In May 1965, two nascent but ambitious literary geniuses were separated only by a short boat ride across Norfork Lake in Baxter County. Charles Portis, having left his job as the London bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune at the end of the previous year, was holed up in a cabin resort called Hickory Hills in Gamaliel to work on his first novel, “Norwood.” He was 31.
The other literary genius on the lake was Frank Stanford, then a 16-year-old whose family lived in Mountain Home in a lakeside house on a road called Mallard Point. If Portis had wandered down from his cabin to the nearest shore of the lake, he could look directly across at Mallard Point and might have seen Stanford and his junior classmates from Subiaco Academy — who were visiting the Stanford home for a weekend revel — swimming and waterskiing and drinking beer from floating coolers. When an Arkansas Coast Guard Auxiliary boat pulled up to investigate, Stanford hauled in the coolers, drove three taunting loops around the law in his own boat and gunned it for the lake’s Missouri line and a secret cove he knew.
Despite the age difference, the emergent writers shared more than a lakeshore idyll. Both had been reared in Southern locales far from literary centers: Stanford in Greenville, Miss., Memphis, Tenn., and Mountain Home; Portis in Mount Holly and Hamburg. Both had read widely and idiosyncratically on their own. Even as a teenager, Stanford could recite Chaucer and had devoured Conrad, Kafka, Turgenev and Marx, as well as works on Buddhism and poetry by Samurai warriors. For novel research, Portis read deeply on the Civil War and the American West, and would eventually acquire extensive knowledge of secret societies and Mayan culture. Perhaps most significantly, each had a finely tuned ear for the voices and language around them, especially Southern vernacular heard in bars and daily life, which would be essential to the sui generis nature of each’s work.
The tragedy of the comparison is that Stanford would never reach the age Portis was when he began writing fiction at Norfork Lake, a pursuit that would eventually produce a body of work canonized in the Library of America, including a touchstone of American literature, “True Grit.” In 1978, 13 years after the aforementioned weekend with his schoolmates, Stanford took his own life at age 29. Despite amassing an enormous body of work and displaying a poetic genius that earned him praise and prestigious publication during his lifetime, Stanford’s oeuvre — partially available in various posthumous collections like Copper Canyon Press’ “What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford” — has largely languished in obscurity, except among a certain coterie of admirers, champions and scholars. One of those is James McWilliams, a writer and professor of history at Texas State University.
In his monumental new book about Stanford, straightforwardly titled “The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford” and published by the University of Arkansas Press on July 1, McWilliams leads with the horrible and well-documented circumstances of Stanford’s suicide. This structural choice — a correct one, I believe — confronts the aura and mythology of tortured genius early. Over the next 500 pages, McWilliams then proceeds to spool out in rich, fascinating and sometimes disturbing detail the course of Stanford’s brief but astonishingly productive poetic life.
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 Singing Knives,” 1971
I admit to not having been familiar with Stanford’s poetry or much about his life before reading McWilliams’ biography. I do remember learning at some point that Lucinda Williams’ song “Pineola” was about his death, and in her 2023 memoir she admits that she fell in love with him almost instantly after meeting him in 1978 and that the composition, which described a suicide and a funeral at Subiaco Cemetery, “fictionalized a few details but the song is true figuratively.”
Stanford’s comet blazed across Northwest Arkansas at a time when I was in high school in Little Rock and just beginning to discover books not distributed by the Sports Illustrated Book Club. When he died, I was studying abroad in England, trying to lose my Southern accent and, as a writer, to emulate Henry James. Stanford, born a decade before I was, followed a very different Arkansas arc, one that saw him continually excavate his unusual and unusually precocious youth for his poetry, especially for his masterwork, “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” a single poem which runs to some 15,000 unpunctuated lines. Acknowledged as brilliant but rejected repeatedly because of its length, it appeared finally in 1978, just before his death, with Lost Roads, a press Stanford himself founded to get neglected poets he admired into print.
McWilliams is particularly good on Stanford’s early life. Adopted by Dorothy Alter from an orphanage in Mississippi as a newborn in 1948, Stanford was raised by her in Greenville to fit into a comfortable bourgeois Southern milieu, though uncommonly for the time she was a single businesswoman choosing to become a mother on her own. In 1951, she married Albert Stanford, a levee engineer based in Memphis who was 27 years her senior and who moved the family every summer to Mississippi River levee camps, where he oversaw repairs. These summer stays, McWilliams writes, were “where a young Frank Stanford would, by just living as a kid, unknowingly find material for a lifetime of poetry” by being exposed to “a whirl of blues-driven sound and voices” from the Black workers and their families in the close quarters of the camps.
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
“The Blood Brothers,” 1964
During the school year, however, Stanford had a privileged childhood in Memphis, where he was a standout young baseball player and athlete. The city also opened him to wider cultural influences — a literary world through the family’s friend Joan Williams, a novelist who was once romantically involved with William Faulkner; and music from Elvis to Melrose High School’s “all black drill and precision team,” as Stanford describes it in “The Battlefield.” One character in the poem “wore out some soles high stepping with them.”
When Albert Stanford retired to Mountain Home in 1961, his son immersed himself in the Norfork Lake pursuits of fishing and waterskiing, and earned the nickname “Bull” for his stature and athleticism. He also led a secret interior literary life of reading and writing. A priest and English teacher from Subiaco Academy, Father Nicholas Fuhrmann, hired the young man to teach him to waterski and, intuiting his intelligence, welcomed him at the academy a year later as a junior. There, Stanford received overt support for his literary interests from Fuhrmann and the other monks and later said he “wrote more between twelve and eighteen” than at any other age. “He was light-years ahead of us — we all kind of acknowledged that,” a Subiaco classmate said. The school, where his mother worked after her husband died, would remain a refuge for Stanford in subsequent years.
Nevertheless, he was underachieving academically and began acting so provocatively in his last semester — though what he did is one of the few details McWilliams hasn’t uncovered — that his mother chastised the priests for not alerting her to his actions. She feared he was in “real trouble” that would prevent him from going to college in Fayetteville without intervention from the family doctor. That storm passed, but later a Fort Smith general practitioner whom Stanford’s mother convinced him to see told her he was probably schizophrenic; a note to that effect gave Stanford a 4F status that kept him out of military service during the draft.
His Fayetteville years (mid-1966 to mid-1972) were where his poetry exploded and his compulsions and mental struggles emerged, producing words and actions that leads McWilliams to call him “as mythological a figure as Fayetteville has ever known.” The context McWilliams provides of Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas’s creative writing community, with which Stanford had a tortured relationship, is engrossing. The university’s MFA program, founded in 1965 by Jim Whitehead, was the locus of both serious work and serious partying in this free-wheeling period. Whitehead’s workshop was “fast, furious, and rough,” one student recalled, and MFA parties went just as hard, leading to many drunken liaisons and outrageous acts. Stanford hosted one at his cabin on Mount Sequoyah and cleared the house of “imposter” doctoral candidates by blasting a shotgun through his ceiling. The poets partied on.
Creatively, Stanford found more inspiration at Sherman’s Tavern, the city’s first Black-owned business and a civic hub for the town’s some 600 Black citizens. It was also a place that welcomed white patrons, “for those willing to enter with respect,” McWilliams writes, and Stanford became a regular. This might have seemed strange to those Subiaco classmates who recalled him as an outright Old South racist. There, he displayed a Confederate flag in his dorm room and seems to have wholeheartedly embraced the tropes of “tradition” and “heritage” that his mother proclaimed. McWilliams links Stanford’s philosophical and intellectual justification for this stance to his study of the history and practice of judo — he formed and coached a competitive judo club at Subiaco — with its reverence for codes and traditions.
But in Fayetteville, McWilliams writes, he “began listening to his world in a new way, with a fresh openness to vernacular” and a “genuine interest in Black culture,” primarily through the friendships he developed at Sherman’s. In this space, Stanford listened and drank and found a rich vein of language and community that connected him to his time in the levee camps and inspired him to develop characters and voice in “The Battlefield.” McWilliams maintains that Stanford’s “interest in the dialogue of Blacks reflects curiosity, respect, and even envy for what he saw to be, ultimately, a shared language of expressive amplitude.”
His shorter published poems distilled his experience in the South to startling, sometimes surreal imagery. C.D. Wright, the acclaimed Arkansas poet with whom he became romantically involved late in life, described his work this way: “As a reader you’ll find every one of his pages overpopulated with similes, metaphors, and conceits, but it is his metaphors that yield more pleasure than anyone’s I know — so distinct, so secure, so peculiar.”
yea we sat up there on the levee like four generals looking at a battle
Charlie B. said these here is what I call box seats hey Jimmy
these is the white man’s bench alright Tang said
the two negroes and the white one Jimmy and myself sat in the balcony
of the Delta
we were like four noblemen in the loges at the opera
“The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” 1977
As the poems poured out and wowed his creative writing professors like Whitehead and Miller Williams (Lucinda’s father), his fellow students, established poets like Alan Dugan and literary editors, Stanford’s romantic and personal life took an increasingly chaotic turn, precipitating a breakdown and hospitalization. Within months of marrying his first wife, Linda Mencin, at age 23, she filed for divorce because of a string — or rather a constant parade — of affairs, one of them a serious relationship with a woman named Cheryl Campbell.
The end of both of those relationships was one factor that sent him spiraling. But “Frank understood,” McWilliams writes, “that at the root of his trouble was his obsession with poetry,” and he burned a large collection of his manuscripts, leading his mother to have him committed to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock. The report of his 10-day stay indicates that “Frank only felt in charge of his life when he was writing.” McWilliams adds that the “fundamental conflict between poetry and life precipitated Frank’s destructive feelings of insecurity.” Upon his release, during a “recovery” time at Subiaco, an unsuccessful suicide attempt by drowning followed. While the art-life conflict sometimes became more balanced, it continued to haunt him until it killed him.
Some three hundred pages in, among the perceptive but always accessible readings by McWilliams of the poetry and its connection to the life, I began to tire of the lists of Stanford’s sexual conquests, including one with a high school girl that McWilliams casually describes as an “affair.” Stanford admits in a correspondence that “I’ll never be able to be faithful to one person,” and McWilliams clearly states that Stanford’s “pseudophilosophical transmutation of love for one woman into an abstract love for all women spared Frank … guilt.” Later, when Stanford writes to an on-again, off-again romantic partner that because “I am a great poet,” she’d have “to understand how volatile are the liquids and solids of my imagination,” he sounds insufferable. The same lover later agreed to give Stanford one more chance during a planned reunion in Eureka Springs, but after she found him sloshed in a bar, she decided “never to see or speak to Frank Stanford again.” I cheered.
Further accounts and descriptions of his second marriage to the artist Ginny Crouch Stanford, in which he constantly suggested painting subjects (including himself), had me wondering if he was a misogynist in addition to being — at least before his last phase as a publisher — a narcissist. McWilliams frames these encounters and relationships in a way that implies the answer is no, and it seems true that the women Stanford became involved with were willing partners. I’ll give the last word on the topic of his romantic appeal to Lucinda Williams, who wrote in her memoir that Stanford “was genuinely attentive to what I had to say and he knew exactly what to say in response. He knew what I wanted to hear, which implies some manipulation, but it also suggests to me that he cared.”
She has a pair of blue jeans and a brassiere on
Holding the prairie
With a clothespin in her lips
Her husband is putting a new coat of lacquer
On his canoe
He still wants to kill
Whoever it is that stole his birddog
“BLUE YODEL a Prairie,” 1973
We get a welcome reprieve from Stanford’s amorous adventures in 1973, when he first settled in with Ginny in a remote house in Rogers and they began farming and gardening to support themselves, while Frank took more work as a land surveyor to earn money and stopped binging on alcohol. Here, his artistic impulses and compulsions tacked toward stability and a real vocation as a poet and writer. He began publishing poems in respected literary magazines and finding attentive editors. But this calmer time also ushered in, as McWilliams puts it, a “nascent sense that his muse was growing drowsy, that the fire that fueled his poetry was fading.”
He had finished “The Battlefield” but despaired of finding an independent publisher for his behemoth, and a turn to short stories led to a maddening, half-year-long series of near misses with famed editor Gordon Lish at Esquire that quashed any belief in him that his writing would be accepted by the literary establishment. He continued writing and producing poems, even when he felt wearied by work and rejection. After all, C.D. Wright called him “the most disciplined writer I have ever known or heard of.”
There’s a too-muchness to “The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford” in some ways (even minor details, like the description of a house, receive two or three quotations in support, when one would do), but then it’s clear there was a too-muchness about Frank Stanford, so perhaps a biography so comprehensive is apt. Almost every other page contains some startling fact: Black poet Ishmael Reed “honestly thought he was a fellow Black poet,” McWilliams writes, when he granted Stanford an American Book Award; a reference in “The Battlefield” to Sputnik Monroe names a white Memphis wrestler who also was a champion of civil rights in the city; when Stanford thought Bob Dylan was getting too much attention as a poet, he frisbeed the songwriter’s records on his Fayetteville lawn.
As someone who has been the champion myself of a couple of neglected writers I thought should be known more widely (successfully with Portis, less successfully with the still-forgotten novelist Gilbert Rogin), I admire McWilliams’ industrious devotion. I was also bowled over by the poetry I read here, and I thank McWilliams for exposing me to it so intelligently. From that poetry I saw that Stanford is often his own best, if enigmatic, biographer: “I want people of twenty seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing.”