All of This Is Magic Against Death

In the summer of 2008, I left New York City for Oxford, Mississippi. I was chasing something. I wanted to study writing with Barry Hannah and Tom Franklin at the University of Mississippi. The novelist Larry Brown, an Oxford native who died four years earlier, was my favorite writer. I’d also fallen under the rollicking spell of Mississippi Hill Country blues artists like R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and T-Model Ford. During my first months in town, as I took classes with Hannah and reread Brown and William Faulkner through the lens of the place I now witnessed daily, I was introduced to the work of an Arkansas poet who died back in 1978: Frank Stanford. His work was heavy in the air in late-aughts Oxford, but all I could find at the time was The Light the Dead See: The Selected Poems of Frank Stanford (1991) and his epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1978, reissued 2000), both of which I immersed myself in. Stanford quickly became my favorite poet. Several years later, I was thrilled by the near-simultaneous publication of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (2015), to me the most important book released this century, and Hidden Water (2015), a valuable scattering of ephemera and bonus material from the poet’s archives.

Still, as far as biographical facts went, Stanford remained something of a mystery—even though his poems are littered with autobiography. I knew he died by suicide in Fayetteville in June 1978, at age 29. I knew of his relationship with C.D. Wright, which began in the mid-’70s when she was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas. I knew Lucinda Williams, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, wrote “Pineola,” a haunting elegy from her album Sweet Old World, about him. I also knew there was some scholarship on him, but I didn’t anticipate we’d ever get a massive—in this case, 600-plus page—biography. The announcement of historian James McWilliams’s The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford (University of Arkansas Press, 2025) genuinely surprised me.

McWilliams begins at the end: Stanford’s last days in New Orleans, leading up to that final, irrevocable act. When the book opens, he has just written a curious message on the wall of poet Ralph Adamo’s bathroom: “What is Frank looking for?” He then breakfasts with the writer Ellen Gilchrist, something of a patroness to him, before the poet and photographer Kay DuVernet (with whom he’d been having an affair while visiting New Orleans) drives him to the airport. Back in Fayetteville, he is confronted by his wife, Ginny Crouch Stanford, and C.D. Wright, both of whom he’d been maintaining intense relationships with, keeping each one somehow separated from the other through a maze of secrets and lies. At that point, Stanford had a cult reputation as a poet and had founded Lost Roads Press with Wright. Still, he worked as a land surveyor to pay the bills. Debt was burying him. He’d betrayed both Ginny and Wright in awful, dramatic fashion. It’s immediately captivating from a narrative standpoint, and it introduces some of the themes—death, betrayal, obsession—that define Stanford’s life.

From there, McWilliams traces back to Stanford’s early years. The first chapter begins: “The poet was southern, distinguished, and broken from day one.” Stanford was adopted by Dorothy Gilbert Alter in Richton, Mississippi, on the day he was born: August 1, 1948. She managed a Firestone store, selling tires, and planned to raise Frank on property she owned up north in Greenville, Mississippi. In late 1951, she took up with levee engineer Albert Franklin Stanford, “a Memphis gentleman” 27 years her senior. The couple married, and Albert adopted Frank and his younger, adoptive sister Ruth, splitting their childhood between a privileged life in Memphis and summers at the levee camps Albert oversaw in Arkansas and the Mississippi Delta.

Stanford’s summers at the levee camps were essential to his work and factor significantly into The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, which McWilliams designates as the poet’s most “defining literary accomplishment”:

No one artist, especially not one as productive and wide-ranging as Stanford, should have their career defined by a single poem. But because it was so thoroughly preoccupying and epic, so heavy and self-referential and autobiographical, The Battlefield, a poem that he worked on for nearly half his life, can rightly be called the touchstone of Frank Stanford’s career.

It’s difficult to summarize The Battlefield, a beautiful and murky 15,283-line epic in free verse. The narrator is a 12-year-old clairvoyant, Francis Gildart (Stanford’s alter ego), who “explores dreamscapes conveyed in a shifting babel of sounds,” McWilliams writes. It’s a poem of the South and about the South, largely concerned with race and class, focusing on what McWilliams calls “[Stanford’s] unwavering attention to marginalized voices.” He points to three lines that serve as rallying cries: “I take to / people that are all fucked up,” “The help is always better than the ones in bow ties,” and “I call to the downtrodden.” In reference to its style and voice, McWilliams explains that “[the] poem thrives on a mostly North Mississippi idiom that samples liberally from everything from Shakesperean tones to clipped, countrified expressions to risqué levee-camp slang to standard dozens-like banter.” C.D. Wright identified Stanford’s influences as Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Arthurian romances, the metaphysical writers, the English romantics, the French and Spanish surrealists, Bushido and the Japanese warrior ethos, Whitman, the Bible, European filmmakers, jazz musicians, and “anyone who talked to him or said something within his earshot.” In a 2012 review for NPR, Steve Stern describes Battlefield as “a great Southern gothic fun house illuminated by lightning.”

Stanford started honing his distinctive style young. He was enrolled at Subiaco Academy, a Catholic boarding school in Subiaco, Arkansas, where he befriended the monks and threw himself into writing poetry and establishing a judo club. He went on to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he was a wunderkind undergrad in graduate poetry workshops, making a name for himself as he broke into little poetry magazines around the country.

From the start, his relationships with women were complex; he liked to juggle multiple lives, a pattern that repeated throughout his adulthood. His many girlfriends and his two wives loved him for his attentiveness and passion, and because he was profoundly supportive of the art they made. But their feelings for him were disrupted by his wandering heart and impulsivity. His first wife, Linda Mencin, was a politically engaged sociology undergrad taking summer classes at the University of Arkansas when they met in 1969. Cheryl Campbell, a musician from Missouri who attended college in Fayetteville and returned there for a fresh start, met Stanford at a party in January 1971. Living a dual life, he somehow carried on relationships with both women simultaneously for a stretch, splitting his time between shacking up with Linda in her Mount Sequoyah home and moving Cheryl into his writing studio. He married Linda in August 1971 (sneaking away days before the wedding to be with Cheryl in Eureka Springs). Both women got pregnant by him—he paid for Linda to have an abortion, and Cheryl ultimately miscarried. McWilliams writes: “Eerily foreshadowing future behavior, Frank maintained intense, conflicting relationships with both women and, simultaneously, casual sexual ones with others.” It was Cheryl who eventually decamped from Arkansas and whom he later reconnected with in New York City, where things flamed out quickly. While there, he wound up pursuing other women, including the wife of the dancer who owned the house that he and Cheryl rented on Staten Island, and a Scottish woman named Deidre who worked at the Museum of Modern Art.

His most profound relationships were with his second wife, the painter and photographer Ginny Crouch Stanford, with whom he lived peacefully in relative isolation for several years in Rogers, Arkansas, tending their garden, each nurturing the other’s art, and then with C.D. Wright. The balancing act of maintaining relationships with both Ginny and Wright consumed the latter part of Stanford’s life—just as he had with Linda and Cheryl, he lied to each about the other. He told Ginny that Wright was a lesbian and they were simply working on Lost Roads Press together, while explaining to Wright that his marriage with Ginny—who now lived on her family farm in Liberal, Missouri—was merely one of convenience. It wasn’t until the weeks before Stanford’s death that the women convened and began to untangle his lies, ultimately forming a close bond.

Aside from these intimate relationships, McWilliams’s biography also boasts a sprawling cast of artists and poets and dreamers. One central figure is Irv Broughton, Stanford’s longtime publisher and his collaborator on It Wasn’t a Dream: It Was a Flood (1974), an ambitious, 25-minute film with “wild sound” and “[Jean] Cocteau-like imagism” in which the poet interviews friends who inspired his literary characters. (Stanford was a cinephile, deeply influenced by the work of Cocteau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bernardo Bertolucci.) Stanford also crossed paths with Allen Ginsberg, who visited Fayetteville with Peter Orlovsky in May 1969 while Stanford was enrolled in Jim Whitehead’s MFA workshop. Ginsberg took an immediate liking to Stanford. Along with a group of other writers, they visited Ozarks National Forest, Eureka Springs, and Magnetic Mountain. After a two-hour-plus reading from Ginsberg (he read “Howl” aloud for the first time in a long time), Stanford and other workshop poets took him out for pizza and beer. On the last day of his visit, Ginsberg read and commented on poems from students. Later, writing to poet John Wood, who had brought Ginsberg to campus, Ginsberg forgot Stanford’s name, calling him “the poet with dungarees,” commenting on how much he liked his poems, and suggesting Stanford submit to Poetry or The Evergreen Review. Stanford also had many literary pen pals, chief among them Alan Dugan, who had made a disastrous visit to Fayetteville in November 1970, during which he got drunk and went off the rails, but who maintained a constructive correspondence with Stanford for many years.

But, as with the poet himself, McWilliams is most interested in the peripheral figures Stanford befriends, many of them Black laborers whose voices and experiences had a major impact on his life and work. There was Willie E. “Jimbo” Reynolds, a shoe shiner at the University of Arkansas’s Student Union, who invited Stanford to Sherman’s Tavern, the first Black-owned business in Fayetteville, where he became a regular. At Sherman’s, he met “civic-minded and engaged Black men” with whom he had close friendships for the rest of his life. The owner of the tavern, Sherman Morgan, was known as “the Black Mayor of Fayetteville.” Claude Ricks, who Stanford grew close to, was “the most committed to racial integration in Fayetteville,” becoming “‘a spokesman for the Black community’ on race relations in the schools.” There were also Stanford’s friends at the levee camp when he was a kid. They had names like Baby Gauge, Ray Baby, BoBo, and Born in the Camp with Six Toes. There were his family’s chauffeurs in Memphis: Charlie B. Lemon and O.Z. Durrett. And his good friend Richard Banks, an important figure in Stanford’s life, featured prominently in It Wasn’t a Dream: It Was a Flood. He meaningfully interrogated these relationships throughout his work.

In a short period, Stanford’s perceptions of race underwent a drastic evolution, and McWilliams addresses these complexities head-on. The poet transformed from a privileged “son of the south”—who donned a confederate cap at Subiaco, exaggerating his Mississippi roots and proudly flouting racist ideologies—into the openhearted, curious, compassionate man he was in Fayetteville. He ultimately recognized the life of Southern white privilege he’d lived and became an advocate for social and racial justice, largely through his work. Integrating himself so fully into Fayetteville’s Black community in the late ’60s was a radical act. McWilliams writes that it altered Stanford’s thinking, and, critically, shaped and informed his vision for Battlefield, which became a “more intricate tapestry, one that—in delving into race, language, and geography—transitions heavily to the syntax, vernacular, dialect and idioms of Black culture throughout the American South.” He “consciously highlights the value of silence amid Black talk in The Battlefield,” which is to say that Stanford didn’t center his own experience but instead sought to observe, learn, and truly hear the voices of the marginalized and oppressed, “[absorbing their] narratives of violence” and “capturing the traditions of the impoverished rural south as a whole.” McWilliams offers not only a complex, captivating portrait of Stanford but also of the American South in the Civil Rights era, and the subsequent years of growth and change—the pressure and pain, the entwined histories, the blood-soaked earth, and the awakenings of people like Stanford.

Stanford’s death haunts these pages and, on a larger scale, haunts his entire life. Years before his suicide, writing to his longtime friend Bill Willett “on a page ripped from the 1969 book William Blake’s Illustrations to the Grave, Stanford decreed that ‘death has always been my mistress.’” That fascination informed his pantheon of personal heroes, such as the masterful Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who died by seppuku—suicide by disembowelment—after a failed coup attempt in 1970. Other heroes were poets as varied as Whitman, John Keats, William Blake, and Thomas Merton. One thing was certain: Stanford “only felt in charge of his life when he was writing,” McWilliams observes, and when his ability to do that started to falter, he withdrew. As his marriage with Linda Mencin was ending in 1972, he suffered a breakdown and wound up being committed to a psychiatric ward at the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock. In the months before his hospital visit, Stanford felt “the Angel of Death hovering,” and he was, as he wrote to Willett, “‘writing to live, creating to exist.’” McWilliams notes that his “creativity thrived alongside a destructive pursuit of sexual indulgence, alcoholic excess, and extreme emotional vacillations.” He “spiraled into obsessions that seemed manageable . . . until they weren’t.” Franz Wright called Stanford “one of the great voices of death,” and McWilliams acknowledges “an important thematic shift” in his work in the mid-’70s, when he “began to center his poems on death and dying more than life and living.” Stanford would eventually die of three self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest.

No doubt Stanford was a mercurial and magnetic figure, wild of heart and spirit, an autodidact with something of a photographic memory. His poetry is not manufactured and pristine. It’s raw, full-throated, ferocious, bloody, and weird. That’s why it endures. Think of these lines from his poem “Death and the Arkansas River,” first published in Constant Stranger (1976) and then in a slightly revised version in Crib Death (1978):

So don’t let Death catch you 
Listening to the ground, even a place 
That sounds like home. 

It could be Death 
Would file a quitclaim deed. 
Death holds a quiet title 
To the land your loved ones walk.

McWilliams relates how Stanford worked on this poem “in his head like it was an evolving prayer” in the year after a summer 1974 tragedy at Subiaco, shortly after Stanford shot “one of the most visually arresting” scenes from It Wasn’t a Dream: It Was a Flood. A student fell out of a motorboat and drowned in Lake Dardanelle, not far from where Stanford filmed a robed monk paddling a canoe with a small coffin across the lake. Haunted by the boy’s death, Stanford didn’t write a word of the poem down until it “sounded right, and undramatic” in his mind. There’s a purity in his tone and in his voice bleeding through the page. It’s as if you can hear the making of the poem in the poem itself, as if you can bear witness to the images that flooded his mind.

Another poem I love and think of as exemplifying these qualities is “The Singing Knives” from Stanford’s 1972 debut of the same title. It features what McWilliams calls a “signature dream sequence, the kind that would define The Battlefield and that serves as a kind of DNA marker in Stanford’s poetry”:

I dreamed the blacksnake rode the guitar 
Down the river 
I dreamed the clouds went by 
The moon like a dead fish 
I dreamed I was dragging 
A cotton sack with a dead man in it 
I dreamed the fish bandits stole the hogs 
Off my lines 
And one of them was a hunchback

In his introduction to What About This, Dean Young recalls encountering Stanford’s work for the first time when he was in college in the ’70s and ’80s. Stanford’s poems “were passed hand to hand like contraband: small editions from small presses, hard to get, guarded with secrecy, coming from far outside any known curriculum, and profoundly intoxicating," Young writes, adding that the poems seem “as if they were written with a burned stick. With blood, in river mud. There is something thankfully unexamined in their execution.” When fellow MFA students first read “The Singing Knives” and other early Stanford poems at the University of Arkansas in 1969, they were blown away. “Nobody in the seminar room had ever heard anything like this,” McWilliams writes. Stanford’s work still hits that way. No small feat considering the wave of voices that has followed in his wake.

McWilliams undertakes an immense task here by seeking to tell Stanford’s story—I would’ve thought it near impossible for someone to pull off at this high of a level, yet he does. The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford is a stunning consideration of the life and work of this American original, of the sacrifices and dangers of making art and of creativity, of the ways this world will try to break artists down, and of the conflicted, bright-burning heart of creation itself. It’s as essential as biographies get. One of my favorite (among the frequently quoted) lines from Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is “all of this / is magic against death.” I cite it often, especially to relay some feeling of gratitude I might not otherwise be able to articulate, be it to friends, readers, booksellers, or other writers. And so, I’ll end there now, with that same sense of gratitude. Stanford’s work itself is truly magic against death, and I’m happy to report that McWilliams’s is as well.