Review of Frank Stanford's title poem "You"

“When a writer dies, he or she dies two deaths and leaves two bodies behind, their physical body and their body of written work,” Greg Bacher writes on his blog dedicated to Frank Stanford, a poet who too few readers know. In 1978 at age twenty-nine, Stanford shot himself three times in the heart, leaving behind seven volumes of poetry. Within a year, two more volumes were published posthumously. In the past few years, a small group of poets have started to aggressively promote his work as can be seen with the 2008 Frank Stanford Festival, the University of Arkansas Press keeping in print his selected works The Light the Dead See, and Lost Roads (a small press started by Stanford with C.D. Wright) reissuing Stanford's epic poem The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (2000) and two earlier collections, You and The Singing Knives (2009).

I’m going to post a short poem here, one from his book You listed as one of the best books from the last decade. When I last checked, Amazon only had one copy—used and selling for $998.00.

You by Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

First, I have to say how that ending continues to kick me in the gut, even now when I’m expecting it. And to render any effect on the reader in such a short poem is tough. So, what’s Stanford doing here?

This poem works in “3s” for me in a few different ways. First, rhetorically I can divide the poem in three sections—or what some might call movements or leaps. (And by “rhetorically” I mean the argumentative structure of the poem such as how a Shakespearean sonnet has five moves: introduction of issue, complication, more complication, the turn, and conclusion.) Each section in “You” surprises because it refuses a clear, direct, and expected link to the previous section. Here is how I see the movements:

First:

Sometimes in our sleep we touch

The body of another woman

And we wake up

Second:

And we know the first nights

With summer visitors

In the three storied house of our childhood.

Third:

Whatever we remember,

The darkest hair being brushed

In front of the darkest mirror

In the darkest room.

The first movement is the speaker dreaming of touching another woman and then waking up. Fine. Got it. Now, after this section, the common movement in a contemporary lyric would be to push the poem to the present. So, for example, if someone is thinking about another woman, the question will be “Why? What is happening now that makes one recall this?” I love how this poem refuses such a linearity. Instead, once “we wake up” we move into another memory, another dream-world. Nighttime links us to this second movement of the poem that describes the three-storied house of our childhood.

The last movement of this poem is unresolved, operating on a tonal, emotional level. This sense of irresolution occurs in a few different ways, but the more obvious way is that Stanford refuses to give us a complete sentence at the end of this poem. Instead, we have a fragment—and I love this fragment. Stanford writes, “Whatever we remember” and then does not bring this sentence back to the “we” coupled with an action verb. “Whatever we remember” and the fragment that follows damns whatever specific memory one may have to silliness. For whatever one remembers, the sense of darkness remains. Therefore, specific memory or a resolution is beside the point. The darkness is inescapable and all-encompassing.

Also, we end with a three-lined descent into darkness, recalling the tradition of Dante’s descent into hell with the triadic line. Stanford repeats “Darkest” three times which most poets would claim is unwise to do within a span of fifteen words. But his repetition lends a quality of fate to it all—a dark fate.

In this short poem, we can see what Stanford is often praised for: his use of diction, image, unique voice, idiom, wit, metaphor, and imaginative leaps. It is his leaps that I appreciate the most given to us straight-on in a conversational manner even though what follows is anything but straight-on. In a review of Stanford’s epic poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, reviewer Philip Jenks describes the poem in a way I find fitting to all of Stanford’s works: “Stanford provides a wild ride on this sailorless ship.”