I dreamed I heard somebody
Singing in the outhouse
—Frank Stanford, “The Singing Knives”
Growing up in the Virginia woods we deprecatingly referred to as “the sticks,” one of my friends had a genuine outhouse in their backyard. Their old farmhouse had been renovated with indoor plumbing, but this mysterious small building remained. Weathered grey wood, a crescent moon carved in the door to let light in, a bench seat with a hole and a wooden lid. It was dim, dusty in the outhouse, and there were daddy longlegs inside.
In reading Frank Stanford’s longish, dreamy, narrative poem “The Singing Knives,” the outhouse lines (as well as lines in the companion, tirade-of-an-adventure poem, “The Snake Doctors”) send me back into childhood. Like history, poetry reminds us that we are barely a breath beyond the past; we are connected by a stitch, and that stitch holds us.
The past is a presence that lives for me in the poetry of Frank Stanford, who, despite or because of flaws on both sides, I read as an heir to Walt Whitman in the Tennessean-Arkansan South. Yet Stanford never pretends to universality—Whitman’s chief failure, for me—and is specific as hell in his characterizations of persons and place, as the best poets are. C.D. Wright, fellow Arkansas poet, claims Stanford as “our Rimbaud” (“the artful elaboration, the qualitative splendor of it, and the literariness in its ground”) and compares him to Twain (“the mighty, muddy river and the mighty, mean tongue”) and also Whitman (“the omnivorous excesses … though Stanford’s poetry is Stygian, wilder; more inflammatory, more insurgent, catastrophic”).1 Six months after Stanford’s death, Thomas Lorenzo read Stanford and exclaimed that he is “a Deep South student of Apollinaire, an ethnographer of cornpone/rockabilly types, a swamprat Rimbaud, a Pound of the Mississippi mud, a dadgum redneck surrealist!”2
Working as a land surveyor, Stanford lived at ground level and knew the plants around him, referencing their names throughout his work. I’m currently in an internet-less cabin in the North Carolina Blue Ridge, and I’m reminded that we know the names of plants primarily through books or oral knowledge—someone told us, or we looked up that leaf, flower, or tree. The mountainside woods around me are full of ferns, sugar maples, poplars, oaks, umbrella magnolias. But I’ll need to retrieve a plant guide from the lodge library to look up a small, low-lying plant that looks a little like a wild and miniature hosta—another presence which gave me a presence-portal to my childhood. This is a plant I have touched a thousand times,
