Frank Stanford

American poet

Frank Stanford (born Francis Gildart Smith; August 1, 1948 – June 3, 1978) was an 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 twenties, and three posthumous collections of his writings (as well as a book of selected poems) have also been published.

Frank Stanford was born Francis Gildart Smith on August 1, 1948, to widow Dorothy Margaret Smith at the Emery Memorial Home in Richton, Mississippi. He was soon adopted by a single divorcee named Dorothy Gilbert Alter (1911–2000), who was Firestone's first female manager. In 1952, Gilbert married successful Memphis levee engineer who subsequently also adopted "Frankie" and his younger, adoptive sister, "Ruthie" (Bettina Ruth). Stanford attended Sherwood Elementary School and Sherwood Junior High School in Memphis until 1961 when the family moved to Mountain Home, Arkansas, following A. F. Stanford's retirement; Stanford finished junior high school in Mountain Home. and published poetry in the student literary magazine, Preview. However, he left the university, never earning a degree.

Over the next several years, Stanford kept writing and in 1971 married Linda Mencin. Stanford probably worked on The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You — which he had likely begun as a teenager. he met Irving Broughton, the editor and publisher of Mill Mountain Press, at the Hollins Conference on Creative Writing and Cinema. Broughton read Stanford's work at the conference and agreed to publish the poet's first book, The Singing Knives. and in 1971, The Singing Knives was published as a limited edition chapbook. Stanford briefly lived in New York City, Returning to Arkansas from New York, he moved to the old spa town of Eureka Springs and took a room in the New Orleans Hotel. Stanford meagerly supported himself (and his second wife) by working as an unlicensed land surveyor. The profession permeated his poetry in numerous instances, as in the poem "Lament Of The Land Surveyor". Broughton and Stanford made a 25 minute documentary about Stanford's work and life — filmed in Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri, discussing the land surveyor's experiences, and interviewing friends on whom Stanford's literary characters were sometimes based — titled, It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood, which won one of the Judge's Awards at the 1974 Northwest Film & Video Festival. Following the publication of The Singing Knives, Broughton's Mill Mountain Press published five more of Stanford's chapbook length manuscripts between 1974 and 1976. Ladies From Hell appeared in 1974, followed by Field Talk, Shade, and Arkansas Bench Stone in 1975; In 1976, Stanford rented a house in Fayetteville on Jackson Drive with Wright and established the independent publishing operation Lost Roads Publishers to publish the work of talented poets without ready access to publishing; he said that his purpose with the press was to "reclaim the landscape of American poetry." That fall, the Stanfords moved from Beaver Lake to the Crouch family's farm in southwest Missouri. and more titles soon followed. The press would issue twelve books under Stanford's direction.

Frank Stanford's poems—tall tales of wild embellishment with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape, drawn from his childhood in the Mississippi Delta and the Ozark mountains—are immediately recognizable, and his œuvre continues to be influential and well received.

In the 1990s, Ginny Stanford and C. D. Wright published accounts of their respective relationships to Stanford, both during his life and afterward. Ginny Stanford published two essays: "Requiem: A Fragment," in The New Orleans Review in 1994, and its companion piece of sorts, "Death In The Cool Evening," a Frank Stanford feature in The Portable Plateau in 1997. Stanford has also been written about in at least two novels — Steve Stern's The Moon & Ruben Shein and Forrest Gander's As A Friend — and two folk songs — the Indigo Girls' "Three Hits" and Lucinda Williams' "Pineola;" the former is an ode to Stanford's work while the latter is a eulogy of sorts for Stanford, who was a family friend of the Williamses. Stanford's impact on poetry was profound and lasting, and celebrations of his work frequently take place. All night readings of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You have also occasionally occurred, such as one organized by Brown University students in 1990 A July 1997 tribute to Stanford in Fayetteville featured readings of Stanford's poetry and a screening of It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood.

Despite continued interest in Stanford's work, his legacy has been largely overlooked in the canonization process of poetry anthologies and university literature courses. He is one of the least known of the significant voices of latter 20th century American poetry, despite being widely published in many prominent magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, kayak, The Massachusetts Review, The Mill Mountain Review, New American Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Now, and Prairie Schooner. However, Stanford's work has received significant critical praise. Alan Dugan called Stanford "a brilliant poet, ample in his work," comparing him to Walt Whitman. Poet Lorenzo Thomas called him "amazing a swamprat Rimbaud, the "remarkable acuity" of his "clear cut imagery and spring tight lines," and his "remarkable talent" as a "testimony to [his] place in American letters." In his introduction to What about This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), the poet Dean Young described Stanford's poetry as, "something authentically raw, even brutal, which seems both very old and utterly new, its vitality coming from roots that sink deep into the primitive well springs of art and the mud of the human heart and mind." In a 2015 review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner says "Since Mr. Stanford's death, his cult has grown, but it's never come close to metastasizing. In large part, that's because his work has been hard to find, issued by tiny presses and often out of print. The long awaited publication this month of What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford gives us a chance to see him whole. It introduces to a broader audience an important and original American poet."