THE LIFE AND POETRY OF FRANK STANFORD

Stanford’s life and poetry are lightning from the ground up.

Texas State University historian McWilliams has written an impeccably researched, capacious, and probing biography of the enigmatic, neglected Southern poet, a “steamboat of jive of magic.” Stanford was a Mississippi Delta orphan when his single mom married a levee engineer. The summer camps with Black workers that Stanford grew up in provided the language and “material for a lifetime of poetry,” especially for his book-length poem that McWilliams extensively draws on, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The wealthy family flourished in Memphis in the 1950s, especially Frank, who had Elvis, the blues, and Black culture as neighbors. In 1961 they moved to Mountain Home, Arkansas, in the southern Ozarks. Here, Stanford was “blessed or cursed with an emerging literary obsession.” Thanks to his mother, Frank’s “conversion” to Catholicism got him into Arkansas’ monks-run Subiaco Academy, where the Bushido warrior and the crusading poet with a near-photographic memory flourished. Stanford brought his “strange” and “feral poetic voice” to Fayetteville’s University of Arkansas, which he would occasionally attend while reading, writing, drinking, then waking and dreaming in the local Black vernacular. Stanford joined the MFA program, where his work stunned faculty and students. He was getting published but dropped out. Thanks to devoted publisher Irv Broughton, The Singing Knives was issued. The darkening, prolific profligate got married, worked as a surveyor, two-timed his wife, and revised Battlefield, “every bit as generous as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.” McWilliams closes with a devastating portrait of the brilliant, promiscuous, financially burdened 29-year-old spiraling out of control and, despite a film and his own small press that he ran with poet/lover C.D. Wright, he ended it all in 1978 with three shots to his chest.

The full-throated biography fans have been yearning for.