon. There's a crunch of gravel and the hidden splashes along riverbanks. Strange enough, Jimmie Rogers haunts these pages. There are nine poems containing the the words blue yodel. Each appears tinny and damning in combination. The pages are steeped in death, blood but also wonder. The poet's hands might be scarred and need washing but indeed they do offer a benediction.
Combing the straw out of my hair
Keeping your scent black as caviar
I initially found Frank Stanford distant, practically unwelcoming. I read about a hundred pages and yet I wasn't sold. There was more. The heft of this collection can prove relentless. It was distilled and yet flowing. I pressed on throughout the holiday weekend, fascinated with the copious mounds of verse neatly packaged.
Then I bought into his mastery.
There was a breeze which inexplicably had calcified with shame. Many of these poems were jagged. Decomposition and regret flicker like roadside neon. There's a crunch of gravel and the hidden splashes along riverbanks. Strange enough, Jimmie Rogers haunts these pages. There are nine poems containing the the words blue yodel. Each appears tinny and damning in combination. The pages are steeped in death, blood but also wonder. The poet's hands might be scarred and need washing but indeed they do offer a benediction.
April 24, 2015
Frank Stanford is a harrowing poet---nevermind the harrowing details of his life and demise, because the more I discover about that, the less I am interested and want to know. Furthermore his poems, while rooted undeniably in certain life experiences are rarely autobiographical. And that is as poetry should be.
First--this collection, monumental and satisfying a thirst for more Stanford which previously was far from quenched. We can thank the dude from Copper Canyon Press for that, I think. This expansive volume should satisfy Stanford's reputation as a great poet with depth and desire for immortality.
The work itself turns on the image. It would be cheap to say that Stanford's images of death, mutilation, blood and brutality are macabre--rather they have mastered what Lorca termed Duende--looking deathward in an elegant and elegiac manner that hits at the truth of death, rather than dancing around it. These poems though, for all their death obsessions pulse with life...that is what happens when the blood is pumping..."and desire and desire". Race also is one of Stanford's obsessions. While some of his passages could honestly seem "racially confusing" it is important to know the sympathy and affinity he feels with the rural blacks, those he grew up amongst and those that are often heroes of these poems. Let's not forget the moon, the cracked and ragged moon which drives his confused and beautifully damned characters. Speaking of characters, these poems have them in spades...wise gypsys, forlorn Arkansas farm lovers. Arkansas and a faceless South are the setting for these poems, and noone could have made this place as deliciously crooked and mysterious as Stanford.
Among all the possible influences, I think Lorca works best as his predeccessor--Lorca before New York so angered him. By the amount of dedications to forgotten South American and European masters in here, it's safe to say however that Stanford was a poet who read with depth and emotional attentiveness.
"Men sing when they work, or at least they used to. I'm liable to talk to myself. I try to get at the taproot of poetry, of that force drawing things upwards...Really I visualize the dead as the living, I visualize you whom I will never know. We are constant strangers...Poetry is like going alone on a big rig, none else on the roads, no smoke, no stops by the wayside...only the sound of your own voice..I see a figure in the field. There is genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts."
-Stanford on technique
First--this collection, monumental and satisfying a thirst for more Stanford which previously was far from quenched. We can thank the dude from Copper Canyon Press for that, I think. This expansive volume should satisfy Stanford's reputation as a great poet with depth and desire for immortality.
The work itself turns on the image. It would be cheap to say that Stanford's images of death, mutilation, blood and brutality are macabre--rather they have mastered what Lorca termed Duende--looking deathward in an elegant and elegiac manner that hits at the truth of death, rather than dancing around it. These poems though, for all their death obsessions pulse with life...that is what happens when the blood is pumping..."and desire and desire". Race also is one of Stanford's obsessions. While some of his passages could honestly seem "racially confusing" it is important to know the sympathy and affinity he feels with the rural blacks, those he grew up amongst and those that are often heroes of these poems. Let's not forget the moon, the cracked and ragged moon which drives his confused and beautifully damned characters. Speaking of characters, these poems have them in spades...wise gypsys, forlorn Arkansas farm lovers. Arkansas and a faceless South are the setting for these poems, and noone could have made this place as deliciously crooked and mysterious as Stanford.
Among all the possible influences, I think Lorca works best as his predeccessor--Lorca before New York so angered him. By the amount of dedications to forgotten South American and European masters in here, it's safe to say however that Stanford was a poet who read with depth and emotional attentiveness.
"Men sing when they work, or at least they used to. I'm liable to talk to myself. I try to get at the taproot of poetry, of that force drawing things upwards...Really I visualize the dead as the living, I visualize you whom I will never know. We are constant strangers...Poetry is like going alone on a big rig, none else on the roads, no smoke, no stops by the wayside...only the sound of your own voice..I see a figure in the field. There is genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts."
-Stanford on technique
February 18, 2024
Legendary. The lost American Rimbaud.
July 15, 2015
First I read The Singing Knives. Then I read all the poems in this book. I'm hooked. Stanford is now one of my favorite poets. There literally isn't a page or poem in this book that didn't deserve at least one highlight or underline.
Unfortunately, Stanford committed suicide and did so while very young. So we lost a great artist and we also never had the benefit (on second thought, is it a benefit?) to see his style evolve. What you get here is FANTASTIC if you like this sort of poetry: deeply surreal, born in the swamps of Arkansas, Stanford sort of reminds me of poetry's counterpart to Faulkner (not that Faulkner wasn't incredibly poetic as well). Rather than Faulkner's mythological Yoknapatawpha County, we get Stanford's ghostly, murky, death brackish Arkansas. As fatalistic as some of Stanford's poems are, especially when reading them one after another, there is a bright light which threads them together and which sings from this book. That light is the joy which Stanford clearly had playing and living with language.
This isn't for everyone, but it's completely for the ones it's for.
Unfortunately, Stanford committed suicide and did so while very young. So we lost a great artist and we also never had the benefit (on second thought, is it a benefit?) to see his style evolve. What you get here is FANTASTIC if you like this sort of poetry: deeply surreal, born in the swamps of Arkansas, Stanford sort of reminds me of poetry's counterpart to Faulkner (not that Faulkner wasn't incredibly poetic as well). Rather than Faulkner's mythological Yoknapatawpha County, we get Stanford's ghostly, murky, death brackish Arkansas. As fatalistic as some of Stanford's poems are, especially when reading them one after another, there is a bright light which threads them together and which sings from this book. That light is the joy which Stanford clearly had playing and living with language.
This isn't for everyone, but it's completely for the ones it's for.
December 7, 2020
Just read it. Wander in this dark and mystical world of dreams and knives and so much life and death. Do it. That's all I'm saying.
dnf
August 17, 2015as much as i want to appreciate the artistry or whatever, there's something in me (a lot of me) that couldn't bring myself to read 700+ pages of some crusty white guy using racial slurs and talking about all the dead animals he's left in his wake
Read
January 7, 2016My review follows:
http://www.zyzzyva.org/2015/11/30/the...
http://www.zyzzyva.org/2015/11/30/the...
February 24, 2022
Well. Words sort of fail me here. Which is ironic, since that didn’t seem to have been a problem for Frank Stanford, certainly one of the most prolific poets know about. I’ve been reading poetry a long time and never heard of him until a few months ago.
This is a fairly comprehensive collection, including all of his published volumes of shorter poems, as well as several collections that were not published, and a variety of other assorted work. Selected passages from his 15,000 line unpunctuated epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Days I Live You are scattered throughout, along with images of handwritten pages, some prose, and an interview. If I recall correctly it is nearly 600 pages.
Frank Stanford’s poetry won’t appeal to everyone and a portion of his work may even offend some people, perhaps deeply. I’ve got no problem with it.
This is a fairly comprehensive collection, including all of his published volumes of shorter poems, as well as several collections that were not published, and a variety of other assorted work. Selected passages from his 15,000 line unpunctuated epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Days I Live You are scattered throughout, along with images of handwritten pages, some prose, and an interview. If I recall correctly it is nearly 600 pages.
Frank Stanford’s poetry won’t appeal to everyone and a portion of his work may even offend some people, perhaps deeply. I’ve got no problem with it.
March 15, 2017
Somehow in my bookshop flip-through, I missed that there were so many uses of the n-word in this book. (How many I found in sampling five or six poems: 0. How many I found my first day of reading: o.O) It's a real pity, because Stanford is an immensely talented poet with a gift for language, and the collection is thoroughly curated and well arranged. I had wanted to send the book to a friend of mine from rural western North Carolina, but now I'm thinking I'll just send him selections and a note about why.
July 22, 2018
This collection is so immense, I can't imagine ever finishing it. I read a good chunk of Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives, in which I enjoyed the poetry and disliked the design and layout. In this chronological volume, there was fair amount of overlap with Hidden Water. The poems which did not overlap were not as strong, perhaps because of the chronological basis of presentation.
July 3, 2022
I’ve only read Frank Stanford in bits and pieces before; mostly quotations + a few complete poems, but never this much at once. This book completely broke my brain, in the best possible way. I feel my own poems bursting forth from me, the sort of poems I didn't even know I was capable of.
June 1, 2017
Holy fucking Christ.
February 2, 2019
Dark. Gritty. Damn good.
February 20, 2019
-didn’t read unpublished manuscripts
August 13, 2021
A good, American poet who die far too early.
April 9, 2023
I'm sorry, but the beautiful binding can't make up for the incomprehensible poetry it contains.
July 8, 2023
purchased because he was called a swamp rat rimbaud, finished bc he's excellent (and, perhaps, a swamp rat rimbaud).
October 18, 2023
Incredible Book
March 29, 2024
"Swamprat Rimbaud"
May 15, 2021
“A carpenter can tell you how a table is made, but can a medium joining hands with us over the table tell us what it is? Hug a tree.
We go back to the poetry, the poet. I see a figure in the field. There is a genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts.”
Death and the Arkansas River - Frank Stanford
We go back to the poetry, the poet. I see a figure in the field. There is a genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts.”
Death and the Arkansas River - Frank Stanford
January 23, 2025
When the rain hits the snake in the head
he closes his eyes and wishes he were
asleep in a tire on the side of the road,
so young boys could roll him over, forever
he closes his eyes and wishes he were
asleep in a tire on the side of the road,
so young boys could roll him over, forever
February 24, 2017
not sure what the hype is about, if anything he consistently wrote like an amateur, I guess that is a talent
March 8, 2016
This is an unbelievably rich book. At times lyrical, at others elegiac, surreal, epic, these are poems that seem as if they've always existed yet this was my first encounter with Stanford. His poems can lead you down a dark Arkansas road in a mad chain of seemingly unrelated images that pile, teeter and twist you towards inevitable death. Death is inescapable in these poems, at times a character and at others the spirit that lurks under their spectral surfaces.
This volume is a massive and worthy collection of a poet who shot himself to death before escaping his 20s. Stanford's poems are unmistakably his, and his voice unmistakably American. If there is any justice in the world, this book will put him in the pantheon of American greats, exposing him to a readership that didn't even know of his existence.
Even as huge as this collection is, it only manages to tease at the greatness of Stanford's work. Stanford's 15,283 line epic poem "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You" is excerpted in pieces here. It works to great effect, like a mad priest spouting prophecy, punctuating the shorter lyrics. But something in me wants to read the whole thing in one long unbroken stream.
There's nothing simple or straightforward about Stanford's work. Except for the prose pieces at the end of the collection, Stanford's poems can be surreal and seem nearly incoherent. He juxtaposes images of horror with images of beauty, matches life with death. They can seem like lists, like stream-of-conscious nonsense. They're dense, fists closed over a jewel.
But the more I read the more I realized that Stanford is also a narrative poet. There are rich stories here, buried deep under the trappings of surrealist image. They can be terrifying, but they're always beautiful.
This volume is a massive and worthy collection of a poet who shot himself to death before escaping his 20s. Stanford's poems are unmistakably his, and his voice unmistakably American. If there is any justice in the world, this book will put him in the pantheon of American greats, exposing him to a readership that didn't even know of his existence.
Even as huge as this collection is, it only manages to tease at the greatness of Stanford's work. Stanford's 15,283 line epic poem "The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You" is excerpted in pieces here. It works to great effect, like a mad priest spouting prophecy, punctuating the shorter lyrics. But something in me wants to read the whole thing in one long unbroken stream.
There's nothing simple or straightforward about Stanford's work. Except for the prose pieces at the end of the collection, Stanford's poems can be surreal and seem nearly incoherent. He juxtaposes images of horror with images of beauty, matches life with death. They can seem like lists, like stream-of-conscious nonsense. They're dense, fists closed over a jewel.
But the more I read the more I realized that Stanford is also a narrative poet. There are rich stories here, buried deep under the trappings of surrealist image. They can be terrifying, but they're always beautiful.
October 27, 2015
While some of his work is obviously well written, I am very dissatisfied with the language used in the majority of Frank Stanford's poetry. Maybe it was what he was going for, disgust and horror. But in my opinion as a lover of horror and the macabre, these pieces are just too much. They seem to be the rantings and ravings of someone who is unhappy with the human race, who doesn't seem to like people of color (even though he looks as if he could be of color himself), who dreams of murder and mayhem and likes it. He is very disturbing. I would be afraid if I personally knew this man. Poetry is a window into the soul, in my opinion, and his soul looks pretty damn dark to me. I am not enjoying it, so I am not going to read it any further. Made it about 100-150 pages in before I knew that I was not going to like such vulgar, obscene, and offensive verse. No thank you. Even though it is well written, it is not for me.
February 5, 2016
This was alright. Some of the language was child-like (his near-obsession with horror imagery), as if he didn't understand himself or his surroundings and wasn't even trying to make sense of anything. I thought too much of his work was mindless and directionless. Someone posted they thought his work was not autobiographical, but I disagree. It's clear Frank saw the world through his own, limited view of the world - a world he was unhappy with - and wrote his poetry through this narrow, dark perspective.
June 13, 2016
Every poem in this collection is a gut punch. The writing is dark, brutal, obsessed with the imagery of death, bees, rivers, and the moon. All of Stanford's poems here are deeply and explicitly connected to the rural south. This is life-changing, soul-warping stuff. The book itself is also absolutely stunning and includes his unpublished works along with some photographs, early handwritten drafts, some prose, and an interview, among other things.
June 14, 2021
To finally experience the breadth and the arc of Stanford’s writing was something I had been waiting to experience for decades. From “The Light the Dead See”, “The Singing Knives” (thank yoy, C.D Wright), “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You”, it has been an immense pleasure. At times, he comes off like Walt Whitman’s jackass little brother. Then the blood seeps out from under the pages.
May 28, 2015
i tried. really tried to get into Sanford. made it 206 pages and there was just nothing in his writing for me. i can see where many would enjoy the imagery and the southern (gothic?) feeling of
his poetry, but they just didn't move me at all.
his poetry, but they just didn't move me at all.
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