Frank Stanford photo — Frank Stanford Photo from Beinecke Library YCALL MSS 1086 Box 12 Photographs 1975–1977

Three Takes on One of Frank Stanford’s Poems

7 min readAug 1, 2023

Frank Stanford was born August 1, 1948. I asked a couple folks currently working on Stanford related material to share their thoughts on his poem, “Narcissus to Achilles.” James McWilliams is working on the first Frank Stanford biography and A.P. Walton is editing a forthcoming book of Stanford’s letters. The University of Arkansas Press will publish the biography and the letters. Our thoughts on the poem are below.

Narcissus to Achilles

Yesterday, I passed over a bridge
and saw a boot underwater.
Such thoughts I had,
I cannot tell you.

James McWilliams’s perspective:

“The short poem is the hardest of all forms, past or present . . . They seldom work.” Frank Stanford wrote these words to his friend and Ironwood editor Michael Cuddihy in 1974. This assessment did not stop Frank from writing, by his own account, thousands of short poems. His versatility within the genre astounds.

Some short poems begin and end like a bullet from the chamber:

Baby one night somebody
Going to strike a match on a tombstone
And read your name.

Others are whimsical:

I quivered down the river
in my uncle’s boat Lucky
someone saw me land a good one
telling me Why don’t you
go to hell

Many are breathtaking:

some owls leave midnight is close at hand

Yet others narratively tantalizing:

Father I wish to make a confession.
Last night at the dance

“Narcissus to Achilles” strikes me as falling into the last category. But in this case, it’s not that the narrator won’t tell us the mystery. It’s that he “cannot.” It’s an important distinction.

Stanford went for broke in his poems. But that could come at a cost: raging away in a heroic vein entails the risk of being misunderstood. In his private correspondence Frank often noted this frustration. He grated, for example, against the “surreal” designation that critics imposed on him. He saw this label as a lazy cop out, or at least a tacit admission that such critics were sheltered from the rural carnival central to Frank’s personal and poetic experience as a son of the South.

He also knew that such a misunderstanding opened one to being molded into someone else’s myth. This observation brings us to the poem’s title. Narcissus crosses a bridge and sees a boot under the water. He wants to share his thoughts about it with Achilles. It seems safe to assume that Frank identified here with Narcissus. And avid readers of his poetry know full well that no poet could do more with a boot in a creek than Frank Stanford. But if his thoughts and intentions cannot be conveyed — if the wind blows over the water or the battle goes sideways — he finds himself at the mercy of others; he has lost control. Narcissus and Achilles would surely have understood.

It’s often said that Stanford was a self-mythologizer. I wonder about this. For one, most people in their mid-twenties are by nature self-mythologizing; it’s called figuring out who you are. But, more so, after many years exploring his life, I am struck by the discrepancy between the fearlessly authentic poet I study and what others needed him to be. Frank tried, and tried harder than you can imagine. But in the end, he could not tell us. The myth, or something, got in the way. But the poems are still there. They are still asking us to remove our armor, and look closely, more closely, and possibly see something besides our own reflection.

A.P. Walton’s perspective:

For a little poem, Frank Stanford’s “Narcissus to Achilles” packs a taut left-right punch, maximizing impact. At four lines and nineteen words, it is the briefest poem in The Singing Knives, Stanford’s first book. Stanford wrote the poem either in the late 1960s or in 1970, the year he last attended the University of Arkansas. In late March 1971, he submitted it to Eleanor Bender for consideration in her poetry-only magazine, Open Places, which she was running out of Stephens College; Bender accepted the poem a month later and published it and three other Stanford poems in January 1972. On probably the very day that Stanford received word of Bender’s acceptance of the poem for publication, April 27, 1971, he enclosed the poem, alongside others, with his first (surviving) letter to Alan Dugan. Dugan replied in May that the poem was learned but nonetheless very beautiful.

Stanford was fascinated with Greek mythology and its gods and flawed heroes. In his June 1971 follow-up letter to Dugan, Stanford noted that his adoptive father — a levee engineer 64 years his senior who died the month Stanford turned 15 — had taught him some humanities and social sciences, including elementary philosophy, and Stanford later took courses on mythology and Greek philosophy at Arkansas as well. He feared being an egocentric poet, so he probably identified with Narcissus, a figure of beauty peering down to glimpse his reflection, only to see a shoe (or boot, through the Stanfordian mill) like one that could’ve fallen off of Achilles’s “heel” and into the water when his mother submerged him for immortality. Some watery reflectiveness then follows, as Narcissus is realizing his own weakness (seeking out his reflection), and the bridge is at least allegorically overpassing Styx; since the poem’s wayfarer is its speaker, it is as though the poet, himself, is narrowly escaping, while nonetheless peering into, the underworld. From there, the interlocution, or perhaps correspondence, between the two heroes could well have ensued.

My take on the poem:

Students have asked me about this short lyric poem many times. They like it. The poem’s title clearly suggests a speaker, Narcissus, and an addressee, Achilles. Having an addressee raises the stakes of the expression. Both mythological characters have become household names through the ages. The poem unfolds in past tense and so it seems positioned as a memory. The word “yesterday” grounds the reader in time. The poem travels from there.

Stanford’s poem reminds me of a Japanese tanka, but his poem is missing a line. It’s more like a haiku in terms of its gesture. I recently heard the poet D.A. Powell mention that poems often explicitly point to specific images while expressing ideas not visibly present in them. The same movement that Powell mentioned happens in Stanford’s little lyric.

The title creates the poem’s drama by setting up a kind of epistolary between friends. The first two lines establish time and place. Narcissus walks over a bridge, and he looks into the water. He does not notice his reflection; he notices one boot. Also, those first two lines establish the poem’s tension by juxtaposing “over a bridge” and “underwater.” The tension invoked by time passing works nicely, because the underwater-image from “yesterday” continues playing in the speaker’s mind. In other words, he’s still thinking about what he saw and what he felt. The important thing for Narcissus is not the boot, per se, but the unspeakable thoughts that the image conjures in his mind. Visually, the poem looks simple enough but it does complicated emotional work. It’s original and evocative, a kind of American Haiku using Greek mythology. The speaker leaves Achilles (and readers) on an emotional cliff, because he did not share what he was thinking. The poem becomes about Narcissus’s unspeakable thoughts.

I love that we have a writer who isn’t academically inclined using Greek mythology. From my understanding, Stanford did not give a damn about academia. He wrote poetry in his own down-to-earth yet smart way.

For readers, the connection with Narcissus staring into water naturally comes to mind, but, instead of falling in love with his own image, we learn more about his inner life in this poem. In early renditions of the Narcissus myth, he commits suicide. The end of Frank Stanford’s life inevitably comes to mind whenever I read this poem.

Just as water triggers the Narcissus myth, so does the boot as it relates to the myth of Achilles, his heel as a point of weakness. In the end, it’s ambiguous whether Achilles is alive or not and it is ambiguous why Narcissus is unable to share his thoughts with him, but that’s exactly what the poem wants to do — put us in Narcissus’s troubled frame of mind.

For me, revealing some hidden meaning in the poem is less important than how the poem works to keep me engaged, especially the feeling of wanting to talk to a friend but being unable to do that. Regardless of one’s take on it, “Narcissus to Achilles” stimulates our collective imagination. I like that. Having Frank Stanford’s biography and a collection of his letters will deepen our understanding of this poem and many others.

Three Takes on One of Frank Stanford’s Poems

Written by Ata Moharreri