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“The Only Manifesto Is The Blank Page,” Greg Bachar

The Capilano Review, Manifestos Now! Edition

The Best American Poetry →

William Waltz presents a poem by Greg Bachar.

“Anyone who doesn’t read Cortazar is doomed.”  Pablo Neruda

Curiosisosity: Take The Tour →

AMSTERDAM, 1936   
In spring, when I was a child too young to know that it was spring, the milk cart was pulled by a little dog that barked while the milkman rang his bell.  We stuck our heads out the window, hoping to see thick cream skimmed from the top of the wood barrel of still-warm milk.  The little dog looked up at us and smiled until the milkman tipped his white cap, whistled, and moved on down the street.

In winter, the milk cart was pulled by an old brown mule with gray cataracts for eyes and long saliva icicles hanging from his chin. We listened from the window without looking because the windows were glazed over with frost. The milk cart never stopped for long when it was cold, but sped on with the milkman cracking his whip, anxious to return the mule to the warmth of its stable. We wondered what had happened to the  little dog while we skated on the frozen canals.

In spring and winter, when the difference between seasons was a whistle and a whip, a little dog and an old blind mule, I was a child who didn’t know that the milkman had a name other than the milkman, and that he too wondered what had happened to the little dog he’d never bothered to name.

Published In Indiana Review Vol. 30, No. 1

2007 Indian Review 1/2 K Prize Winner

BEANS   
A can of beans knocked at my door one day.  “Hello,” it said.  ”May I sit on your shelf for a while?”  “Certainly,” I said.  I hadn’t eaten anything for days.  “Promise not to eat me?” the can of beans asked.   “Certainly,” I said aloud to the can of beans, but under my breath to myself I said: “Certainly not.”  I put the can of beans on my shelf and went back to work at my desk (I am a cartographer).  Then I went to sleep. In the morning, I woke up, rubbed my eyes, and remembered that I had a can of beans on my shelf.   My stomach growled. The can of beans jumped off the shelf, ran across the floor, and leapt through my window.  Glass went flying everywhere and I heard some dogs barking  down the street.  “How about that!” I thought.

Published In Conduit No. 19, Last Laugh Edition

FINALLY MYSELF   
No one knows that I am nobody.  They think that I am somebody, and treat me as such, with equal parts fear and apprehension.  To be somebody doing nothing is one thing, but I am nobody doing something, and that confuses them.  They think it odd that a somebody like me would do what I do.  None of them listen when I try to tell them I am no one and that although I am doing something, they might as well think of me as doing nothing, since it would be easier to be seen as a nobody that way.  I want to marry a real nobody, someone who means nothing to no one anywhere.  That would be something to me, and she would be my  everything.  My nobody girl, how everybody will love her, thinking her a real somebody like me, but it’s nothing, really, just a little of this and a little of that, some crumbs and a piece of ice tied to black string.   That, to me, is something.  Being a nobody, nothing suits me quite well.

Published In Conduit No. 19, Last Laugh Edition


A HERD OF WILD DONUT HOLES   
I was picking through a dumpster behind the donut shop one day when I found a bag of donut holes.  “Release us,” one of them said, “And we  will serve you for the rest of your life.”  I dumped the bag out onto the ground and watched in disbelief as the donut holes scurried off towards the north.  The one who had promised me a life of servitude  stopped at the cusp of the horizon and shook its little donut hole fist at me.  That made me angry.  “Who do they think they are?” I asked myself, and set out after them.  What they had miscalculated was the  speed at which a donut hole can travel versus the speed at which an angry man can travel.  I caught up to the herd easily and picked them up one by one, cinnamons first, followed by the sugars, and then the plain.  I popped each one into my mouth until all but the leader, a sugar, remained.  I picked it up and held it at eye level.  ”Well,  what do you have to say now?” I demanded.  “Okay, okay,” it said.  “I will serve you the rest of my life.”  Since that day, friends don’t ask but they know that my life has changed in some small way for the better.  I keep the donut hole in a little pouch I had sewn into my jacket’s shoulder, and whenever I am at a lack for words, I lean my head a bit and it whispers in my ear.  At night, to help me sleep, the donut hole tells me the legend of the mother donut that all donut holes dream of returning to.  I have never been happier.

Published In Quick Fiction No. 5

THE SHOEBOX PEOPLE   
I keep an elderly couple in a shoebox under my bed.  At night, I  carry them around under my arm.  They like to go downtown, “for the shopping” as they put it in their thick Quebec accents.  I let them out of the box and disappear into the crowd.  I know they won’t get very far: they are very old and “Madame” has trouble with her heart. I walk around the block a few times to get my circulation going and then walk up to them at the corner.  It is the same every time.  They like to pretend they are visiting from out of town and that they can’t find the hotel they are staying at.  “Take a left at the light,” I always say, adding, in French: “A gauche.”  “Ah, you speak French?” they chant in  unison.  “Not anymore,” I say.  The light changes. I pretend to cross the street.  The old man fusses with the old woman’s scarf.  When they turn the corner towards their “hotel,” the open box is waiting on the ground for their return.  I’ve painted a picture of the city on the box’s bottom; they take a few  steps thinking they are still downtown  before coming across the two doll beds I’ve arranged in the corner.   “Maurice has given us our favorite room again,” they say together happily.  Maurice is the concierge.  I am Maurice, but I am no concierge.

Published In Cranky, Vol. 1, No. 2

A SMALL BIT OF NOISE ON MY KNUCKLE   
When Kate returned from the store with a full box of scars, I asked her what she intended to do next.  ”Count my wounds,” she said, “and apply labels to them.”  Time passed.  I grew accustomed to the fact that Kate wore her pain in the form of an assortment of latex stick-ons.   She eventually discovered that the number of wrongs  inflicted on her person was finite.  She was happy to see that plenty of scars remained in the box to use as spares, should one of the old scars fall off, or for emergencies, should a new scar be needed to label a new wound.  “Darling,” I said one night, “You look wonderful.”  I  meant what I said.  We should all be so honest with our pain.

Published In Quick Fiction No. 3


A TEXTBOOK’S SHIMMY IN A CARPENTER’S BIND   
The longest screw in the world is screwed into my wall.  I am taking a moment out of my unscrewing to catch my breath.  ”Still at it?” my wife says, goes on with her life.  I nod.  Another year gone.   Another gray hair falls to the floor.  The mice sweep them into piles and run them through their mouths to use as spittle-stiffened swords.   They  duel with one another at my feet.  I gave up ambition long ago, long before ambition quits the ordinary man.  Decades ago, I said:  “That  screw had got to go.”  Decades later, it is still going, still coming out of the wall.  ”I never knew,” I say to my wife when she shuffles by,  “that a screw could be so long, a wall so thick.”  She is tired of hearing it, but I am afraid to tell her anything new about the screw. Each day, I know that when I reach the screw’s end and extract it from the wall with a proud grin, the hole it leaves behind will be my grave, and that no wife wants to hear such talk in the middle of an  otherwise fine day.  I am close now, oh so very close to the end.

Published In Quick Fiction No. 8

CRIMEA   
I never meant to be a poet but when the soldiers asked me what time it was I had to say something.  I made up a story about a tooth planted in the ground that grew to be a beautiful woman.  The soldiers laughed, slapped me on the back and said yes, they’d been bitten by that one in Minsk and then again in Rotterdam.  When the train whistle sounded, they each took a turn at the flask.  The last soldier to drink handed it to me and said:  “Keep it.  Remember us.”  I’ve kept it filled with whiskey ever since.  Almost every day I take a sip seated under a cherry tree near the brickyard where buildings are born.  And today I have a toothache!

Published In Conduit No. 19, Last Laugh Edition

THE PRESIDENT OF PLANET EARTH, VELIMIR I 
“Little things are significant when they mark the start of the future, the way a falling star leaves a strip of fire behind it; they have to be going fast enough to pierce through the present. So far we haven’t figured out where they get that speed. But we know a thing is right when it sets the present on fire, like a flint of the future.”

Despite the fact that Russian Cubo-Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov only lived a short life of thirty-six years (1885-1922), the volume of work he left behind makes for virtually inexhaustible reading. It is not only the quantity of Khlebnikov’s work that may provide the reader with a lifetime of amusement and exhilaration; the scope and nature of his vision of and for the world proves that he was deserving of the titles President Of Planet Earth and The King Of Time. And even though the King Of Time has been dead for almost a hundred years now, his words still seem to have arrived from the future.

“The goal is to create a common written language shared by all the peoples of this third satellite of the Sun, to invent written symbols that can be understood and accepted by our entire star, populated as it is with human beings and lost here in the universe.”

Born in the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic in Russia, a region inhabited by Mongolian Buddhist nomads, Khlebnikov grew up to be well-educated in the disciplines of science, nature, folklore, mythology, mathematics, literature, art, history, and languages. By the time he met Mikhail Matiushin, Elena Guro, David Burliuk, Nikolai Kulbin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexei Kruchonykh, and other poets and painters who would become his fellow Futurist cohorts in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Khlebnikov had already begun to fuse these varied subjects in his thinking. Collaborations with his Futurist peers as they rebelled against the old and musty stodginess of the Symbolists before them helped spark Khlebnikov’s literary output. And while many of the Russian Futurists were talented artists and writers, it is Khlebnikov who, in the end, represents, defines, and keeps Russian Futurism on the literary map today. Khlebnikov is the diamond, so to speak, on the gold band of the Russian Futurist movement.

“I have discovered the fundamental Laws Of Time, and I believe that now it will be easy to predict events as to count to three. If people don’t want to learn my art of predicting the future….I shall teach it to horses.”

Having published the first two volumes of The Collected Works in 1989, editor Ronald Vroon and Harvard University Press have rounded out the set with Volume III: Selected Poems. When we discover a writer whose work interests us, it is only natural to want to know as much as possible about his or her life. These three volumes are not only satisfying because of their literary content but because the editor has included a thoughtful and informative biography of Khlebnikov, as well as introductions to the different sections of each volume that provide a context for the different styles and forms that Khlebnikov used to explore his world of ideas. It is hard not to be interested in this writer who kept his manuscripts in a pillow case under his bed, lectured soldiers in the Red Army on the cycles of time, traveled through Persia in a long beard and tattered clothes as a lecturer/journalist for the Russian government, whose goals for his life’s work included the invention of a universal language and alphabet while working mathematically to discover and chart the fundamental algorithms that govern natural and historical events, a discovery that would allow him to do no less than predict the future.

“Those who were inspired by these shadow-book communications were able to go off for a moment, write down their own inspirations, and half an hour later see their messages projected onto those walls in shadow letters by means of the light lens.”

Volume I of the series contains Khlebnikov’s letters, journals, autobiographical notes, essays on Russia and language, journalistic writings, and his visions of the future, where he predicts or calls for, among other things, the existence of television and global communication, a common system of hieroglyphs for the people of planet Earth, and the creation of a government of Inventors/Explorers to oppose the system of Investors/Exploiters and form an “independent government of time.” Volume II contains Khlebnikov’s prose, which he hoped might break the “logical rules of time and space,” his plays, and “supersagas,” a literary form of his own invention, texts arranged in “canvases” and “planes.” “Narrative is architecture composed of words;” he wrote, “an architecture com-posed of narratives is a ‘supersaga.’” Volume III, as mentioned earlier, contains a generous selection of the six hundred some odd poems that Khlebnikov wrote before his death in 1922. Embellished on the lid of his coffin by Khlebnikov’s affectionate friends was a blue planet Earth with the title: “The President Of Planet Earth, Velimir I.” A fitting tribute for a visionary whose literary and aesthetic goal can be summed up as the unification of all the peoples of Planet Earth.

Published In Rain Taxi Vol. 3, No. 2

HENRI ALAIN-FOURNIER: LOST AND FOUND

Born in 1886 in a small French town, Henri Alain-Fournier wrote one published novel in his short life, Le Grand Meaulnes. Translated variously over the years as The Wanderer, The End Of Youth, The Lost Domain, and now The Lost Estate, the book captures the dream-like quality of moments that later resonate as symphonies of memory and loss, nostalgia and regret.  Anyone tortured by a haunted past might want to think twice about reading this book; those who revel in such musings and who possess even a strand of the fin de siecle concept of romance should seek out Le Grand Meaulnes immediately.

While not strictly autobiographical, the author’s life and the novel mirror each other in numerous ways. At the age of eighteen, Alain-Fournier visited an art exhibit in Paris.  After leaving the museum, he encountered a young woman whose aura and beauty captivated him.  He followed her onto a bateau-mouche for a short ride down the Seine to her house on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and began returning frequently to sit beneath her window.  On one of these occasions a curtain parted and the woman, Yvonne de Quievrecourt, smiled at him.  One afternoon he was at last able to speak to her, according to most accounts for no more than an hour.  She revealed that she was scheduled to leave Paris the next day and to be married. On parting, she turned and looked at him for what he describes as a long time before disappearing.  “Since then,” he wrote to her in an unsent letter, “I have never stopped searching for you.”

Although Alain-Fournier continued on with his life and education, he remained obsessed with his memories of Yvonne.  In 1913, his younger brother discovered that Yvonne’s family owned a house in Rochefort, and arranged for Henri and Yvonne to see each other.  During this second and last encounter, he showed her the unsent letter in which he wrote, “I cannot resign myself to not finding you again, to never setting eyes on you.” Now married with two children, she admitted that during a rough patch in her marriage “I thought of you all the time.  I would have written if I had known how to…but now I’m the happiest of wives.” A year later, during a battle near Verdun, the 28-year-old Lieutenant Alain-Fournier was seen firing his pistol while running towards the German lines and was never seen again.

In between his fateful meeting with Yvonne and his demise, Alain-Fournier composed and published Le Grand Meaulnes.  The story of the novel centers around two characters: the young Augustin Meaulnes, a rebellious instigator who arrives in a small French village to attend boarding school, and Seurel, the schoolmaster’s son, who narrates and reflects on the book’s events, acknowledging soon after Meaulnes’ arrival that he “was counting on him for some extraordinary exploit that would be sure to turn everything upside down.”  His new friend fulfills this youthful desire and more.  Meaulnes gets lost after setting out on a solo adventure and comes upon a mansion in the woods, where he encounters a beautiful woman named Yvonne during what comes to be known as “the strange party.” The next morning, exhausted from the night’s dream-like events, Meaulnes hitches a ride on a departing carriage and falls asleep while trying to memorize the path that led him there.  When he wakes, he has no idea how to find Yvonne or the location of the mansion.  He returns to tell Seurel of his adventure; the rest of the novel deals with their search for the lost domain, and what happens after one finds it. Children at the beginning of the novel, Meaulnes and Seurel grow up but are never fully able to leave the events of their youth behind.

Alain-Fournier’s novel isn’t only about the sense of regret and lost moments, though; it is also about that age when we sense there are adventures in store for us, and search for them without a thought of the possible consequences. The reader becomes a willing accomplice when Seurel muses that he is:

“searching for something far more mysterious.  It is the path told of in books, the ancient obstructed path, the path to which the weary prince could find no entrance.  It is found at the last forlorn hour of the morning, when you have long since forgotten that eleven or twelve is about to strike…and suddenly, as one thrusts aside bushes and brier, with a movement of hesitating hands unevenly raised level to the face, it appears in sight as a long shadowy avenue, the outlet of which is a small round patch of light.”

In thinking about the possible location of “the lost domain,” Seurel goes on to say “that in front of me, far from Meaulnes, far from all hope, there had just opened out, as clear and easy as a familiar road, a path to the manor without a name.”  Alain-Fournier’s novel is a detailed map to this manor with no name, the place where wonder converges with reality to endow singular moments with the substance known as poetry.  What more could you want from a novel?

Sources Consulted:
Towards The Lost Domain: Letters From London, edited by W.J. Strachan (Carcanet Press, 1986)
The End of Youth: The Life and Work of Alain-Fournier, Robert Gibson (Impress Books, 2006)
“Afterword”, John Fowles, The Wanderer (Signet, 1971)

Published In Rain Taxi Vol. 12, No. 4

Curiosisosity: You Are Here →

FRANK STANFORD: CONSTANT STRANGER
“Really, I visualize the dead as well as the living. I visualize you who I will never know. We are constant strangers. I imagine you, I stare at you when I write.”

  When a writer dies, he or she dies two deaths and leaves two bodies behind, their physical body and their body of written work. It is the responsibility of the living to see that the writer’s efforts to create a world on the page aren’t wasted by allowing their words to slip and sink beneath the wake of passing time. Frank Stanford is a writer whose work and legacy now sit dangerously close to the edge of oblivion.

Of the eleven volumes of his work that were published both during his lifetime and after his death, only one, a collection of short fiction, Conditions Uncertain & Likely To Pass Away, is available today. NOTE: Since this article was written in 1998, University of Arkansas Press has kept in print the 1991 collection The Light The Dead See: Selected Poems Of Frank Stanford; in 2000, Lost Roads re-issued Stanford’s epic poem The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You and have also published two of the author’s early collections, You and The Singing Knives and the collection of tales Conditions Uncertain And Likely To Pass Away. 

The rest of his books are out of print and hard to find and an untold number of poems and short stories remain unpublished and uncollected, a fact which might lead some to believe that his work is neither important nor deserving of a larger audience and proper evaluation by readers and critics alike. Among poets and writers who have discovered Frank Stanford’s work, though, just the opposite is true, as they have kept his writing alive by tracking down and xeroxing for each other the rare volumes of his poetry that actually represent only a portion of the manuscripts he put together during his lifetime. For many who stumble upon his words for the first time, there is a mixture of responses—inspiration at the scope and magnitude of his body of work; curiosity to know more about his life; and frustration with the fact that the thousands of pages of poems, stories, essays, and letters that make up his literary estate have, for the most part, languished in the thirty years that have passed since his death.

“If I was a pilgrim, I only had a raft and the river was low. If I was a poet, then who was Shelly and that one F. Villon. If I was trying to be somebody else, then why was I becoming myself.” 

Frank Stanford was born on August 1, 1948, in Mississippi. When he was twelve, he and his family moved to Arkansas. Three years later, after his father’s death, he discovered that he was an orphan and had been adopted. He completed the last three years of his high school education in the Benedictine Academy in Subiaco, Arkansas, and was accepted into the University Of Arkansas Graduate Poetry Workshop in 1969. He left the program without fulfilling its degree requirements, spent many of his years as a self-described “traveling recluse,” wrote extensively, and was married twice, the second time to the painter Ginny Stanford.

He was the subject of a documentary, It Wasn’t A Dream, It Was A Flood, made in 1975 by his friend and first publisher, the writer and filmmaker Irv Broughton, whose Mill Mountain Press issued Stanford’s first seven books of poetry. He earned a modest living as a land surveyor, briefly ran a movie house that showed foreign films, and founded Lost Roads Publishers in an effort to bring to print the writers whose work he thought deserved to be read. On June 3, 1978, he committed suicide by shooting himself three times in the heart with a twenty-two caliber pistol. He was twenty-nine years old.

“For some reason, danger calmed my nerves and made me sleep. As Jean Cocteau said, I think, the old myths are constantly being reborn without their heroes, their victims, knowing it, like lies who always tell the truth, the poet lives beyond his era, thus tragedy, therefore black comedy, ad infi…” 

The manner of Frank Stanford’s death left an indelible absence felt to this day by those who knew and loved him. A close reading of the work he left behind makes his passing seem even more poignant and senseless to those of us who can only know him through his writing. The twenty years since his death have seen the perpetuation of a Stanford “mystique” that, in some circles, has allowed his life and work to take on an almost mythic quality. Caused, in equal parts, by a tendency of some critics to mistakenly point to his death as a way of understanding who he was and what his writing was all about, along with the steady disappearance and unavailability of his books, this “mystique” has disguised and overlooked the fact that, in his lifetime, he was an active participant in nearly every aspect of his chosen craft (writing, publishing, thinking about and speaking on his aesthetic ideas in interviews and correspondence with friends and other writers).

The Stanford “mystique” also does not acknowledge the fact that he did not die an unknown poet— much of what he wrote, relative to the number of pages of writing he left behind, was published in chapbooks, books, and literary journals while he was alive by editors and publishers who recognized the beauty of his creative talent. Much has been written about Frank Stanford the poet, yet he also wrote what amounts to several volumes of short fiction over the course of his life. He also did translations of poems by Vallejo, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Follain, and Parra, evidence that he recognized the need himself to champion the work of writers who would otherwise remain unpublished, neglected, and unread. If one considers the fact that there exists today, in his literary estate and the private collections of those he knew and corresponded with, a reader’s treasure trove of unpublished poems, stories, letters, essays, notes, and film scripts, it becomes obvious that Frank Stanford’s legacy deserves to be championed by those who would like nothing more than to see his work in print and available to the generations of readers who have not heard of him yet.

“If we could think or dream, sending out a fleet of poems at the speed of light, or approaching the speed of light, what would we actually be doing. If a poem could travel the same distance light could in a year, then a poem I would launch now would be fifteen years old and passing thru this galaxy’s edge and I would have been dead 45,000 years. There is something to all this and death.”

A close reading of his poetry, letters, fiction, and essays reveals the presence of a confident, original voice and a personal aesthetic that was not only limited to literature, but also incorporated a deep understanding of painting, music, philosophy, and cinema. We can only speculate as to what might have come from Stanford’s imagination had he survived the demons that led him to an early exit from this world.

In an essay titled “With The Approach Of The Oak The Axeman Quakes,” Frank Stanford wrote: “When the poet is young he tries to satisfy himself with many poems in one night. Later the poet spends many a night trying to satisfy the one poem. My poetry is no longer on a journey, it has arrived at its place.” One hopes that this statement might one day be fulfilled with a Collected Works Of Frank Stanford on the shelves of bookstores and in the hands of readers who might be moved or inspired by the words he left behind for us to read and carry with us as our own.

Published In Rain Taxi Vol. 3, No. 3 The Frank Stanford Edition #1 (Click Here)

CONDITIONS UNCERTAIN: TALES BY FRANK STANFORD
“I am reminded of the scene in the film by Cocteau where the fragments and shards of the broken mirror flow mysteriously back into themselves to form another mirror, another image.”

Most, if not everything written about Frank Stanford’s writing and life has been about his poetry, about Frank Stanford the poet. When a Collected Works Of Frank Stanford is finally assembled one day, though, it will be more accurate to simply refer to him as Frank Stanford the writer because the truth of the matter is that he possessed an equal (and perhaps even greater) facility in the writing of unique and interesting fiction as he did in the creation of a huge body of interesting poetry. This is not meant to in any way put down any of the thousands of poems he wrote, it is just to say that if he was a great poet, then he was also a great fiction writer. For the reader experiencing Frank Stanford’s writing for the first time, Conditions Uncertain & Likely To Pass Away, a collection of eleven “tales,” is a good place to start. The stories in Conditions Uncertain are proof that Stanford was a writer who was able to bring poetic moments and images into his narrative writing as easily as he was able to bring a sense of story, character, and place to much of his poetry.

“A great man—but not as great as that Greek whose handwritten book I found— has said that all roads are long, and at the end of those roads what concerns us is how we walked them. This may be so for those who travel for the sake of travelling, but not for me. Oh yes, I’ve learned from walking, but it is what I find on the journeys that makes me step.”

A character in one of the “tales,” as Stanford called them, tells us that “I plan to leave behind a book of essays dealing with the imagination.” Conditions Uncertain is just such a book, for each of the stories in the collection, some just a few pages long, others approaching the length of short novellas, are filled with not just an interesting assortment of strange characters, narrators, and situations, but language and descriptions of the reality these characters inhabit that make a claim for the argument that the perception of the kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory nature of reality is also the most honest way of depicting it in writing. In one of his letters, Stanford wrote: “I’m off my bearing, maybe, but you understand: you know what real is, so you don’t have to describe what you don’t understand as surreal (like others do).” These tales go beyond the realm of the surreal by weaving the twisting and bending webs of their narrator’s stories with a chiaroscuro of dreams, nightmares, paintings, music, and stories within the tales themselves.

“His words were at once simple and complex. And he liked to drink and wander through the thickets of his past.”

In “McQuiston’s Tale,” the narrator visits a blind man named Shing who claims to have a ventriloquist son with a dummy named Arimathea. Shing drinks a bottle of tabasco and, even though he is blind, likes the color blue. In “DeMoss’s Tale,” the narrator is taken by Silent Night, the ice truck man, to have his hair cut by Rudy in the icehouse. He puts a frozen minnow in his pocket and goes to the carnival to see The Devil. “Hitchcock’s Tale” is the horrifying account of what happens to a group of convicts being taken to prison in a wagon. “Delainey’s Tale” recounts a man’s dream of a strange comedian who arrives in a boat called “The Setting” to inquire about some paintings. Ansar’s Tale & Luper’s Note” is the story of an astronomer who goes blind and, while being taken care of by two young boys with an interest in the stars, remembers the stranger who arrived in his town when he was young and left books for him to read in his outhouse. “Merton’s Tale” outdoes the strangest moments and people in a David Lynch film as a man, whose only possessions are a tape recorder and his collection of classical music, spends a few delerious nights stranded by a snowstorm in a strange town.

Stanford’s characters are consumed by the weight of their dreams, memories, and experiences, and the reader isn’t always sure if their perceptions of are the right ones to hold on to. As a result, Frank Stanford’s stories are like those dreams we sometimes have that are filled with very strange people who we have never met, but who inhabit the world we often toss and turn through in our sleep. His fiction reminds the reader that memories are as real as the experiences that shaped them and that dreams and nightmares are experiences that can help shape or bend our perceptions of the past and present. With lines like “I felt the watch ticking against me all night like a grasshopper nailing a coffin,” Stanford taps into a reservoir of surprising and jolting images and similes to create fictions that are at once disorienting and exhilarating to read. It is as if Stanford set out and successfully fulfilled one of his own character’s statements: “I worked and worked the ore of my dreams until it was a fine radium.”

The eleven tales in Conditions Uncertain & Likely To Pass Away represent only about a third of the short fiction that Stanford wrote in his lifetime. There are some twenty or so pieces of unpublished fiction in the Stanford estate—one hopes that they might made available sometime in the not too distant future, along with the rest of his unpublished and out of print work. Only then will the true magnitude of Frank Stanford’s artistic contributions be given a proper evaluation that will enable his future readers to see for themselves how his work frees the mind to better perceive reality’s true strange shape.

Published In Rain Taxi Vol. 3, No. 3 The Frank Stanford Edition #1 (Click Here)

IT WASN’T A DREAM, IT WAS A FLOOD: THE FRANK STANFORD FILM
In the essay “With The Approach Of The Oak The Axeman Quakes,” Frank Stanford wrote:  “I believe that the metaphorical imagination can be authenticated by the cinema.” Friend and publisher Irv Broughton collaborated with Stanford to fulfill this belief with the making of It Wasn’t A Dream, It Was A Flood, a twenty-six minute film described at the 1975 Northwest Film & Video Festival as “a dreamlike documentary about poet Frank Stanford filmed in Arkansas and Mississippi.”

The film certainly is “dreamlike,” its scenes and images reading like ingredients for a Stanford poem:  mad laughter, a water wheel, a radio advertisement for an electric comb; mist hanging over a river, a nude man plowing a field, a giant moth crawling up the bark of a tree; a cemetery, the moon, cartoons, The Three Stooges, a young gypsy woman fortune teller; a soundtrack of classical music, funk, blues, and chirping crickets; a museum of relics, a chandelier made of toothbrushes, the pocket watches of monks who died, robed monks waiting on shore for another monk rowing towards them in a canoe with a black-draped coffin at the bow.
   
A second layer of the dream consists of people who knew Stanford talking about him.  George Garrett: “He may see something the rest of us don’t.”  A laughing Kenny Willette: “He’s a crazy son of a bitch if you ask me… everything happens when Frank’s around.”
 
Assembled as a collage of still photographs and live-action sequences, it’s the third layer where the film really “happens,” as these scenes all belong to Stanford: napping on a porch, carrying what appears to be a wooden fish through the halls of the abbey, paddling a canoe, writing at a dining room table, laying in the sun on the shore of a river, walking down a dirt road wearing a white fedora.
   
Then there’s the poet’s voice, the film’s most compelling element—hearing it for the first time, one realizes the depth of feeling behind his words on the page and senses the living presence of the man himself.  Mostly he is heard in voice over: talking about Greek mythology and its relationship to life in the South, the connection between the flow of life’s imagery and ideas and their manifestation in poetry, the nature and qualities of monks, women, and especially dreams, the film’s dominant theme.
   
Stanford asks:  “I believe in dreams that come true.  Do you?”  He describes the monks as “dreamers and visionaries,” and explains that he “put a lot of trust in dreams.”   Most memorable of all, Stanford reads his poem “Linger:”

I’ve fallen asleep
In the trees before

I dreamed someone’s horse
Had wandered out on the football field
To graze
And I was showing children through a museum.

The film does feel like a museum of dreams with Stanford as its curator and guide taking the viewer on a tour of this parallel world.
   
In “The Axeman Quakes,” Stanford wrote: “I was envisioning a film which still isn’t finished, Deathward.”  The “film” of Frank Stanford’s life and legacy is also still unfinished.  One hopes that somewhere there is more footage of the poet and more recordings of his voice, because both help make real the spirit of a true visionary. As he wrote in a letter to poet Alan Dugan:
   
If you were me, here alone, walking through the meadows and mountains, having a vision not too unlike the ones Whitman, Blake, and the singers in the Bible had, not thinking at all in terms of the literary world—but rather cells of inner worlds, almost audible in their movement—or of ever publishing all that you were sensing, would you undertake such a lengthly (sic) vision at this time in your life—if you were me?
  
We who love his work need to undertake the completion of this vision on Stanford’s behalf.

Published In Rain Taxi Vol. 13, No. 3, Special Frank Stanford Feature

Jack Waste Goes Mad

Item: one saxophone, he doesn’t know how to play. Item: one broken record player and a big stack of records.  Item: one bad dream, an empty room, a coffin, and bright white light. Item: one six pack, one kiss, one broken heart, one traveler in the night, someone on a train unmet.  Item: two gray green eyes at the seaside, a baby carriage being pushed slowly down the pier. Item: one sack of sugar and not enough flour to make one cookie with.  One summer night, one summer breeze rustling through the leaves, one man alone, one Jack Waste with too much to think about. One small town carnival, one funhouse, one candy apple, one graveyard on the other side of town. Item: one deep breath next to Eliab’s Grave, one slipping away, one daydream on a summer day.  Three dollars, enough money for two drinks, two Jim Beam and Cokes. Jack Waste applied for a job at the carnival. He wanted to spin cotton candy for a week, but the man in charge told Jack that if he wanted to do himself any good, he would join the army for three years instead. Jack Waste went to the movie theatre and spent his three dollars on a movie he had already seen. A woman in the film looked like a woman who he was in love with once. Jack left the theatre before the movie ended, sat on a bench across the street from the town common, and watched the carnival lights as they whispered and blinked, as kids laughed and begged their parents for money for rides and fried dough, as stars emerged one by one in the night sky above. Item: a different night, spent sitting at a bar. The television was filled with images that meant nothing to him. If television was a template or a mold meant to shape Jack Waste’s life, then the resulting shape it produced resembled nothing but wreckage. Still, he could not take his eyes away from the screen. They moved from his glass to his few dollars on the bar and back to the television again. Television. It was a beautiful word, he gave it that much, but he did not want it to rule his world, even though he knew that it did. Everybody was watching. The pictures were a mosaic of insanity reflecting the workings of his own mind, of everyone’s mind. What he resented was the fact that television did not pull images out of his head, but filled it with images of its own design. When he turned his head away, it was several minutes before his own thoughts and mind pictures returned to him. Later, back in his apartment, Jack Waste tried to sleep, but could only stare at the ceiling for several hours. Jack Waste loved to sleep but he didn’t like waking up. Like the hangover that came with drink, waking was the price you had to pay for a good night’s sleep. On top of everything else, Jack Waste hadn’t slept a good night’s sleep in years. Item: one life, what to make of it. Item: one unquelled hunger, desire. One wasp or bee slipped through the screen to buzz around in the dark. Jack Waste had once thought it was important to write things down, to remember them, to pass them along, but now he wasn’t so sure. Lately, whenever he picked up a pen to write, he got a queasy, uneasy feeling in his whole body. Just as the television stole his thoughts and replaced them with unwanted images, so too did the blank page suck his existence out of his lungs and veins. There’s no time for fiction or reflection, Jack Waste thought, there’s only time for existence, pure existence, away from the diseases of influence: television, magazines, other people’s books, movies‑‑anything that replaced one’s thoughts with those of someone else. It’s more important to live, Jack thought, to simply live. Item: one reality, left somewhere like a set of keys needed to get back into the house. Item: one set of premonitions, one set of memories, one ounce of awareness, a small herd of clarity, one pound of moments to be eaten up when the time is right. Item: one tomb with a rotting corpse, one fresh grave, one funeral procession, one fallen telephone pole on the ground. One moon rising up from behind a gentle hill. One infinity of crickets and lightning bugs. One pair of ears, one nose, two eyes, and a mouth. Two hands, two feet, a body alive, listening, watching, thinking, waiting for something to happen, wanting some event of significance to take place‑‑a good party, a first kiss, love in the night. Item: a body and mind lying in wait in its cave, watching the sun go up and down, leaving the cave to hunt for food, sustenance, and experience‑‑the secret of which existed in the silence of perfect clarity, the euphoria of the moment when the eyes, wide open, see things alive and full of life, before closing again and falling asleep…again. Item: one Jack Waste, trying to wake, trying to wake and stay awake. One Jack Waste: tired of sleep.

Published In Conduit No. 9, The Big Bang Edition

Conduit No. 9 Contents