Born in 1948, Stanford was a prolific poet known for his originality and ingenuity. He has been dubbed “a swamprat Rimbaud” by Lorenzo Thomas and “one of the great voices of death” by Franz Wright. He grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee, and then Arkansas, where he lived for most of his life and wrote many of his most powerful poems. He attended the University of Arkansas from 1967-69 and studied engineering while continuing to write poetry. Stanford died in 1978.
He authored over ten books of poetry, including eight volumes in the last seven years of his life: The Singing Knives (1972), Ladies from Hell (1974), Field Talk (1974), Shade (1975), Arkansas Bench Stone (1975), Constant Stranger (1976), The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), and Crib Death (1978). His posthumous collection, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (2015), was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award.
Frank Stanford Checklist:
Section A: Books and Broadsides
Section B: Contributions to Books and Anthologies
Section C: Contributions to Periodicals
Section D: Film
Mill Mountain Press [coming soon]
References Consulted:
RACCOON: MONOGRAPH TWO, edited by David Spicer
Memphis: St. Luke’s Press, April 1981
“A Preliminary Bibliography of Frank Stanford” by C.D Wright
Online Resources:
“Finders, Losers: Frank Stanford’s Song of the South”, by Lorenzo Thomas
“The Last Light of the Levee Camp: Frank Stanford Revisited”, by Elijah Burrell
“Poetry Class #2 (Frank Stanford)”, by Jack Dog Welch