The Last Light of the Levee Camp: Frank Stanford Revisited

By Elijah Burrell

I first heard Frank Stanford’s name in 2008 on the first day of an undergraduate poetry workshop. The professor, with his grits-thick Delta accent, pulled out a copy of The Singing Knives and proceeded to read from the titular poem:

When Jimmy cut a throat
The eyes rolled back in the head
Like they was baptized
I tell you
When he cut a throat
It was like Abednego’s guitar
And the blood
Flew out like a quail

The workshop sat in silence. I had never heard a thing like it. On a sensory level, it sounded mystically backwoods, surreal, and reveled in violence. Soon after this magical introduction to Stanford’s poetry, I purchased every book by him I could. Back then, the options were limited. Though Stanford wrote eight books of poetry before his death at age twenty-nine, only three remained in print in 2008. The other five were highly sought-after collector’s items. Thankfully, in 2004 one of Stanford’s former classmates from the Arkansas MFA program, Leon Stokesbury, had published his selected works. This book, The Light the Dead See, includes poems from Stanford’s entire body of work. I spent long nights in my office, gluttonously digesting his words long after my wife had asked me to come to bed. I pursued any written biographical information I could on the poet, and honestly, that cupboard was bare. I tracked down a few articles from old literary journals, and time after time I came away wanting to know more about the interesting man I felt such a poetic kinship with. A certainty: Frank Stanford’s life is one of the more interesting stories in modern and contemporary poetry. Stanford, I came to learn, was a master of self-mythology; what was true and what was not, has blurred into an amazing patchwork of mystique in the years since his death. Though his story ends tragically, there is much to learn from what transpired in the fugitive time of his living years.
To provide a satisfying introduction to Stanford and his work, I decided, one could not rely on old articles and hearsay. For years now, I have heard of the storied writing program during the late sixties at the University of Arkansas. Between 1966 and ’67, Stanford enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, and, in his sophomore year, poetry instructor Jim Whitehead noticed him. Whitehead was struck by Stanford’s peculiar poems, and invited him to join the graduate poetry workshop the following semester, while still an undergraduate. The graduate students in that workshop included future Pulitzer Prize nominee Jack Butler, Stokesbury, R. S. Gwynn, Larry Johnson, Bruce Edward Taylor, John Stoss, and John Wood.
I set out to speak with some of the men from that original workshop. Stokesbury, Gwynn, and Wood floored me with their cooperation and enthusiasm. I also engaged in a wonderful series of correspondences with Ralph Adamo, a close friend of Stanford who was involved in the writing program, too. Throughout this essay, I will relay parts of these interviews and conversations to patch together the mysterious pieces of Stanford’s life. First, though, let’s move backward in time, from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to southeast Mississippi.
Frank Stanford was born five months after my own father. On August 1, 1948, Dorothy Margaret Smith permanently surrendered the child to the Emory House for unwed mothers in Richton, Mississippi. He was the surviving half of twin brothers. His adoption papers say he was born Francis Gildart Smith. A day later, another Dorothy, Dorothy Alter, adopted the baby, and changed his name to Francis Gildart Alter. She returned to Emory House several months later and adopted a little girl named Ruth, who became Frank Stanford’s sister. In 1952 Dorothy met and quickly married Albert Stanford, who formally adopted both children and moved the family to Memphis, Tennessee.
Many believe that even though he was four at the time of his adoption, Frank Stanford was oblivious to the fact that Dorothy and Albert were not his birth parents. Albert was a very successful levee engineer and was responsible for the system of levees that eventually gentled the Mississippi River. In the summertime, Albert Stanford moved his family into the levee camps deep in the Mississippi and Arkansas deltas. Normally, the Stanfords were the only white folks in the camps, and Frank played almost exclusively with the African-American children of the laborers. These children came from a culture and place at first unfamiliar to Stanford. They had names like O. Z., Tangle Eye, Born In The Camp With Six Toes, Ray Baby, and Baby Gauge.

“The Blood Brothers”

There was Born in the Camp With Six Toes
He popped the cottonmouth’s head off
There was Baby Gauge
He tied the line to his wrist
He tied it to the alligator gar
He rode the fish
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

There was Charlie B. Lemon
He had four wives and a pair
Of long-toed shoes

There was Mose Jackson
He threw snake eyes in his sleep

There was Bo Bo Washington
A rat crawled in the bed
And sucked the blood
Out of his baby’s head

There was Jimmy
He had the knife like night
He was white

I had the hands like dragonflies
I killed one white man
He was a midget
I did it with a frog gig
It was the summer of the Chinese daughter
I danced on the levee

During his time in the camps, Stanford picked up African-American diction, speech patterns, and musical rhythms, which later became immensely important to Stanford’s writing. Stanford’s South was different from most writers’ South. A wide range of subcultures populates the Delta: indigent farmers, voodoo priests, Pentecostal holy-rollers, and a blend of aristocratic and poor whites. What some critics have called Stanford’s “Southern Grotesquery” was most likely just a selection of the most interesting experiences he had in his time there, the most captivating folktales he heard in the camps. This acquaintance with the underbelly of the Delta, an area most readers of poetry have no cultural or intellectual grasp of, helps make Stanford’s poems unique.
In 1963 Albert Stanford retired and permanently moved the family to Mountain Home, Arkansas: a little town snuggled deep within the Ozarks and completely bereft of African Americans. Shortly after the move, Albert died. Dorothy converted the family to Roman Catholicism and sent Frank to the Subiaco Academy and Benedictine Monastery in Subiaco, Arkansas. According to Stanford, it was here, under the tutelage and watchful eyes of the monks and priests, that the young man began to write poetry. Stanford later made the outlandish claim that he had written poems that were several thousand pages long during his time at the monastery. Conveniently, Stanford also maintained he later burned much of this early work, and there are old acquaintances who say they never saw Stanford write any poetry at this age, or even talk about it. One thing seems certain: It was Subiaco’s liberal-arts curriculum that inculcated Stanford with a refined appreciation for classic literature and artistic culture. John Wood noticed this almost immediately a few years later when he met Stanford at the University of Arkansas. Wood told me, “With Frank’s background as a student at Subiaco, he grew up having been exposed to many cultural things the average Arkansas kid might not have been exposed to. He certainly was responsive to Italian opera.” It was natural that Wood noticed Stanford’s unusual interests since he had grown up in the flat wasteland of the Delta himself.
Once Stanford graduated from Subiaco, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas. It was at this point, we can be sure, that he began writing poetry furiously, feverishly. His longtime friend and college roommate, Bill Willett, remembers Stanford in their room, fueled on bourbon, five days at a time, as he wrote, wrote, wrote. Willett believes it was during this time that the poet began to write his best-known work, the postmodern, surrealistic epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. This poem is more than fifteen thousand unpunctuated lines long, and details the darkly twisted odyssey of a twelve-year-old: Francis Gildart (Stanford’s own first and middle name). Francis roams a mystical dreamworld Delta full of deadly racism and sexual violence. Francis and his band of misfit friends fall victim to, and avenge, the social injustices perpetrated by supremacists and rednecks. He sleeps with married women. He fights monstrous stray dogs and sees gigantic catfish. He raises hell. Stanford’s own poetic voice inhabits the speaker’s narrative. Most lines are in a rough, Southern diction. The “boy” protagonist cites Beowulf, Beethoven, Twain, Chaucer, and Christ, yet Stanford spells much of his dialogue and declarations phonetically. In one memorable instance, Francis ruminates on who it was that lynched and murdered his friend Sylvester the Black Angel. During the meditation, Stanford writes a chilling bit on the darkness of men’s hearts:

I know then the ones that done it some by signs others by whispers
if you have ever picked up an old Nehi bottle buried in a ditch
for two cents and poured the muddy water out and seen a tadpole
beating his tail on the new hot mix asphalt that the prisoners was made
to lay down just the other day that stuff still crawling over the weeds
and all and you see that tadpole like the black rag of a flag
flapping on a dead mast then you know what I mean you know what people
will do to one another

For all this mixing of metaphors, the passage is brilliant. Many times, Francis will just tell the reader, “I’ll tell it like a dream.” The reader easily loses track as to what is real and what is dream. Memory of events is never linear or cumulative; instead, the narrative moves in and out of reality until nothing can be trusted but the sure voice of Francis. Francis’s dream sequences mainly act as transitions to the next adventure, the next thought. Almost unfailingly, they pertain to death.
While some critics argue that the poem fails to hold together as cohesively as the great long poems of the past, Battlefield is most certainly Stanford’s greatest accomplishment as a poet. Critics and readers have unanimously labeled Stanford as only a free-verse poet, perhaps because of the Whitman-like longer lines in Battlefield. He is a hero to contemporary experimental poets because his poems are so unconventional and offbeat. Stanford once said, “If a person is quiet enough inside, he might be able to catch on to what I’m trying to do in my poetry.” In 2008 organizers put together a Frank Stanford Literary Festival in Fayetteville. Most panels were about the experimental nature of Stanford’s work; most of the guest readers and Stanford disciples considered themselves experimental poets. There is an argument for reading Stanford as a fragmented surrealist, and, as I have found in my own research, there is also an unmistakably regular metrical heartbeat, or at least the spirit of one, in several of his finest poems. Many of Stanford’s casual readers—and even some of the writers who knew him best—might consider this idea to be witless conjecture. After reading extensively about Stanford’s time at Subiaco, his unmitigated love for the Romantics like Blake, Keats, and Shelley, I began to look closer at Stanford’s own poetry. I scanned the lines for the ghost of meter and was startled by what I found.
I began to ask Stanford’s workshop mates and friends whether he had ever spoken with them concerning meter in his own work. Gwynn, Adamo, and Wood all specifically mentioned that Stanford rarely spoke of his own poetry outside of workshop. Gwynn, who is probably (given his New Formalist orientation) one of the best sources for information about Stanford’s use of meter, told me, “As long as I knew [Stanford] he was free verse all the way, though he wrote a free verse that was instinctively rhythmical. I expect phrases like iambic pentameter would have caused him to lapse into silence.” Later, Gwynn added, “My general impression from then is that Frank didn’t think he had to ‘mess with that stuff.’ His free verse was good enough on its own and he wouldn’t have subjected himself to regular meters.” Stokesbury maintains that Stanford “had the basic or rudimentary knowledge of it, but was pretty much against traditional verse, at least as far as trying to let it infiltrate his own style.” Yet when one reads The Singing Knives, which mostly contains work written during the Arkansas workshop period, one finds that Stanford employs, then buries, iambics in several of the poems. In poems such as “The Gospel Bird,” Stanford alternates lines of accentual-syllabic trimeter and tetrameter (trimeter, tetrameter, tetrameter, trimeter) in the first two stanzas of part one. He roughs the lines up with several instances of trochaic final feet. The poem titled “The Minnow” is entirely monometer. In the three middle stanzas of “The Pump,” Stanford keeps every line but one in some loose variation of tetrameter, pentameter, or trimeter. Each stanza is uniform save one line.
In the book You, Stanford writes whole stanzas (and whole poems) in strict syllabics. In “Wind Blowing on a Sick Man,” the tercet “They get out of their car, / Wipe the dust off their shoes / on the back of their pants” is composed of lines written uniformly in six syllables. In the longer poem “Instead,” every line is five syllables save three variations. These are but a few examples of metrical lines in Stanford’s poetry. Even in Battlefield, with its sprawling lines, Stanford occasionally throws in iambic pentameter—sometimes strict, sometimes loose—when he makes a point or calms the mood (line 2967: “They want to moor me to some shelf like a book”). The question arises: Did Stanford write metrical lines consciously to establish feelings and moods, or were these lines the product of learned, subconscious rhythms? I believe the answer is a little bit of both.
The University of Arkansas MFA program was highly committed to teaching form and meter to its students. Whitehead taught a course called Form and Theory of Poetry, a course still cherished in memory by the former students with whom I spoke. None of the students can remember whether Stanford ever enrolled in this course, though they agreed that he might have read the assigned textbook, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, at the behest of Whitehead. Stokesbury told me, “I do not know if Frank read it. I imagine he might have, because I cannot imagine Whitehead not suggesting that he should, as he did to everyone.” I contend that Stanford most likely did read Fussell. He likely constructed a rough understanding of prosody from overhearing discussions among the poets around him. This is yet another specific area where Stanford’s personal mythology clouds both what is true and what may be true.
When asked how a reader should interpret these metrical lines, to a person his friends had a romantically reasonable explanation: Stanford possessed “perfect pitch.” Gwynn asserts that Stanford “picked up certain cadences from the King James Bible, preachers, and Latin mass.” Stokesbury, Adamo, Gwynn, and Wood all agree that Stanford’s rhythms owe a lot to blues lyrics, call and response, and other elements of folk tradition. Gwynn told me, “Asking Frank to produce, for example, a sonnet would have been like asking Picasso to draw a straight line. Maybe he could have done it; maybe not.” While it is certainly possible Stanford had a gift for hearing and producing elemental rhythms, the truth is most likely that he had that and a rudimentary prosodic knowledge he never spoke of, and denied with fierce conviction so as to encourage the belief that his poetry was unencumbered by any artifice, any influence not from the pure source or tap of the soul. Stanford imagined and birthed what I would call Pure Source Poetry. This is the poetry from the deep cold spring, the honey right off the comb—or at least that’s what the reader is invited to believe. Even if much of the time he was full of it, he had a gift. For years, as I pored over his work, I wondered what it must have been like to have a conversation with Stanford, to talk rivers, birds, and blues with the man.
I asked Stanford’s friends and classmates for their immediate impressions on first meeting him. Gwynn remembers it clearly: “I recall him as being quiet, a little thuggish in appearance, and somewhat forbidding. I wasn’t quite sure who he was or why he was there.” Gwynn remembers Stanford as being “not particularly forthcoming.” He recalls that Whitehead “was his mentor, and [Frank] was content to let Jim do most of the talking about the poems, and Jim was given to occasionally bizarre Freudian readings.”
Stokesbury also remembers the quiet Stanford:

He hardly participated at all. His approach during that first year was that of the student to the masters, like a karate student to his master, quite literally. In just a few months, Frank began to write some very interesting poems. And by the next fall, he wrote several of the good poems in The Singing Knives.

Before long, though all the writers partied and socialized outside the workshop, tension built. Stanford began to lose interest in school and fell out with some of the others in workshop. Adamo, who never had workshop with Stanford but was a good friend in the program, remembers: “He got fed up with it, he dropped out, possibly while it was still going on that year and certainly then did not return to it. I think he did not really like, maybe not even respect, the process; also that he did not like some of the others in the workshop.” Gwynn remembers it this way:

He began his withdrawal from the group. I remember telling Jim Whitehead that Frank had told me that he had come to a workshop meeting but had sat outside the door listening to all the comments and having a good laugh; Jim was angry and hurt by this. Frank thought it was funny. In retrospect, I find it cruel but typical.

As I spoke to these old friends of Stanford, I wondered what had changed in the young Stanford between the time he began his workshops as a shy, reticent poet and the time he walked away from them. Soon answers flowed.
Two well-known poets from outside of Arkansas visited the program during the months before Stanford’s withdrawal: Allen Ginsberg and Alan Dugan. In 1969 the program brought in Ginsberg for a reading. After returning home, Ginsberg kept a small correspondence with Wood, and in one of his letters, he inquired about Stanford: “I’ve forgotten the name of the poet with dungarees—dark glasses, but I liked his poetry.” In a later letter, Ginsberg told Wood: “Frank’s poems seem slightly electric.” He told Wood to pass on to Stanford that he should submit his work to all the major magazines. Wood remembers that in “a surprisingly short time Frank had published poems in many of the finest journals in the country.” This, one can easily imagine, would have sparked envy among the other members of the program. Ginsberg had singled out Stanford as the poet with great potential.
Stokesbury campaigned strongest to get Alan Dugan invited. No one knew that Stanford began sending Dugan his own poems before Dugan arrived in Fayetteville. Dugan became a great champion of Stanford’s almost from the beginning, and this might have been a problem for at least a few of the other poets. Gwynn remembers the atmosphere during Dugan’s visit:

Because Frank had abjured the workshop scene by this time, it was particularly galling to other members who were seeking the approval of the Master’s Voice, as we did in those times. [Frank] had found a champion for his work. He wanted the ‘big time.’

The taste of success must have been a huge factor in Stanford’s belief that he no longer needed the workshops or the program. Stanford’s mother dropped a bombshell during this period, also. Dorothy admitted to Frank that Albert and she were not his biological parents. By all accounts, this revelation made a profound difference in Frank’s outlook. Whatever enmity these occasions might have engendered culminated in a blowout party at Stanford’s cabin on Mt. Sequoyah. Gwynn remembers the height of the party this way:

When everyone was drunk and stoned and dancing wildly to some kind of strange music (I think it was an LP of Frank’s called ‘Jug, Juke, and Washboard Bands of the 30’s,’ Frank emerged from a back room with a shotgun and sent two blasts through the ceiling. The party was quickly over.

Adamo recalls the same party and says that almost directly after the incident Stanford “left for parts unknown.” The shotgun incident on Mt. Sequoyah became one of the central elements of Stanford’s mythology—the wild boy-poet from the South, willing to blast a buckshot hole in his own ceiling.
Stanford faded from the immediate view of the Fayetteville scene and saw his books rapidly published by the small Mill Mountain Press. He submerged himself in bourbon and ended his first marriage. Those closest to him grew concerned. Dorothy persuaded Frank to commit himself to the state mental hospital in Little Rock. He was there a month. Within a year Stanford married a second wife, a painter, named Ginny Crouch, and they lived a meager, rustic existence in various homes throughout Missouri’s Ozark Mountains and in Arkansas. By day Stanford was a land surveyor. He maintained his interest in poetry but began an exploration into avant-garde filmmaking. During this heady era, Stanford wrote to Alan Dugan to describe his circumstances:

Hell, I’m eating out of the garden every day. Everything is growing. I come home from work, eat turnips, drink pot liquor tea for the blood, eat my strawberries with goat milk and bee honey (makes me dream, fuck, and write), then drink ice water, ever so lightly mixing it with bourbon.

Though it sounds like an idyllic existence for Frank and Ginny, it was not. Frank’s poetry dealt in death as it always had, but Death had become a character, not a caricature in the lines. The poems spoke of sexuality in strange tones and about the deaths of the poet’s fathers (biological and adoptive), the death of his loved ones, and Death’s dance with Frank himself. Frank began sharing stories with his friends of previous suicide attempts: the time he had stabbed himself in the heart with a letter opener while lying in the graveyard at Subiaco, the time he had swum out to the middle of Beaver Lake and tried to drown himself. There were also many women besides Ginny. In 1975 Stanford met Carolyn Wright (known to us as the poet C. D. Wright) at a party in Fayetteville where she was a graduate student. Stanford beguiled Wright, and they began an affair that lasted for two or three years. At the height of the affair, Stanford and Wright started their own press, Lost Roads, and rented a house in Fayetteville together where they could operate it. Ginny, living an hour away at the home they shared, was understandably wary of Wright and the other women Stanford was seeing.
Though Stanford wrote some of his very best poetry during those tumultuous years, the mid- seventies, the jig was almost up. By this time his old friends in Fayetteville began to wonder what in Stanford’s life, if anything, was unembellished. The men I interviewed all had something to say about Stanford’s self-mythologizing. Adamo feels that “the stories complement and contextualize the poems in a way that satisfies some longing in the human imagination that wouldn’t be as content simply with the words, however great. I think he did it because of the uncertainty of his own identity.” Stanford only knew the past he made for himself. He never knew his real parents, he bore witness to the lives of African-Americans in his summer sojourns in the levee camps, and he floated from Catholicism to poetry to Zen Buddhism. He snatched the pieces that made his story, and his poetry, more interesting. Gwynn had this to say:

Frank was a mythologizer in the manner of Yeats and Plath. It’s pretty clear that he saw himself early on, maybe as early as his Subiaco years, as some kind of transcendental figure. No one will know the absolute facts of Frank’s early childhood, but it’s pretty clear from his poetry that he felt he was anointed in some obscure way; he was, after all, a Roman Catholic and a genius.

Wood remembers Stanford “re-dated parts of his life.” He shared this:

I can’t recall right now which poet it was—more minor I think—someone like Paul Fort or Francis Jammes—that I introduced Frank to. Then a year or so later we were chatting about French poetry and he told me how he’d read that particular poet when he was I can’t recall how young. I, of course, said nothing. So what? Frank was trying to credential himself. He didn’t need to because he had the gift, but it made him feel better.

Stokesbury, one of Stanford’s earliest and most steadfast friends, had this to say:

There is no one that I have ever met who was as completely into self-mythologizing as Frank was. And no one who was as successful at it. His great gift was verisimilitude, as much as any poet I know. But remember, that does not mean what he wrote, or said, about himself was an accurate reflection of the real world. This preoccupation with his past, a rewriting of his history, an attempt to define who he is, or rather invent a history for himself because he did not feel like he knew who he was is at the center of his work. He was a wonderful poet and a unique and special man, but he was the biggest liar I ever met. He wants you to make his myth for him, and look, thirty-five years after his death people are still willing to do so. Maybe that was his real genius.

On June 3, 1978, Frank Stanford returned home from visiting Adamo and Ellen Gilchrist in New Orleans. Ginny and C. D. Wright confronted Stanford about his philandering ways. The three argued passionately. At some point during the day, Stanford excused himself and walked into his bedroom. In her essay “Death in the Cool Evening,” Ginny Stanford remembers “Three pops, three cries . . . After the third cry I knew he was dead.” Stanford killed himself with a .22-caliber target pistol; he lay on the bed, the bullet holes in a circle around his heart.
Frank Stanford lived the life and died the early death of the Romantic poets he idolized. Someone once wrote about Percy Bysshe Shelley: “His life was a paradox of reason and irresponsibility, of compassion for the oppressed and a supernatural unconcern for those about him. Breathing an air too rarified for human beings, he existed.” Finding words better suited for Frank Stanford would be difficult, so I will instead close with one of Stanford’s own poems:

“Instead”

Death is a good word.
It often returns
When it is very
Dark outside and hot,
Like a fisherman
Over the limit,
Without pain, sex,
Or melancholy.
Young as I am, I
Hold light for this boat.

When the rest of you
Were being children
I became a monk
To my own listing
Imagination.
Nights and days floated
Over the whorehouse
Like webs on the lake,
A monastery
Full of noise and girls.

The moon throws knives.
The poets echo goodbye,
Towing silence too.
Near my house was an
Island, where a horse
Lathered up alone.
Oh, Abednego
He was called, dusky,
Cruel as a poem
To a black gypsy.

Sadness and whiskey
Cost more than friends.
I visit prisons,
Orphanages, joints,
Hoping I’ll see them
Again. Willows, ice,
Minnows, no money.
You’ll have to say it
Soon, you know. To your
Wife, your child, yourself.

Adapted from a lecture given in 2012 at Bennington’s Writing Seminars.

Elijah Burrell was raised in Missouri and has lived there for most of his life. Aldrich Press published his first poetry collection, The Skin of the River, in 2014. Aldrich Press published his second book, TROUBLER, in 2018. Burrell received the 2010 Jane Kenyon Scholarship at Bennington College, where he earned his MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington’s Writing Seminars. His writing has appeared in publications such as AGNI, North American Review, Southwest Review, The Rumpus, Sugar House Review, Measure, and many others.