Frank Stanford’s “Lighted Room,” and Some Answers to Some Questions about His Life
Lighted Room
I’m going to cut me some ham
And wait for death to lace his boots.
The old bushwhacker has seven wives,
Two trucks with good tires,
One with a flatbed for hauling.
In the morning there were soda crackers
Gone from my cabinets, crumbs
On my table, and mud on the floor.
That pint on my radio
With the painting on the bottle,
He took a deep swig.
My dogs sleep with me in the cold.
They look up in the sky like me.
Like a boat with no eyes for the oars.
It doesn’t matter what they say.
If you see one glove on the side of the road
You might as well pick it up.
Nothing is going right these days
Except that lowdown
You know who I mean.
And he’s moving right fast.
(What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, Copper Canyon Press 2015)
Many readers will recall Emily Dickinson’s poem that starts with “because I could not stop for Death” when they think of death as a theme in poetry. Stanford used her words, “I started Early — Took my Dog — And visited the Sea,” for an epigraph to his book Arkansas Bench Stone (Mill Mountain Press 1975). The Dickinson epigraph faces a beautifully imagined portrait by Ginny Stanford.
The language and the expression of thought in “Lighted Room” work well together. The poem is accessible; pretty much anyone could read it. “I’m going to cut me some ham,” for example, humanizes the voice and places the poem, immediately. Right after that first line death is personified. Also, the speaker shares a kind of tension he feels because he has to wait for his housemate: the speaker “wait[s] for death to lace his boots.” It seems as if Death could be the speaker’s roommate, and he’s not a good one either. The poem’s last paragraph begins with a simple expression, that “nothing is going right these days,” and it amplifies the speaker’s anxiety. All through the poem, and notably at the end of it, one of the characters, Death, seems to get along pretty good no matter what.
Stanford used twenty-one lines, arranged into seven paragraphs, to personify death as a roomie (from hell). Death, who owns two trucks, eats his roommate’s “soda crackers” and drinks his roommate’s alcohol, is referred to as a “bushwhacker,” a hillbilly, which gets juxtaposed with a Biblical reference. Maybe the poem’s speaker wanted to eat that hunk of ham with those crackers. Is that why he goes out “in the cold” and sleeps with his dogs, because Death can be such an asshole?
The speaker addresses us in line sixteen, and it seems haunting because, though the deadly roommate is not mentioned, we can assume he was on the side of the road earlier, taking a life. That move, evoking what is not there, reminds me Stanford’s little poem “Narcissus to Achilles.”
While I prefer studying a poem on its own at first, without reflecting much on who wrote it, I am curious to learn more about the poet in this case. The author James McWilliams, with whom I have spoken before, finished writing, after several years, the first Frank Stanford biography. He was gracious enough to answer more questions.
You can read Frank Stanford’s biography when it comes out with Univ. of Arkansas Press in 2025.
James, I want to ask your take on Stanford’s relationship to death. Do you by chance have an idea when he might’ve written “Lighted Room”? How soon did he confront death in his real life?
Stanford was fascinated not only with death, but with highly theatrical, performative deaths. He became obsessed, for example, with the suicides of Yukio Mishima and Sergei Yesenin, writers whose legacies are known as much for their dramatic manner of death as their body of literary work. One might say that Frank thought a death should reflect the life — that one should die in a way consistent with how they lived (an idea that Montaigne also espoused). On a more local level, in 1972 a former roommate of Frank’s — a physics major — killed himself through a mechanism involving a bed and a cinderblock that only a physics major could devise. Frank was deeply intrigued and evidently wrote a 200-page eulogy for the kid that he buried. I realize this is all very dark, but Frank was comfortable with darkness.
As for the poem, my guess is that he wrote it after 1974. That was the year he worked on “Death and the Arkansas River,” a poem that, in my assessment, marked a shift in Frank’s work towards a sustained focus on death. Lorenzo Thomas called Stanford “the poet of death,” and I do not dispute that characterization. But it applies mostly to the years 1974–1978, and the poems that appeared in Crib Death, You, Constant Stranger.
Death as a character becomes more and more prevalent but it has always been present, and even relevant, in the poems. What have you learned about Stanford’s character? I never heard about him being morbid or obsessed with mortality. How do you reckon such images and ideas about death in Stanford’s poetry as they relate to his real life? Was he into anything that gives you the idea that he thought a lot about dying?
Let’s go back to “Death and the Arkansas River.” In it, as you suggest, Death is a character. He is a character who “dances a slow boogie,” “is one for fooling around,” and “can afford whatever he wants.” Death has a shine on his shoes and his poll tax paid. Read the poem a certain way, and you do not find a tone of morbidity, but rather a sense of playfulness in the face of death. While many of the poems in Crib Death do tend toward a visceral darkness, many others kind of shadow box with and taunt death, as would Muhammed Ali, an idol of Frank’s. Stanford’s character was as complex as anyone’s, and I make no claim to understand it beyond what he chose to share about it, but as the tonal range of his response to death suggests, he was malleable and shape shifting, maybe in a way that other great poets of Death — Emily Dickinson for example — were not. A couple more thoughts I can share. “Death on the Arkansas River” is based on the real death of a high school kid in the summer of 1974. The kid drowned in Lake Dardanelle. Frank actually helped look for the body. Frank’s mentor Father Fuhrmann remembers him being downright distraught over the tragic accident. On the other hand, when his former roommate killed himself, Frank did not seem nearly as emotionally undone by the event, but more curious and intrigued. I wonder, and this is just speculation, if Frank found accidental death to be more emotionally affecting than suicide. Perhaps, to get back to your question, this says something deeply significant about his character, particularly the need for control.
Can you speak about the days before he committed suicide? What have you learned about his last days? An editor once showed me a poem Frank wrote, supposedly right before he died. The poem was the word “death” over and over in the shape of an hourglass on yellow notebook paper with blue lines. Was there a suicide note?
There were, in a way, three suicide notes, and they inform the last chapter of my book, which details the last two weeks of Frank’s life on a nearly day by day basis. Let me just hit what I think are the main takeaways from those two weeks, all spent in New Orleans. First, Ginny Stanford and CD Wright let Frank know just two days after he arrived in New Orleans that the double life he’d been living for almost three years was exposed, and that he could expect to come back to Fayetteville to a firestorm of anger and retribution. Second, Frank, who had been trying to find ways to reconcile his love triangle and openly love both women, and maybe have those women love each other — today it’d be called a “throuple” — threw that quixotic ambition aside and wrote his suicide notes on white and yellow legal pads. Third, for the next twelve days, he felt as liberated and alive as he’d ever been. Even his friends were noting how happy he seemed. He went to see music all over the city, visited bookstores, and rode the streetcar up and down St. Charles alone at night. He also reconnected with a lover who was very much a kind of soulmate of Frank’s — a photographer named Kay DuVernet — and spent many hours with her, including his last night on Earth. She drove him to the airport to go home on June 3, 1978 and it was on the plane where I think he wrote that last poem, but I cannot be sure.
Thinking about driving, did he own a car? Did he have dogs?
Stanford as an adult never had dogs, but as a little kid his mother raised keeshond hounds on their farm in Greenville. He and Ginny had cats, two of them, and Frank named the cats Arletty and Deburau, characters in “one of Frank’s favorite films,” Jacques Prevert’s Children of Paradise. Ginny kind of lived in fear of them getting run over, even though they lived in a rural area.
Frank did own cars. In 1968, he had a Corvair that his mother bought for his sister. Frank had worked that summer at a Chevy plant in St. Louis and was able to get a discount on a Camaro. But Ruth preferred the Camaro so Frank traded it for her Corvair. He soon sold it because he needed the cash. He got a very cheap VW Bug, green. When the Bug died in 1973, he valued it at $40.00. He then got a 412 VW Wagon and, in 1977, a white Datsun pickup truck, mainly to carry his surveying equipment.
The word “truck” brings me back to “Lighted Room.” Why do you think Frank was able to write about death this way, as if Death is a person he lived with or who crashed at this place time to time?
This is a reach of an answer, but I wonder if his ability to personify death had something to do with the many abortions that Frank’s lovers had. Frank paid for these abortions, and definitively wanted these abortions to happen, but he dwelled on the children that might have been born. He even named them. If he had a daughter she would have been called Avalon. In early 1973, he spent a week with a woman from Scotland touring the South and when Frank put her on a boat in New Orleans, never to see her again, he was fairly certain she was pregnant. Dead children in coffins appear often in his work, and of course there is the monk rowing the small coffin to shore in Frank’s film It WASN’T A DREAM: IT WAS A FLOOD. Towards the end of his life Frank was asked why he had no children, and he said, “I’m lucky, I guess,” but I think the abortions weighed on him especially hard near the end of his life (again, think Crib Death). So, to try and make sense of your question, maybe he could so easily personify death because the abortions led him to think of the children as both unborn (dead) and alive at once. But again, this is all speculation and armchair hypothesizing.
Fair enough. Stanford mentions a radio in the “Lighted Room.” I recall radio stations referenced in The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (The Battlefield). Can you tell us about the music that Frank listened to? Was he into any particular kinds of music or artists at the end of his life?
Stanford musical tastes were broad, as was his overall cultural curiosity, but, when the needle hit the vinyl, it was usually jazz and blues that poured forth. His record collection was of almost all Black artists. Frank loved music. The radio station mentioned in The Battlefield is WDIA, the first all-Black DJ radio station in Memphis, where Frank spent much of his childhood. Stanford reiterates the racialized nature of Memphis’s music scene in the specific attention he pays WDIA in The Battlefield. In Frank’s Memphis, fewer institutions encouraged more crossover experiences than this historically notable station. “When I first started at WDIA,” recalled the great Beale Street bluesman Rufus Thomas, “no Black voice had ever been on radio. Everything was white.” WDIA changed that. Near the end of his life, he was listening to less jazz and blues and more Mahler, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi. This may have had something to do with the shift in Frank’s cultural attention to European film, but, really, he always stayed open to all kinds of music.
Let’s do one more. Like Emily Dickinson, Stanford wrote a lot about death and personified it. I know artists inspire each other. Would you please tell me your take Frank Stanford’s relationship with Emily Dickinson? Does he seem moved by her?
Frank read Emily Dickinson from a young age at the encouragement of his mother, Dorothy. Dorothy’s taste in poetry was provincial — she thought poetry had to rhyme to be worthwhile. But her decision to expose a young Frank to Emily Dickinson may have been an attempt to show him how a poet could blend modernism and rhyme, thus embracing tradition and experiment at once. In any case, yes, I think Frank owed something to Dickinson, especially when it comes to the sharp bits of death imagery that inflect so many of Stanford’s shorter poems. That said, Frank generally resisted openly declaring the impact that specific poets had on his own poetry. Perhaps this was part ego, part genuine faith in his sui generis originality, but he highly valued his faith in a muse that came entirely from within.
To circle back, a connection between Frank Stanford and Emily Dickinson seems apparent. Death speaks in their poems. Amusingly, Emily was so reclusive and Frank was such a wanderer. There’s also a case to be made that another poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, shares a link to Dickinson and Stanford when it comes to death as a theme in poetry. One of the first Stanford photos I saw showed him reading Three Tragedies by Lorca (New Directions 1938). It’s that bucolic porch picture many people who search for Frank Stanford have seen:
One of a poet’s duties is to talk about topics often left unspoken, including death and what happens after it. They are explorers who venture into the unknown, or the caves we are afraid to enter. Poets, no matter how short or long their lives, use their insights and sensitivities, often gained by experiencing immense loneliness and a kind of never ending restlessness, to express themselves with language, which is ultimately as restless as they are. Poets have to be brave. Their spirits, because they go into the unknown, sometimes as if summoned, sometimes going through hell, into hideous places, alone, seek magical combinations of words that have usefulness beyond their own desires. It astounds us to the core, how beautiful and strange, and usually gut-wrenching in the end, that poets, or any adventurers, go into nameless places; they allow themselves to enter terrifyingly unfamiliar spaces. Going beyond their own memories and longings, poets build their poetry paths through their inner-worlds, brick by brick, word by word, in total darkness. It’s amazing anyone manages to do it at all.
Frank Stanford had a compulsion to write poems. It became his destiny. It took gall and a certain kind of courage. With difficult things going on his life, I am amazed that he wrote as much as he did.
Some people think poets just sit down and write a great poem. It doesn’t work like that. Addressing uncomfortable ideas takes work. This reminds me of another poet who was a close reader of Frank Stanford’s poetry, Franz Wright. He was a poet who understood he had to spend time with difficult topics so he could hash them out with his words, especially when it came to a topic like death. Responding to a question about his lonely work and serious discipline I had, he replied, “I think it was in high school when I said to myself, ‘if something takes them an hour, I will put in ten.’ I don’t care what I have to do [to write poetry]. I’m going to kick everyone’s ass. Isn’t that nice? Don’t you wish you had a little voice like that inside you? I don’t think it has ever left me, right to this day. I don’t know what to do with it. It grows quieter, less desperate, certainly, as I get older.” The voices in Frank Stanfords poems are frozen in time. He died young. Clearly, he worked a lot; he put his 10,000-hours into poetry and became proficient with writing while living his life. That’s a considerable feat in itself.
Reading “Lighted Room” and learning a little more about the poet’s life reminds me of poetry’s utility as it relates to our ever-changing, mysterious, breathtaking lives — how lucky are we to have poetry and each other as we grow older.
Related Links:
Frank Stanford and the Movies with James McWilliams
Frank Stanford Translated into Italian and a Conversation with the Translator
Three Takes On One of Frank Stanford’s Poems (with A.P. Walton and James McWilliams)
Frank Stanford’s Lament and Some of His Biography with James McWilliams
Frank Stanford’s “Tapsticks,” a Conversation with James McWilliams
My Answer to a Student Who Asked About Frank Stanford’s Titles
Smoking Grapevine: Outline and Concordance for The Battlefield
Conversation About The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 1
Conversation About The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 2
Frank Stanford’s The Battle Field Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 1
Frank Stanford’s The Battle Field Where The Moon Says I Love You Pt. 2
Frank Stanford: In His Own Words
Frank Stanford: In Leenus Orth’s Words
The Art Of Imitation In Poetry Between Pablo Neruda & Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford Chapbook Assignment
