Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

"And the music of no socks"

Thoughts on… Frank Stanford, “Their Names Are Spoken”

Where the saplings come up

In the belly of the road

Nobody has traveled for so long

I found the place you bear east

And walk over the hills

Until the sun goes down

And come onto smoke and goats

And the music of no socks

For a gate they use the stead

Of a tarnished brass bed

The little winds that came up

Like a child soaping a saddle

We dream on

Now night a cool moss

On the undersides of the cold ground

Keeps growing on the stones

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Frank Stanford is surely one of the most important undervalued American poets. Few have read him, but his writing of a dark and fallen South is on par with the novels of William Faulkner and the stories of Flannery O’Connor. In writing ability and scope, Stanford is their equal. The subject matter, tone, and language are quite similar. He died at twenty-nine by his own hand in 1978, yet he’d already published seven volumes of poetry. Two more posthumous collections would appear within one year. His most mysterious work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, is an epic poem of more than 15,000 lines narrated by a twelve-year old boy, growing up in Mississippi.

A volume of selected poems, The Light the Dead See, published in 1991, serves as a solid introduction to Stanford’s work. For those who want to experience the poet in-depth, I’d recommend What About Water: Collected Poems and Hidden Water, unpublished works, fragments, and letters – both books published in 2015. A writer of enormous possibility. Readers can only guess what might have been.

*

In terms of tone and landscape, “Their Names Are Spoken” is quite typical of Stanford’s writing style. The voice in the poem is a bit world-weary but never loses connection to the physical world. Stanford is always specific and clear in his use of description, as is evident in the opening stanza:

In the belly of the road

Nobody has traveled for so long

I found the place you bear east

The landscape of Stanford’s poetic world is very reminiscent of the visual world of James Whale’s films: stark, murky, dissipated.

When the poem begins, readers fully recognize the speaker’s isolation without understanding the cause, and as the poem develops, we empathize with this journey for relief, for some bit of freedom, for a kindred voice. Stanford writes: “And come onto smoke and goats / And the music of no socks”. The language, infused with reality and myth, is very concise, exact, and direct.

The poem’s second half displays an odd world – but a world that is found. A tarnished bedstead used as a gate, which Stanford no doubt employs to speak volumes about character with brevity, allows entrance into the unusual:


The little winds that came up

Like a child soaping a saddle

Much of the poet’s writing relates to the archetypal conflict of child becoming adult in a world of death.

The closing lines are stunning in their dark beauty, and are filled with the faintest shimmer of hope:


Now night a cool moss

On the undersides of the cold ground

Keeps growing on the stones

The growing – represented in the child to adult – is also evident in the human well of emotions (and here readers should feel free to insert the term of choice: soul, spirit, breath, conscience, voice) that rises, that fills.