[New-Poetry] Frank Stanford

[David Graham]

I never picked up Stanford's selected poems back when it first  
appeared, and now I see that Amazon is selling used copies for over  
$60.   Ouch.  It does seem odd that there's no in-print selected.   
Didn't one of his collections appear as one of the Carnegie-Mellon  
classic contemporaries, or am I hallucinating?  Nice big selection of  
poems online, anyway.

On my shelves are a # of his chaps & small press books, in any case,  
all long out of print now.  Goes to show you should never get rid of  
poetry books.

Here's one of his poems that's stuck in my mind for many years.   
First and last stanzas italicized.

Elegy For My Father

       1883-1963

When Alfalfa was afraid
Spanky and Buckwheat
Put a gar in his sock
And said it was his leg.
Everyone thought he was sick;
He sang in the bed all night long.

The devil was beating his wife
In the Bear Creek Woods
And I was alone
In the roots of a cypress tree.

I had one finger in my ear
And one in my toes looking for jam,
Waiting for the Negro
To set off the dynamite.

There were coons in the mussels
And sticks of powder
Under every stump.
Toadspit was washing off the weeds.

A fish head was nailed to each tree
And the gar bladders going down
Sounded like a thousand slow leaks.
A kingfisher dived for the river.
Fish bladders and dynamite began to blow up.

I saw half a bullfrog
Fly under the rainbow
And land on the bank.
It hopped for the rest of itself.
It hopped for the rest of its life.

The devil is beating his wife
In the Bear Creek Woods;
Alfalfa sings in the bed
With his gar leg on;
My father's socks sit in the drawer
Like old bullfrogs.

--Frank Stanford.  The Singing Knives.  Lost Roads, 1979.



========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
==========================================




On Mar 15, 2008, at 3:01 PM, munrop at sprynet.com wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Somebody by the e-address of AlMaginnes gave us this:
>
>  "Here is a link to an essay about a nearly forgotten American poet  
> who deserves a much wider audience than he ever managed in life.  
> (Fans of Lucinda Williams should know that Stanford was the subject  
> of her song "Pineola).
>
> http://poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181083"
>
> Wow.  Thanks for this.  I'd never heard of this guy before.  I  
> found the poems collected at the Poetry Foundation site (http:// 
> www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=98306) quite useful  
> and intriguing.  Clearly I need to get deeper into Stanford's work.
>
> Reading the Poetry Foundation selection from "The Battlefield Where  
> the Moon Says I Love You", "The Last Supper", I was immediately put  
> in mind of James Dickey, (especially "May Day Sermon to the Women  
> of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist  
> Church").
>
> Yeah, maybe, maybe not.  I've just hauled out that poem and had  
> another look, (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/dickey/ 
> mayday.htm); not so sure now.  Oh hell.  Yes I am.  The voices both  
> poems very appealing to me in much the same way, sophisticated  
> critique not withstanding.  When I read the Stanford work I also  
> find ringing in my hear poems by David Lee, especially in the the  
> voice of "John" and poems by Elton Glaser.
>
> There is something to that rockin' Southern preacherizing and  
> miserifying that gets right to me, an uptight Calvinist from the  
> far north and altogeher too cramped in my speech.  I wouldn't know  
> a true Southern voice if it whacked me up side the head so all  
> those poets could be feeding me bamboozlement and I have to take it  
> on faith.  However, counterfit or true, those are poems voiced in a  
> way that touches me.
>
> Thanks again for the heads-up about Stanford.
>
> After my sign-off I've included a poem by David Lee and a poem by  
> Elton Glaser.
>
> Peter
>
> P.S.  I swiped "miserifying" (see below).  Sorry if my use of it  
> and preacherizing sullied the southern tongue.  My klutzy usages  
> were intended as homage, not parody.
>
>
>
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