out of order frank stanford start

_explicatory statement-skip if you are in a rush_frank Stanford does not fit into my scheme of modernist and observationist writers. I will move on from those groups slowly. Frank is the writer that gets me thinking more than anyone else. I think it is because his life was too short to explain anything. Therefore, I will be writing entries about frank alongside all the groups I move through, toward frank’s place in the timeline. I feel that Stanford is a floater. He is a ghost that moves throughout the movements. I will try to keep up on relating Stanford to the groups he is posted near. However I do not know how he will line up through time. It will be interesting to see where he can.



I have been thinking about the battlefield where the moon says I love you. There is controversy about whether or not Stanford actually wrote it early in his life; or pumped it out in secret in the later years. Many believe, because of the sheer power and knowledge base represented, that frank must have written it after his earlier work, or at least majorly revised the early lines to keep up with the rest of it. I have been thinking. I believe that Stanford wrote most of this early in his life. First half. I mean the book came from St. Francis and the wolf – an even longer poem a high percentage larger than the battlefield. These lines seem to be frank learning to write, line after line and on. I now believe, more strongly than ever before- that frank writing these lines taught him how to write lines in short order later in life when in the university. Not the other way around.


There are passages in the battlefield, particularly ones in the more narrative sections of the text, that drag on and on. These sections of text are so far below standard for the shorter poems of ease he produces. I will continue this post soon with cited examples of each and what they compel in me.


More generally frank is a king. A method actor of words. Bale aint got shit on frank. His constant address to death is inspiring, if it wasn't so crazy that it led him to that suicide.


Frank is alot like a modernist in the way that the myth of the poet is alongside, if not above or surrounding, the poetics. I cannot read his things without thinking of his life. His life was so short there was no time to document anything, and because of that the battlefield fills in that history with mythic power. Not to mention the fact that his death itself was of such poetic power that at that moment his poems would always be touched with that moment. I am attatched to the pity of you, frank. Sometimes I think about cd Wright remembering the living frank. That is part of her gift and grit. But we will get to her more later.