The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford by James McWilliams.
When 29-year-old Frank Stanford put three bullets in his chest on June 3, 1978, he ended a life that, since the age of 9, was inextricably linked with poems that were deeply influential but largely unknown outside the insular world of American poetry. A select following—a cult, really—has admired this prodigy of the American South from the beginning and, through its dedication, kept his reputation and work flickering on the periphery of the American literary tradition.
The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford offers for the first time an authoritative and comprehensive study of Stanford’s life and work, introducing to a broad readership poetry that remains both captivating to working poets and, in its celebration of everyday experience over academic formality, accessible to readers who rarely read poetry at all.
Stanford’s poems range from one line to his iconic fifteen-thousand-line poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, but 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 centered on an admiration for the marginalized, the downtrodden, and the eccentric misfits not only evokes the grotesques of Faulkner and O’Connor but reminds us how poetry thrives in the stories and traditions of the oppressed and forgotten.
The themes preoccupying and inspiring Stanford’s prolific output—language, sex, death, class, geography, commercialism, surrealism, film, race—also preoccupied and inspired his daily life, which was marked by violence, alcoholism, excessive philandering, mental instability, emotional abuse, and, through it all, an inveterate desire for beauty. Constantly attentive to this connection, this biography traces the often painfully complicated life of a hidden talent who left a lifetime of poetry that, in its grounding in the mundane, transcended it to become a profound voice that we need to hear.
James McWilliams has written on a wide range of topics both academically and journalistically, with work appearing in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, and Harper’s. He is professor of history at Texas State
University.
The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford will be published in the summer of 2025.