University of Arkansas Press Publishes The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford

The University of Arkansas Press is excited to announce The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford, by James McWilliams, is now available.

When 29-year-old Frank Stanford put three bullets in his chest on June 3, 1978, he ended a life that had been inextricably linked with poetry since childhood. Deeply influential but largely unknown outside his corner of the poetry world, this prodigy of the American South inspired a cult following that has kept his reputation and work flickering on the periphery of the American literary tradition ever since.

The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Stanford's life and work, introducing to a broad readership poetry that remains both captivating to poets and, in its celebration of everyday experience over academic erudition, accessible to those who rarely read poetry.

Stanford's poems range from one line to his 15,283-line epic, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The vital thread running through all of his poetry is an ear for language that vies with Walt Whitman in its expansiveness and generosity. Stanford's omnivorous attraction to vernacular, particularly Black and rural vernacular, centered on an admiration for the marginalized and eccentric. Blending the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and O'Connor with a racially egalitarian vision, his poetry thrives on the stories and traditions of the oppressed and forgotten.

The themes that preoccupied Stanford's prolific output—language, sex, death, class, geography, commercialism, surrealism, film, race—also preoccupied the poet in his daily life, which was marked by heavy drinking, philandering, mental instability, emotional abuse and, through it all, an inveterate desire for beauty. Constantly attentive to this tension, biographer McWilliams traces the short and painfully complicated life of this hidden talent who left a lifetime's worth of poetry that, through its grounding in the mundane, achieved a vision of the transcendent.

"Texas State University historian McWilliams has written an impeccably researched, capacious and probing biography of the enigmatic, neglected Southern poet," wrote Kirkus in a starred review. "McWilliams closes with a devastating portrait of the brilliant, promiscuous, financially burdened 29-year-old spiraling out of control and, despite a film and his own small press that he ran with poet/lover C.D. Wright, he ended it all in 1978 with three shots to his chest. The full-throated biography fans have been yearning for."

James McWilliams is a writer and historian who teaches at Texas State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar and Mississippi Review.

McWilliams was recently interviewed by Kyle Kellams for Ozarks at Large on KUAF. Listen to the program on KUAF's website.

The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford is available from the University of Arkansas Press and wherever books are sold.