The Life and Poetry of Frank StanfordJames McWilliams McWilliamsLabel: University of Arkansas PressDescription: When twenty-nine-year-old Frank Stanford put three bullets in his chest on June 3 1978 he ended a life that had been inextricably linked with poetry since childhood. Deeply influential but largely unknown outside his corner of the poetry world this prodigy of the American South inspired a cult following that has kept his reputation and work flickering on the periphery of the American literary tradition ever since.The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Stanford’s life and work introducing to a broad readership poetry that remains both captivating to poets and in its celebration of everyday experience over academic erudition accessible to those who rarely read poetry. Stanford’s poems range from one line to his 15263-line epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The vital thread running through all of his poetry is an ear for language that vies with Walt Whitman in its expansiveness and generosity. Stanford’s omnivorous attraction to vernacular particularly Black and rural vernacular centered on an admiration for the marginalized and eccentric. Blending the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and O’Connor with a racially egalitarian vision his poetry thrives on the stories and traditions of the oppressed and forgotten. The themes that preoccupied Stanford’s prolific output—language sex death class geography commercialism surrealism film race—also preoccupied the poet in his daily life which was marked by heavy drinking philandering mental instability emotional abuse and through it all an inveterate desire for beauty. Constantly attentive to this tension biographer James McWilliams traces the short and painfully complicated life of this hidden talent who left a lifetime’s worth of poetry that through its grounding in the mundane achieved a vision of the transcendent.
