Can a Myth Grow Up?: The Poet Frank Stanford at Second Sight

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In the fall of 2018, I travelled to Fayetteville to attend the second-ever Frank Stanford Literary Festival, held in honor of a wild, Arkansas poet who’s been dead 40 years. The only other time I’d visited Fayetteville was 10 years earlier when I’d attended the first-ever Frank Stanford Literary Festival. At that time, almost all Frank Stanford’s work was out of print. He was known only to a handful of writers and artists who kept his work alive by word-of-mouth and by posting some of it on the internet. The dedication of this handful, however, is hard to overstate. The 75 of us who attended came from all over the country. We stayed up all night in the Walker Community Room of the Fayetteville Public Library mixing whiskey and coffee, reading Stanford’s poems, and discussing the excesses of his life.

While many people still have not heard of Frank Stanford, he is more easily discoverable now. The enthusiasm of the first festival helped bring his poems back into print. Any bookstore with a decent poetry section should have one of his books—most likely What About This, the nearly 800-page collected works issued by Copper Canyon Press in 2015, and possibly Hidden Water, a collection of Stanford’s notes and letters published by Third Man Books, which is an offshoot of Jack White’s—formerly of The White Stripes—Third Man Records.

When I learned there would be a second Frank Stanford Literary Festival, I knew immediately I wanted to go back—this time not only to celebrate Frank Stanford, but also to gauge how the reception of his work has changed, and how times have changed.

If this is the first you’ve heard of Frank Stanford, imagine a rockstar, charismatic and tortured like Kurt Cobain, who happens to be a poet. Though largely unfamiliar to people outside the poetry world, Stanford is arguably the cult-hero of American poetry. In the four decades since his death, the lengths fans will go to read more, and learn more—not to mention the duty they feel to share him with others—continually renews his intrigue. Reading Stanford’s poems has caused people I’ve met to postpone graduate school to drive around Arkansas tracking down Stanford’s childhood teachers, and to propose marriage while staying in a hotel where Stanford once lived, and even to drive out to Subiaco Academy and sleep on the poet’s grave.

In part this is because Stanford’s biography reads more like a Southern myth than an actual life: He was born at the Emery Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers in Richton, Mississippi, in 1948 and adopted the next day by, who raised him to believe he was descended from Southern gentry. When Frank was three, Dorothy married , a successful civil engineer, who gave him his last name. Their union provided Frank a well-to-do upbringing in which he was often chauffeured in the family’s black Cadillac—an orphan and an aristocrat at once.