Frank Stanford’s Lament and Some of His Biography with James McWilliams

20 min readJun 3, 2023

Dedicated to Matthew Henriksen, a father, a poet, a friend

image of Frank Stanford — Frank Stanford from _It Wasn’t A Dream: It Was A Flood_

Frank Stanford died on June 3, 1978. James McWilliams, currently writing Stanford’s biography forthcoming with the University of Arkansas Press, and I wanted to honor the poet and his poetry. We took a look at one of his poems, a lament. I thought it would be interesting to think of laments before looking at the poem. That way, we can think about what a lament does and why poets have used this form for centuries.

Regarding Stanford’s “Lament of the Land Surveyor,” I do not feel concerned with finding out the poem’s meaning as much as I want to think about what I see working. I tend to think where a poem begins and where it ends. I try understanding how it travels. I think about how we are transported through a poem, how the words relate to one another, what tensions are generated, how the dramatics work, who is the addressee and why that might matter. When we discuss Stanford’s poem below, James’s speaking parts are italicized with a line to the left-hand side of what he says.

A lament expresses grief generally associated with the loss of someone or something. Typical topics include honoring the deceased, depicting death, and comparing the past and the present. Complaints about life’s cruelty and its misfortunes, the purposelessness of life, or death’s finality may come up. Nature often seems bereaved in such poetry. Laments over deceased individuals that are more elegiac may incorporate moments of consolation. Numerous examples exist throughout poetry.

One of my favorites is Sextus Propertius’s elegy 111.18, from David Slavitt’s translation, for Marcellus. Some lines from it:

… for here Marcellus dies, Augustus’ son-in-law
and adopted son, whose gaze has turned to the darker
waters of River Styx. His noble spirit is gone
and wanders now by that bleak and distant shore.
What good does his lineage do him now, his brilliant marriage,
and the love of all of Rome and the emperor too?
He cannot hear applause. He died in his twentieth year…

The ferryman is waiting for each of us, even you,
whose body he brings to the place where shades of the righteous
dwell in bliss. Or perhaps, with a special dispensation
like that enjoyed by Claudius, your forebear,
and by Julius Caesar, you were allowed to rise from the mortal
paths of earth to the starry realm of the skies.
(from Propertius in Love: The Elegies translated by David Slavitt)

Those lines exhibit the lament’s characteristics mentioned above. Other examples include Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Lament,” Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Bawling for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías” (“Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías”), or Dylan Thomas’s well-known villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” Laments can be found in all traditions and in all countries, even today.

A contemporary poem by Louise Glück that I just reread seems relevant here. Her thirteen lined poem “The Night Migrations” is a newer kind of lament that explores grief, death, and mournful feelings:

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them —
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

What will the soul do for solace then?
I tell myself maybe it won’t need
these pleasures anymore;
maybe just not being is simply enough,
hard as that is to imagine.
(from Averno)

In anticipation of loss, despair comes upon the poem’s speaker even before death itself strikes. The speaker offers a kind of self-consolation, kicked off by the phrase “I tell myself.” The speaker, despite feeling a bit forlorn, seems to give posthumous advice to console the addressee — “… maybe [the soul] won’t need/ these pleasures anymore/maybe just not being is simply enough/hard as that is to imagine.” From the poem’s start, time plays an important role and raises the stakes.

And finally, before getting to Frank Stanford, I want to mention another example, a poem by another contemporary poet, Richard Jackson. “In the Time of the Living,” an elegy for his friend WS Merwin, starts with the following thirteen-or-so lines and explores themes of lamentation:

How often we imagine the sounds of buried insects.
How often our words are the ghosts of those we’ve lost.
So many moments are filled with their own endings.
By the time we think we hear it the airliner is
already out of sight. Our lives dissipate like its
ice crystal vapor trails against the early moonlight
from winds too high to hear. Each night the deafening
sounds of stars die before they reach us. Their light
bends so much they are never where we see them.
High over the gorge this afternoon an eagle whistled
a cry we could almost hear. These cries, you said,
frozen in another age. How often we believe in nothing
as if it is something we trust, like a blind man tracing
the circle he will walk.
(from The Heart As Framed: New and Select Poems)

Glück and Jackson have carried on expressions that grieve mortality in these examples. Her beautiful poem’s lament seems subtle but it is there. His poem’s anguish mixes nature with human experiences in an incantatory way as he eulogizes Merwin’s benevolence. Both contemporary poets express their despair in utterances that share information they may not be able to comfortably express to their respective addressees face-to-face.

These examples bring us to the main discussion of this post, Frank Stanford’s poem titled “Lament of the Land Surveyor”:

Here it is the last day of November
And I am still working the hills
Without a shirt or a new pair of boots

Like the shade throwing itself
Into the river
A voice in disguise I remember
It’s hard to walk a straight line

My father-in-law is coming home soon
On his one-eyed tractor
Heading east of a moon
That’ll be gone tomorrow

I’ve dreamed a lot
About a black cat
Dying at the foot of my bed
About cornerstones
I’ve found in the dark with bare feet

Forties of death and no bearing
Acres of sadness without death
I’ve dreamed a lot

And waded full gullies
Beneath a ridge where Sally’s grandmother
Is shearing roses

And the smell of those flowers
Floating to the foot of the mountain
Reminds me of my hair
Falling on my own father’s boots

And the smell of his jacket
And his straight razor like a lamp
Glowing in the window before me

(This poem comes from What About This, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015, and the poem initially appeared on page eighteen in the first edition, which is a fatigue green soft-back that includes artwork by Ginny Stanford, published by Mill Mountain Press from Seattle, WA in 1975)

“Lament of the Land Surveyor” starts with a specific time and place. The poem ends, at least emotionally, in a different place. The speaker takes us from the present moment to a daydream and then to a memory before, presumably, re-entering the present moment. Associations related to smell take us from place to place before before cutting back to the present. The poem travels. It becomes more active. The two similes used in the poem, “like the shade throwing itself/into the river’ and “like a lamp/glowing in the window before me,” bookend it. These are opposites, just looking on the surface and seeing “shade” and “lamp/glowing.” Tension, one of the poem’s driving forces, seems prevalent, but first I want to listen to your take on Frank Stanford’s journey as a land surveyor. We’ve ended up thinking of him as a poet but he worked as a land surveyor, to which Lucinda Williams alludes in her New Yorker essay, which is expanded upon in her badass memoir, Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.

What will you share about Stanford as a land surveyor who wrote (mostly poetry)? Did his surveying crew know he wrote poems?

Stanford started working on a surveying crew in August 1970 when Sam Gwynn, a poet in the Whitehead workshop who worked for a local surveying company, helped get him hired at the firm Kemp, Christener, and Associates. Frank had no experience surveying. “I suspected,” Gwynn added, “from the familiarity with nature in his poems that Frank could tell a brush hook from a handsaw.”
And Frank warmed to the task. “The job is money and outside,” he wrote to Alan Dugan, adding how he liked being in nature, seeing bobcats, sidestepping snakes, and running into eccentric backwoods locals. He also found the work conducive to a poetic mindset. Whitman had done such labor, after all. Stanford echoed this idea in a line from a poem in Arkansas Bench Stone: “Although I can’t prove it, / Most poets work for the highway dept” (What About This, p. 432).
Working with Frank was a memorable experience for Gwynn. The daily labor — much of it clearing and platting land for a Fayetteville suburb and sewer line — was more than anything else physically demanding. Frank loved this aspect of the job. His primary task was to keep taut the back end of the chain, moving it forward as the surveying team progressed. But he also took the lead when it came to clearing brush with machetes and bush axes. “He could work,” Gwynn recalled, “he could certainly brush.”
Frank got on well with his crew. “The guys I work with are good souls,” he wrote to Dugan in June of 1971, “they could give a shit that I was a writer.” Frank convinced them that he was, as he put it, “an Indian or something because every time I called [for bad weather] the rain has come.” He would court inclement weather, in one case a tornado, by “fucking around and dancing out in the woods.” This left him more time holed up in the truck writing poems. All in all, Frank was okay with employment: “My land surveying job,” he wrote Dugan in the Spring of 1971, “is v. good.”
Frank eventually got fired when he did not show up for a really important job. It turns out that he did not show up because Alan Dugan was visiting the University of Arkansas that weekend, in November 1970, and Frank had become Dugan’s favorite. So, it was probably a good choice on Frank’s part, as Dugan would become a lifelong friend, supporter, and pen pal. He was rehired by Don Kemp soon thereafter and worked for Kemp, on and off, with varying levels of commitment, for the rest of his life.

Neat hearing about a poet we love doing another kind of work. Please share more about that, but let’s take a look at the poem for a moment.

In terms of Stanford’s poem having poetic characteristics of a lament, I think tension rests between the lines here. I sense a feeling of life’s cruelty, fragility, or its hopelessness. The speaker says, “It’s hard to walk a straight line,” which jives with the land surveying Frank Stanford and the metaphor making Frank Stanford.

Tension seems apparent with the “forties of death and the no bearing/ acres of sadness” image that gets undercut by the “without death” phrase. The saying “forty-acres and a mule” comes to mind. That idiom, of course, has historical, racial, and political seeds sewn into it.

Actually, the whole fifth stanza exemplifies tension by way of its syntax and the order of its lines. For example, it could be interpreted as “I’ve dreamed a lot” about those “forty-acres of death” but “without [that] death” in them, as if Sherman’s 1865 forty-acres-order rooted. It’s an interesting part of the poem that offers a conciliatory turn, creates a shift, and takes us into a memory.

The speaker juxtaposes fallow land with “full gullies” and a “ridge where Sally’s grandmother/ is shearing roses,” an image readily associated with the sense of smell. Furthermore, the “f” sounds, from “flowers,” “floating,” and “foot” sonically usher in the poem’s final image and ending.

There’s a mixture of remembering and daydreaming here. The present tense seems to create some strain, especially since the grandmother “IS shearing roses,” but we are not actually in the present moment at this point in the poem. I think the sixth stanza takes us inside a daydream while the speaker continues working.

Time creates tension from the start. The end of November, a colder time of the year, is also the start of December. The notion of time is mixed up in the poem. It uses the “I’ve dreamed a lot” anaphora to braid daydream, memory, and the present moment. Other kinds of tension are present.

Financial pressures appear. The speaker works “without a shirt” or “a new pair of boots” and his father-in-law rides a “one-eyed tractor” home. Do the speaker, his wife, and the father-in-law share a home? Is Sally in the poem his wife? Is her grandmother dead or alive?

Was there tension with money and in Frank’s relationships in 1975?

Frank’s life after leaving high school was consistently marked by financial insecurity. He rarely complained about it and, it seemed, worked only as much as was necessary to write. By 1975 he might have been in slightly better shape financially than in the past — he had been working hard as surveyor, especially in the summer months; he had done some work as a fishing guide and overseeing canoe rentals around Beaver Lake; he and his second wife Ginny were growing a lot of their own food, or at least trying to, at their cabin in Rogers; and his inclination was always to tighten his belt before going out to find more work.
As with financial concerns, there was ever-present tension in his romantic relationships from 1969 on. Frank was a chronic philanderer and it often got him into terrific trouble with women. It led to the end of his first marriage with Linda Mencin after less than a year, and it more or less forced him to leave New York after he’d spent a month there in early fall 1972. He’d see as many as six or seven women at a time. That’s quite a juggling act!
By 1975, he was married to Ginny, but beginning an affair with C.D. Wright, and soon he was shuffling back and forth between the two. All the while he kept girlfriends, or whatever you want to call them, all over Northwest Arkansas, including Eureka Springs and Rogers. There was something sad and manic about his relationships with women. But he could also be very supportive of them, especially if they were artists.

Interesting, James. I want to hear more about his life, but that reminds me about the poem. Relationships play important parts in the poem at hand, too. The image of the grandmother shearing roses carries the expression to a memory. To me, the memory gives an impression that the poem’s speaker’s biological father already passed away. The word “reminds” conjures up the image of hair falling; specifically, a father cutting his son’s hair.

Hair, just the idea or a specific image of it, can create strong emotions. I’m thinking of a spot in Lorca’s lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende” where he says that “a lock of hair on the forehead [can] provoke a whole tragedy.” Stanford’s lament ends with a memory of his father and the senses awakened by that memory. The speaker smells “his [father’s] jacket” and he sees “his straight razor” as he gets a short haircut.

The speaker in the poem notices his “father’s boots.” It reminds me of Stanford’s little lyric poem “Narcissus to Achilles.” Maybe the speaker’s memory of his father and the haircut comforts the speaker in this lamentation. Maybe that’s something the speaker can share with the addressee in a poem, something the poet may not have shared otherwise. He elegizes his dad here.

So much adds to the tension in “Lament of the Land Surveyor.” Is the speaker working shirtless as the work day ends in November; is it getting dark outside, I wonder. I think the word “cornerstones” brings memories into the poem by way of association, connotation, and implication. This poem’s language comes together and creates a narrative steeped in present, past, reality, and memory or dream, all in one breadth.

Will you speak more to the tension in Frank’s life when he worked as a surveyor, specifically, or do any more stories about that job come to mind?

While he generally enjoyed the work, surveying was always a source of tension for Stanford because he had to balance it with his writing. Writing always came first for Frank and, in his correspondence, he often complained about having to work ten to twelve hours a day when he’d rather have been writing — “It’s hard to walk a straight line.” Towards the end of his life, when he was running Lost Roads Press, he would convince his friends to go and do some of the more basic surveying for him. Debbie Luster, for example, remembers filling in for Frank even though she had no clue what she was doing. Plus she was terrified of snakes. When he was working regularly, Frank was prone to odd behavior at work. Sam Gwynn recalls once finding him in a trance, as if he had been hypnotized, and on another occasion witnessing him engage in an outburst where he ran around chopping the heads off of flowers and declaring his superiority. But, again, the idea of making a living mattered to him, both in terms of money and pride. His father was a model in this regard. As a levee engineer Albert Franklin Stanford provided his family with a steady foundation. He took pride in his work and worked very hard. He commanded respect. This respect is evident throughout The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (the Battlefield). Could “hair / Falling on my own father’s boots” be a nod in this direction? Seems so.

That brings me to the dramatics in the poem. The ties between the speaker, the characters, and the addressee seem compelling. We have an in-law, Sally, grandma, and the actual father who cut the speaker’s hair. I’m not sure what the family dynamic here is exactly and if the speaker laments his dependance on his wife’s family, or whatever it is. I’m guessing the poem’s addressee could be a friend, someone like Bill Willett.

Will you please share what you have found out about Frank’s relationship with his in-laws in his first marriage and his second marriage? Any stories you’d like to share about his marriages to Linda or Ginny? If I’m not mistaken, he communicated with C.D. Wright’s folks, specifically her father, right?

Frank seemed to get along well with Linda’s parents. They were well off, her father had been in the military, but they were still supportive of their daughter taking up with an underemployed poet with no prospects of a conventionally successful future. Frank was, when he wanted to be, a likeable guy who could socialize with the best of extroverts, and he did this well with Linda’s parents. This ability assuredly comes from his upbringing in a wealthy Memphis social scene with various acceptable role models (consider the role of the “astronomer” in the Battlefield, a professor who is always encouraging Francis to be the paragon of decorum). He cared enough about his relationship with Linda’s parents that he was pretty upset when, after they split, they came to get Linda’s stuff and said something to the effect of how low he had sunk due to alcohol and womanizing. I don’t think Frank had much interaction with Ginny’s parents, but, yes, he worked closely on a few occasions with C.D.’s father, who was a judge in Harrison, Arkansas. Basically, Ernie Wright sent some surveying business in Frank’s direction. He screwed a few of these jobs up — he was never licensed as a surveyor — but no hard feelings followed.
Frank’s idea of reality was perpetually in flux. This is how he wanted it. He consciously worked to see the world through altered states. As a kid, he explored with his friend Bill Willett astral projection and seances. Later he allowed himself to fall into trance-like states, often through forced sleep deprivation, in order to write. He may have sensed that if you knew you were writing a poem it would be a shitty poem, so he tried to find a frame of mind that allowed him to write without being totally self-aware that he was writing. Alcohol would serve his purposes in this way as well. He was, with a few exceptions, always a heavy drinker. He seemed to be a happy drunk, too.
Film appealed to him because of the way it could displace reality and be more real than the world under your nose. He was often called surrealist but he bristled at this term a bit. If you were looking at the world through the proper lens, the surreal was real, maybe more real, than conventional notions of reality. Film reiterated this.

Image of Frank Stanford with black cat — Frank Stanford photo from archive at Beinecke Library

Laments tend to use nature in a mournful way. A black cat appears in the “Lament of the Land Surveyor.” We have seen one photographed with Frank before. The cat in this poem is “dying at the foot of [the speaker’s] bed” in a dream.

I remember visiting the Post family home with Fr. Nick and the matriarch saying that Mrs. Stanford, Frank’s mom, kept Shar Peis at one point. Have you found anything out about his relationship with animals?

Frank’s mother lived on a farm in Greenville that she called Green Acres when she adopted Frank. Expansive and bucolic, Green Acres was a fit place to care for a child. After Frank was born, she raised collies, rabbits, and chickens, turning the farm, where Frank would live until he was 3, into something like a petting zoo. When Frank started to talk, which he did before he was a year old, Dorothy recalled how “he’d want to know about the birds and the trees and animals.” That’s primarily what he saw every day. It’s no surprise that he identified with his namesake, St. Francis.
Frank was never in a position to care for a pet until he and his second wife Ginny moved into a house in Rogers, Arkansas in the Fall of 1973. They established a kind of stable domestic routine, something that was new for Frank. One day, they both came home with cats that they had adopted.
But Frank was likely more fascinated with wild animals. Fish. He loved fishing and spent his summers during middle/high school working as a fishing guide on Lake Norfork. He was a superb angler, winning competitions against adults as a twelve-year-old. As a surveyor he reveled in seeing wild animals, including snakes, foxes, and wildcats in rural Arkansas.
Frank was wild and he loved the wilderness.

In the end of “Lament of the Land Surveyor” the speaker is, presumably, still working or walking. The closing image implies that the speaker is coming out of the memory. The transition is like a match cut. The lamp’s glow bouncing off the razor is not the thing itself; it’s a reflection. The closing image seems to hover between dimensions: a reflection in a window, an image from a memory, the image we read at the end of the poem. The speaker and us readers are twice removed from the thing itself when considering that closing image, a “glowing in the window.” Memory mixes with the present moment. The lines drawn by time get blurred. Has the speaker made it back home in the end, I ask myself.

Stanford’s poem seems like a lament if I think about it in terms of its form (the arc of certain images or gestures and how they develop). The format (or surface arrangement) is interesting without punctuation and how the enjambment works in the stanzas. The sense of discovery in the poem seems original. It’s not as effusive as the Propertius example, but I can see why Stanford called this a lament. The poem’s anguish seems more muted like in Glück’s poem. Like the Jackson poem, Frank uses the moon, a waning crescent moon. All four poets, Sextus Propertius, Frank Stanford, Louise Glück, and Richard Jackson include nature in their laments, as if nature speaks through them, though Propertius uses more mythology in his elegy while Glück, Jackson, and Stanford go to nature more so because that is what we see; that is what we experience.

Nature is timeless. There is some comfort knowing the natural world continues living on with other people who were alive with us after we pass. And at a very young age, even as young as a toddler, a person can notice and point to something as high up, magical, and enduring as the moon.

We have seen Stanford’s poems mix reality, dream states, and memories. It’s jarring, because you lose sight of what is real and what is myth. I do not always think the speaker in his poems is actually Frank. That way, his poems create opportunities for tension, irony, contradictions, double-perspectives, doubts, et cetera, allowing him to say things he might not have said any other way. You can lose yourself in his imagination.

What is your take on Frank’s mental health, since he seemed to wrestle many notions, some of which might seem conflicting on the surface — writing poetry and surveying land, being into art like literature or film but being a macho guy, too, or the idea he was a blue-blood-southerner and then the news he was adopted, his boarding school education and his affiliation with a university he stopped attending, and what did he think about dreaming?

Was he into dreaming and tripping out, stuff like that? Why is Frank Stanford writing a lament in this time of his life, when he would have been twenty-seven-years old, or what do you suppose comforted him during difficult times in 1975?

I don’t want to overstate or romanticize this idea, but I think Frank was, in whatever form, a genius. And geniuses tend not to exist easily with the world. So, in a way, Frank was always living something of a lament. Adding to his angst is that, while a genius, he was not aloof from the feelings of others. He felt guilt because when he was following his muse he hurt others. I’m armchair psychoanalyzing here, but I think he was incapable of existing in conventional reality while also burdened with enough social awareness and residual empathy to know what that incapability did to others. In this respect, he surveyed landscapes that he knew as intimately as anyone, but he could not live in them. Who would not lament that?
Today, Stanford would almost certainly be treated for manic depression. And this raises that huge dilemma. It’s plausible that such treatment would have blunted the fire that inspired his poetry and allowed him to stay alive. But then we would not have this poem, much less the larger corpus of his work, including the Battlefield. I have no answer to that conundrum.
1975 was a tough and transitional year in many ways for Frank. He was burned out a bit on writing. He had been writing manically for years — poems, stories, screenplays and of course the Battlefield. He had a lot to show for it — widely published and a handful of books under his belt. But he started to feel like his work was formulaic. A few editors did as well. He tried to hit the big commercial target in that year and got nowhere but jerked around by Gordon Lish at Esquire. At one point he was throwing darts in the dark, with Lish’s encouragement, sending in a story a month. No bullseye was hit. He could hardly get people to read the Battlefield, much less publish it. So, this all weighed on him that year. Through it all he was surveying. He was, in short, exhausted.
Plus he was living two lives. One with C.D. Wright. The other with Ginny. It must have been hard to sustain psychologically. I imagine he started Lost Roads in part to have something stable and concrete he could focus on. He and C.D. conceived of the idea in 1975.

1966 yearbook photo of Frank Stanford — 1966 yearbook photo

Frank Stanford’s Lament and Some of His Biography with James McWilliams

Written by Ata Moharreri