Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart
For the last year I've slowly been building a towering stack of southern novels on my desk, having read almost nothing but southern writers. I suppose I was hoping to discover a voice - my voice - in one of these books. It's a ridiculous and cowardly thing. It's on one hand an attempt to find a good writer to emulate because I lack confidence in myself. On another hand it's just a high-minded form of procrastination. I don't know if all those great southern writers are going to make my own work better or worse or have no effect at all. I've read a lot of great books, for whatever it's worth. And a few bad ones, too. And I've learned that the southern canon is vast. It includes books set in places that, while technically southern, are so foreign to my own history and experience they may as well take place in another country. Places like New Orleans. Or worse, Texas.
Along the way I read a poem by Frank Stanford called "The Snake Doctors." It's a long poem that tells an insane story about a little boy who gets into a row with a pair of fish thieves on the river after one of them castrates the boy's pig. When I got to the last line of that poem, Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart, it just knocked me over.
"The Snake Doctors" is part of a 1971 collection of Stanford's work called The Singing Knives. The book sang to me with descriptions of scenes and images that I felt were so real, so close to my own memories from my childhood. Snakes, knives, honeysuckles, dirt daubers, alligator gar, shotguns, blood brothers, dead deer, rivers and canoes.
In Arkansas at this time of night
A man would be cranking the arm of an ice cream bucket
Or an old telephone
Bringing up angle worms out of the earth
We're installing a clutch
Welding by dark
Closely watched and timed by men
As if we're cutting something loose from kin
All men good for nothing or not listen or heed
Do not break down on the prairie
This is a living not worth selling
Parts to keep it all running
-From "Land of the Downstream People"
I'm not trying to give the impression that I am river people. I grew up among the relative creature comforts of the resort town of Hot Springs. But there were river people all around us all the time. There were river people in my own family. I spent plenty of time in my youth along the Caddo River. My mother's people are from Amity and Glenwood. My shithead uncle still lives out there in a house in the woods he built on some of our family's land that he stole from us. When I was a kid and we all still talked to him I'd get left out there in that terrifying place for days at a time. Or even worse my dad would want to take me out there for a whole week of deer hunting.
It was out on the Caddo River that I first shot a gun - a twelve gauge shotgun when I was all of eight years old. The recoil knocked me clear across the field. I remember how when we kids would each kill our first deer we had to drink the blood and smear it on your face and take a bite out of the heart while it was still warm. I remember being on the Caddo River and seeing the biggest copperhead snake I ever saw, and I remember how my shithead uncle put his boot on the snake's neck and snapped it's head off in his hand like it was nothing. He laughed at us for being scared. Taunted us with the big snake head in his had. I remember floating down that river and seeing an old car sticking up out of the water underneath a bridge, it must have been there for twenty years at least. There was a whole mess of snakes living inside of it and when we floated by they swam out of it and wriggled past our canoe. I remember catching a big alligator gar and being so proud of what a big fish I caught only to have my dad throw it back and tell me gar didn't count. I remember being thick as thieves with my cousin and covering every inch of road between the river and the house, getting chased by the meanest old country dogs, pulling up empty trot lines that turtles beat the fish to, and recounting television programs we liked and telling stories of girls in our classes that didn't like us back. I remember when my shithead uncle threw the kitchen table clear across the room so he could get at his daughter, his fists balled up. I remember in that moment thinking I'd never see my cousin or the Caddo River ever again. I was right on both counts.
Frank Stanford's poetry conjures up all of this for me. And any of these vignettes could have been plagiarized directly from a Frank Stanford poem. Some of his poems are like short stories. A number of them have recurring characters and sometimes are from the point of view of a young boy growing up along the Mississippi Delta. The people in his poems are poor, unafraid, unsentimental, comfortable with violence. There are animals in a lot of Stanford's poems and the people and animals all seem to operate on a common wavelength - they are wild.
Stanford was born in Mississippi but he moved to Mountain Home, Arkansas in the eighth grade. He graduated from high school at the Subiaco Academy in Arkansas and then attended the University of Arkansas for a time. He showed promise as a poet and was invited to join a graduate poetry seminar during his freshman year in 1969. Despite the impression he made on the writing department, he dropped out of college the following year and published The Singing Knives shortly thereafter. He moved to New York City for a little while but then returned to Arkansas and lived in the hippy resort town of Eureka Springs. He eventually made his way back to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he lived the rest of his life.
Stanford published six books of poetry, all before he was 30 years old. His work was championed by poets as accomplished as Alan Dugan and Allen Ginsberg. But Stanford refused to do public readings. He never finished his undergraduate degree. He worked as a land surveyor in Northwest Arkansas and, other than submitting poems to dozens and dozens of publications large and small, he didn't pursue publication or poetry as a profession. He wrote like mad - even writing and publishing a 542 page epic punctuation-less poem, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. But for the most part he lived a simple life in Northwest Arkansas. Simple save for the half dozen extramarital affairs he carried on around town, including a brief episode with a young Lucinda Williams. He took an apartment in Fayetteville with the poet C.D. Wright, who at the time was an MFA student at the University of Arkansas. Stanford was married at the time, but his wife was living on her family farm in Missouri. Stanford and Wright had a love affair, as two young and attractive poets living together in the 1970s might do, but they also launched their own press - Lost Roads Publishers - which is still in business today.
A lot of Stanford's life is a puzzle, and his poetry offers little in the way of clues. Without knowing much about his biography, I assumed that Stanford grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River or in the hills of the Ozarks - poor and wild and unafraid. But much of his life, both on the page and how he portrayed himself to those around him, was invention and mythology. And the more I've learned about Stanford's life, I've been surprised at how different it was from the world that is so accurately captured in a lot of his work.
On this score I'm not alone. Ishmael Reed was shocked and disappointed to learn that Stanford was white, for example. So many of the characters in his poems are black, and so much of his language bears a familiarity with southern black vernacular. It'd have been easy to mistake the all-but-anonymous writer for being black. Others mistook Stanford for being a "primitive" poet - one who is untrained and unread and writes from a pure inner-voice. They thought he was the poor river rat depicted in his poems, raised outdoors among the hogs and hawks and snakes and bandits whose writing was perhaps discovered by some WPA-style field worker.
The truth is that Frank Stanford was the child of a well-to-do family. His adopted mother was a Mississippi socialite who married a wealthy engineer from Memphis. He grew up privileged. He attended a private and prestigious Catholic boarding school. His childhood was relatively ordinary for someone of his means. He was cheerful. He played sports. He had many friends. He was handsome and attracted the attention of girls. His parents carted him around town in Cadillacs.
But the world in his poetry isn't an invention of his imagination. His father worked on the levees in the Mississippi Delta. And during Stanford's youth he spent a few summers living in labor camps along the river. Those camps were mostly made up of African American workers and their children, who Stanford befriended and played with. It was during these brief forays into those camps that Stanford would develop more than just a creative voice for storytelling and poetry. He would also develop a worldview, one that viewed Jim Crow and racism as a threat to humanity. From his sense of the injustice faced by southern African Americans, to his experiences hunting and fishing with the workers and their children in the bayou, the world of those summers for Stanford became the world of a lot of his early creative work. He so fully captured that feeling of that particular time and place in his life, it was easy to assume he had spent a lifetime on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Mother, when you beat out my quilt tomorrow,
Remember the down in the sunlight,
Because I did not sleep there.
Remember, come evening, the last hatch of mayflies,
Because I won't.
They are evil, Mother, and I am
Going to take it all out, in one motion,
The way you taught me to clean a fish,
Until all that is left is the memory of their voice,
And I will work that dark loose
From the backbone with my thumb.
-From "Terrorism"
Lately I've incorporated Stanford into my morning routine. I wake up, make lunch for my kids, hustle them off to school, come home and read the local paper, do the puzzle and drink a cup of coffee. Then I read a Frank Stanford poem before I turn to the computer and begin to write. Sometimes if the poem doesn't do it for me I'll read one or two more. I rarely need more than three to feel something that helps me sink back into the world of my book. Learning what I have about his life hasn't disappointed me or changed how I see his work. All I know is that when I read his writing it feels as authentic to me as my own memories of my own childhood, and that's what matters. It doesn't have to be something that was real to him or not. It has to connect to something that is real for me or for you, whether that's an actual memory of killing a snake or the actual feeling of grief upon the death of someone you love. Somewhere your synapses have to fire. Something, however small, has to be true.
I am writing a work of nonfiction, sort of. It's a memoir of a woman's life who is long dead. Almost everyone in the book has died. Some left behind some record of what they did, how they felt, what they said. Some were surreptitiously recorded or followed and reported on. Some spilled their guts in affidavits or interviews with law enforcement that were preserved for all of this time. But for the most part what I have to work with are the stories these people told their children who are now as old as many of their parents were when they passed away. Those stories are relayed to me second or third hand with fifty years between now and then. Despite my efforts to not invent anything out of whole cloth, I doubt everything that's told to me or that I read in some government report is God's honest truth. All I hope is that what I write will feel true to you in some small way. That rather than connect with Hazel Hill out of pity for her, or Owney Madden or Dane Harris out of envy for them, you instead identify somehow with their trials, setbacks, failures or successes. That you'll agree with my judgement on the facts because you can recognize yourself in there somewhere, same as me. Hopefully we can just make that deal with each other and go into the story together.
My father and I lie down together.
He is dead.
We look up at the stars, the steady sound
Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan.
This is our home.
I remember the work in him
Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost.
And I imagine the way he had fear,
The ground turning dark in a rain.
Now he gets up.
And I dream he looks down in my eyes
And watches me die.
-Riverlight
Stanford didn't find out he was adopted until he was 20 years old. According to his sister, the change in his personality was instant and dramatic. His entire life had been a lie, a story concocted for him by his adoptive parents. The revelation likely broke him psychologically. But it freed him creatively. It was then that Stanford starting to make up stories about himself for people he'd meet. He adopted a persona on the page and a persona in his personal life that was unbound and pushed buttons. He lived impulsively. He drank to excess. He carried on affairs with numerous women at once. He once held a birthday party for Allen Ginsberg at his home in Fayetteville, and inexplicably fired his shotgun into the ceiling so that the "lightweights" would leave and go home. And they did. People in Fayetteville at that time either thought Stanford a genius or a nut. The ones who knew him best thought he was both.
Over time Stanford's later work grew ever darker and more violent. He moved away from the wild creatures of the Mississippi River and towards stories of love and death. He wrote of heartache and heartbreak, and always in the foreground was the presence of death. He wrote of death as driving a Cadillac, as an actual entity that pursued his characters. He wrote of the death of couples in love, of animals, of old people, of himself.
Once while away on a trip to New Orleans, his wife and one of his lovers discovered he had been running around. The two women spent the days he was out of town talking and piecing together all of his lies. When he returned home they were waiting for him to confront him about it. His wife had already filed for a divorce. After an argument Stanford went back to his bedroom, took out a 22 caliber pistol, and shot himself in the chest three times. The women heard it all from the next room. After each of the shots he cried out. "Oh!" It was the shock at what it felt like, this thing he had been writing about for years. Perhaps it was surprise that what he had in his head when he wrote all those poems about his own death was wrong.
Frank Stanford was 29 years old when he killed himself in his Fayetteville bedroom. He had written a will, perhaps because he had been planning his suicide for some time. He requested to be buried in Fayetteville, with no funeral, no guests, and no mention of God or religion. They ignored it. They buried him in St. Benedict's Cemetery in Subiaco, Arkansas. They had a funeral and invited his family, the priests from Subiaco, even the myriad of women he had carried on with around town.
Stanford didn't understand that when you die, you don't get a say anymore, even if you write it all down. The only time you belong to you is in life. In death you belong to everyone else. Your story, like your funeral, isn't yours to fabricate for others anymore. Your story belongs to your family and friends who remember you to others, and the corny mediocre writers who try to piece it all together years later for a book. That's where I come in.
Down here in Arkansas I'm surrounded on all sides. I'm surrounded by my own foggy memories I can't be sure are real, the lies people tell me to paint a certain picture, the tragic deaths of old friends and loved ones, the lush Ouachita mountains, the twisting Caddo River, and a whole mess of snakes. I tell you friend I'm surrounded.
Truly yours,
David
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