Frank Stanford (1948–1978)

Surely a contender for the most remarkable book to ever come out of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Which is not to say this dense 15,000 long-lined "poem" with no punctuation marks is very readable, in fact its a terrible challenge. I read 3,500 lines and feel that's enough for awhile. This is an hallucinatory stream of dreamtime images sometimes coalescing into an identifiable narrative for a bit before dissolving back into the torrential flood of passing language, taking their shapes from the African-American experience in Memphis and the Arkansas Delta levee-building camps of the mid twentieth century.

The work has found supporters among prominent contemporary American poets yet remains outside on the margins, too unique and unwieldy. Stanford, white and middle class but with a connection to those levee camps and Memphis neighborhoods of his youth, wrote this while at the Univ. of Arkansas as an undergraduate. It was first published in 1978, in Fayetteville, by a publisher he helped found, shortly after he killed himself.… (meer)