**
Few poets I’ve ever read can match the manic energy of Frank Stanford. Or his ventriloquism. Stanford could inhabit anybody.
I reach for Stanford when I need a thwack on the head. You know what I mean? When I need to be reminded that the world is overhuge with possibility. That all I have to do is open the window and look down into the alley behind the Gates-Briggs Building in White River and watch the cooks as they smoke and laugh. That vitality’s everywhere. Just get the hell out of my own head and watch, and listen.
Holy shit, the amount of watching and listening Frank Stanford must have done. Eleven books, including one that goes on for weeks called The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. This one is hard to find on its own***[1]***, but when you do it might keep you busy for longer than Stanford lived. I know I’ve never finished it, but I returned to it this morning and read a section. I’ll sound ridiculous trying to explain it but I’m going to do it anyway because it’s so damn good and I just feel like yowling today about Frank Stanford.
This section of what is something like a 15,000-line poem is about a nameless guy who tells us he’s been walking down country roads for the last thirteen miles. Really? It doesn’t matter, but I believe him. Anyway, he gets picked up by somebody driving a black ’52 Ford and somebody in this car asks the walker where he’s walking to and the walker (who’s now in the car) says, Snatch’s, where else? And that person in the car then says you won’t believe your eyes when you get there. To which the walker answers I believe anything. To which the person in the cars says you better be with your eyes when you open the door. Pause right there for that phrase. You better be with your eyes when you get there. Isn’t that wonderful? As if what’s there at Snatch’s is so unbelievable that your eyes will take off when you see it…
Snatch’s, a reader soon learns, is a coffee shop down the road. Mr. Snatch himself is outside his own shop standing beside the open the door of his car, listening to the radio. When the walker asks him what’s going on, why’s he outside his own shop, Mr. Snatch doesn’t answer. That’s when the walker says, come on be a sport, and still Mr. Snatch doesn’t answer. So the walker says, *well I know you got some coffee/ on a cold day like this/ I’m going to get me a cup…*But he tries the door of the shop, something is blocking the door. That’s when he goes around to the side and looks in the window and holy shit again:
what I saw I thought I didn’t see
I turned around five times and spit
on my foot with both hands over my eyes
I cleaned my fingernails
And turned on the hydrant to slick back my hair
I needed sleep
I ran back and forth jumping up in front
of the window like a deer
What’s Sonny Liston, heavyweight champion of the world, doing sitting by himself at Snatch’s? Drinking beer with honey? Who knows? This doesn’t matter, either. I believe him. All that matters is he’s there, Liston’s sitting right there, and he looks like a knight who’s come back empty-handed and beat from the crusades…
In 1978, the poet died by suicide in Fayetteville, Arkansas, two months shy of his 30th birthday. But what he packed into a mighty life, and all that he watched.
*[1] I guess it* used to be hard to find, nothing seems hard to find anymore, but in this case it’s good news that Lost Roads Press out of Wyoming keeps the book available, though it isn’t cheap.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well as chair of the English and Creative Writing department at Dartmouth. His most recent book, Still No Word from You, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.