A decade in the making, James McWilliams's The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford is itself an epic worthy of its subject, the cult author of 15,283-line epic poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. In its starred review, PW called McWilliams’s 652-page biography, published this month by the University of Arkansas Press, “a page turner” that "does a remarkable job connecting Stanford's poetry with his personal life” and renders Stanford's dramatic final years "in spellbinding detail."
McWilliams is author of several books, primarily about agricultural history, is also coediting with A.P. Walton a new, revised edition of The Battlefield, for publication by Arkansas next year. He spoke to PW about why the Stanford is worthy of wider recognition.
When you're describing this book to people at dinner parties, how do you explain it without making non–poetry lovers' eyes glaze over?
With someone like Stanford, you begin with the life rather than the poetry—because Stanford lived a mythical existence. Here was someone living hard and fast, becoming a poet through a process that was bombastic, dramatic, and utterly intense. That kind of life story can capture readers immediately. Then you can say, "Look, he actually wrote poetry that matched that intensity. This wasn't academic verse—it was poetry that came from deep within."
Readers who discover Stanford are often people who don't regularly read poetry. They might appreciate the South or Southern literature, but when they encounter Stanford, they think, "Wait—here's poetry I can actually connect with."
What was the context in which Stanford was writing? How did that feed into what he was producing?
Stanford drew from romantic poets like Byron and Keats—two major influences—but he also wove global voices into his distinctly Southern poetry. He was an enormous fan of avant-garde film, particularly French cinema from the '60s, so figures like Jean Cocteau appear throughout his work. He admired Yukio Mishima from Japan and incorporated diverse cultural references into this deeply Southern foundation.
His work was rooted in the South the way Faulkner's was—Faulkner was his major idol—but Stanford ventured far beyond that "postage stamp of soil" Faulkner inhabited. He brought in Norse mythology, Japanese Bushido, and other distant traditions while maintaining his Southern core. It was like he was bringing the world to the South.
Stanford was also deeply connected to Arkansas's landscape through his work as a surveyor. He composed much of his poetry in detached, rural areas of the state, and you can trace surveying language throughout his poetry. He published a whole collection called Arkansas Bench Stone and speculated that a surveyor's work—drawing lines across terrain—resembled poetry itself. He embraced these analogies and valued his surveying precisely because of its poetic possibilities.
People romanticize him as someone who would just sit down and let a poem explode from his mind before moving on to the next one. The reality was that he much more methodical. He was a craftsman, and I want people to appreciate the workmanlike approach he brought to poetry that so often feels explosive and feral.
Stanford isn't widely anthologized. What's your argument for his canonization?
There are several compelling reasons. First, he produced a lifetime of high-quality poetry in just six years. But more importantly, consider how poets have responded to his work over the decades. Stanford has been praised by John Berryman, Richard Howard, Nikki Finney, Eileen Myles, and Terrance Hayes. If you look at that list, these are poets working in radically different traditions, writing completely different kinds of poetry with vastly different poetics—yet they all find something in Stanford worth deeply admiring. That suggests a universality to his poetics that transcends stylistic boundaries.
The third reason involves the circumstances of his publishing. Stanford didn't work with well-known, recognizable presses. He published with Mill Mountain Press, run by his friend Irv Broughton on a shoestring budget. The press essentially existed to publish Frank Stanford, but it had no name recognition and virtually no distribution. His books were printed by a semi-literate hillbilly who lived off the grid in some holler in Arkansas. This was all by choice—Stanford had opportunities to move to larger venues but deliberately avoided them. He held a somewhat romanticized belief that commercializing his work would diminish its quality, and he never wanted to lose creative control. And he didn’t. But as a result, when he died, so did his work.
You're also coediting a new edition of Stanford's magnum opus. Can you tell us about that project?
Stanford's magnum opus was The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You—a poem of over 15,000 lines with no punctuation, where the first line is also the last line. It was published in 1978 after his death in an edition of 1,500 copies, but 500 were destroyed in a flood. If you want an original copy today, you're looking at two to three thousand dollars.
Lost Roads Press released a second edition in 2000, but that went out of print a year ago. Now copies on Amazon run about a hundred dollars. We're working with University of Arkansas Press on the third edition of The Battlefield, and it's proven to be a much larger project than we anticipated. We've compared the original typescript to both previous editions and discovered over a thousand errors that needed correction. Beyond that, we found 200 lines that never made it into the published poem.
This isn't simply a reprint—it's a new, corrected edition. We're including an introduction and plot summaries to help readers navigate this epic work.
What was your experience working with University of Arkansas Press?
Arkansas was the natural choice because Stanford spent much of his adult life in Fayetteville, where he's still a legend. Walk into Dickson Street Books and you'll find a case of rare books with plenty of Stanford titles. Anyone in the literature program or MFA program knows the Stanford legend. When I pitched the project, the editor told me, "I've been waiting 10 years for this book."
Because it's a small press, I developed personal relationships with everyone there and was actively included in every phase of the decision-making process. My input mattered on things like the book's cover design. I've published with commercial presses before where you simply get an email saying, "Here's your cover—hope you like it." This time, I got to play a legitimate role in the process of creating the book, which felt incredibly rewarding.
What were the challenges of researching a biography in the digital age?
I started with two mistaken assumptions. First, that because he only lived 29 years, it would be a shorter biography. Second, that since Yale has his archive, this would be a straightforward archival project. I was profoundly wrong on both counts—just because someone lives a short life doesn't mean you write a short biography.
Frank Stanford died in 1978 at 29, so his contemporaries are still around. Tracking them down was sometimes straightforward, but usually not. I had to subscribe to White Pages and other databases to find people's addresses. I ended up interviewing over 200 people, essentially building my own archive of oral history around Stanford.
Then I realized that family members might have papers, along with Irv Broughton, who has a vast collection. Frank's niece had his sister's papers sitting in boxes in her garage in Dallas. The bottom line is that I collected fragments of this archive from all over the country, compiled it as best I could, and wrote the book. But, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't a research library anywhere that wants to complete a comprehensive Frank Stanford collection, so I still have all this material that deserves a home.
Is there anything people get wrong about Stanford that you want to correct?
Anyone who knows Stanford will usually tell you about his death before his life. He committed suicide that, even by the standards of suicides, was incredibly dramatic—it happened after a fight with his wife and his lover, both of whom were in the house when he walked into a bedroom and shot himself three times in the chest with a .22 revolver.
More than anything, I'm trying to draw attention away from that death and toward the richness of the life itself. There's a line in a Jack Gilbert poem that says, "People forget that Icarus also flew." We think of Icarus face-down in the water, but we should remember he soared.
