Frank Stanford
Copper Canyon Press ($40)

by John Bradley

To the gentlemen from the south
to the tourists from the north
who write poems about the south
to the dumb-ass students
I'd like to ask one lousy question
have you ever seen a regatta of flies
sail around a pile of shit
and then come back and picnic on the shit
just once in your life have you heard
flies on shit
because I cut my eye teeth on flies
floating in shit

This unpublished poem by Frank Stanford, "Flies on Shit,” shows a writer whose stance is both defiant and proud of his rural roots and outsider status. Yet even as he mocks those who he believes look down on him, he slyly laughs at his home turf. It comes as no surprise that Stanford once wrote: “I don’t believe in tame poetry.”

Stanford was born in 1948, in Mississippi, and died, by three self-inflicted gunshots to the heart, in 1978, at twenty-nine, in Arkansas. Seven books of his poetry were published in his lifetime, though most of those are difficult to find or out of print. Now, thirty-seven years after his death, we have the long-awaited Collected, which gathers not only all of his published work, but unpublished poems, prose, and part of an interview with Stanford.

Even before his death, Stanford had a dedicated following. His poetry provokes strong responses, and part of that is due to the originality of Stanford’s voice, at once innocent and worldly at the same time. The opening of "The Angel of Death" demonstrates this:

A man came down the road.

I told him he better watch his step.
He asked me what I was doing,
Sleeping in the middle of the road.

I said I was an orphan.
See these suspenders?
They hold up my pants.
I sleep where I please, says I.

Mark Twain's unforgettable Huck Finn surely was an influence on Stanford, but his voice was his own creation, shaped by growing up along the Ozark levees, absorbing the local speech, in particular the rural black Southern dialect. His language draws heavily on rural imagery, but is presented with an intensity that leads some to call his work surreal. This image, from "The Angel of Death," captures that hyperreal/surreal mix: "The moon went back into its night / Like a blue channel cat in a log."

Not only voice commands attention in a Stanford poem, but the locale does as well. His poems create a world where we meet characters named Baby Gauge, O.Z., Ray Baby, and Six Toes. It's a world where a hired hand nails "the head of a varmint" to a joist in the barn, where the blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers echoes in the back rooms of his poems, and in some of his titles too—"Blue Yodel of the Wayfaring Stranger,” “Blue Yodel Silence You Are," "Blue Yodel of the Quick and the Dead."

Like the speaker in "The Angel of Death," Stanford was an orphan. He attended a Benedictine academy, and later the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he intended to study civil engineering. His love of poetry, though, led him in another direction. In the spring semester of 1969, while he was a sophomore, he was invited to attend the graduate poetry workshop. He soon dropped out of college and worked for many years as a surveyor in Arkansas. He certainly knew his home terrain, but make no mistake—flies to the contrary, Stanford was no rube.

In an unpublished manuscript of "versions and improvisation" in the Collected, readers can see the depth of his poetic knowledge. He dedicated poems to Comte de Lautréamont, Jean Follain, René Char, René Daumal, Yukio Mishima, Federico García Lorca, Antonin Artaud, Robert Desnos, Yvan Goll, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Sergei Yesenin, among others. His backwoods persona seems to deny this depth of reading, but for those who linger over Stanford's poetry, it's apparent.

Most of his poems are narrative, but a Stanford narrative is unlike any other. Take "Wind Blowing on a Sick Man," here in its entirety:

Men with no headlights drive up in front of a whorehouse.

They get out of their car,
Wipe the dust off their shoes
On the back of their pants.

Then they go upstairs and hang a woman.

Summer is almost over, the river is down,
The sun comes loose
Like the bright orange thread
I used to bite off a new pair of dungarees.

The further they drive down the road
The closer their voices get.

At first the title seems to provide an entry into the poem, but as is typical with a Stanford, the title creates even more mystery. The violence, in the third stanza, comes suddenly, and is told in a flat, emotionless manner. More lines are given to how the men clean their shoes than about the murder. The emotion in the poem comes with the imagery: "The sun comes loose / Like the bright orange thread / I used to bite off a new pair of dungarees." That's all we know about our narrator. The closing koan-like couplet leaves us to ponder not only the events, but the dark implications. Are the men drawing near to the narrator? Or is the narrator speaking about their psychic presence, how their act of violence has been internalized?

Death is an ever-present element in Stanford's poetry, a part of the landscape, a natural force like gravity. The opening of “Island Funeral” illustrates this well:

Mama Julinda is let down into a hole
Her sons have to dig minutes ahead
Of time or the water will rise up
And make a channel around her,
And then it would be like having
Bad dreams, standing in a circle on the bank,
Throwing shovels of dirt at a boat.

The “bad dreams” would make Mama’s death even worse, as the bobbing coffin would refuse to sink into the ground, offering a nightmarish resurrection of sorts. Death, however, can take on even more frightening dimensions in Stanford’s poetry, a presence too awful to deny and, eventually, to resist: “you haven’t heard a thing / until you’ve heard / an infant gurgle like a shoal / in its own blood,” he writes in “the molested child goes to the dark tower again 140 years to the day.”

One of the more disturbing poems in the Collected is “The Purpose of Sin,” where the speaker makes a terrible disclosure:

if I were to take a knife
if you could see me mean at the glass grave
and dig it back into my thigh
searching for its curved point
the papers on the desk would flutter
and the ferns hanging from the ceiling
would sway like they were stowed up in a storm
simple air would pour out of my wound
like the soft and the hard bugs on a summer night.

Though sin is never mentioned anywhere in the poem, only the title, it appears to drive the speaker to consider self-mutilation. As with Sylvia Plath, death for Stanford ultimately became seductive. But for a time, poetry seemed to be a way for him to charm the grim reaper. As he says in The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, “all of this / is magic against death.” That magic finally failed him, but the “all of this” he left us was vast. The Collected contains over four hundred poems (with more on the way in the forthcoming Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives). Given this literary output, any editor would struggle with what to publish, and what to leave in the archive. That said, editor Michael Wiegers has made some odd choices. In his introduction, he tells us that “I did not try to make a complete gathering,” disappointing for a 747-page book called Collected Poems. It’s certainly understandable that this volume cannot include the entire book-length The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (a part of the even larger manuscript Saint Francis and the Wolf). But the decision to offer snippets from The Battlefield, and to place them throughout the Collected, gives no sense of the size and power of that massive poem. The Battlefield would be better evoked if all the excerpts were placed in a separate section, if they should be included here at all.

Wiegers also tells us he has left out variations of poems “so as to avoid repetition that might make the book less propulsive,” yet he includes a variant of “Desire for a Killing Frost” and two versions of “Death and the Arkansas River.” He also has included forty-three pages of Stanford’s “Uncollected Prose,” which are unpublished short stories, but why not use this space for more of the archival poetry? Or for a fuller biography of Stanford? The one-page biography of this poet, at the back of the book, does little to suggest the richness and complexity of Stanford’s life. Dean Young’s introduction offers imaginative praise of Stanford (“Imagine Vallejo growing up in a tent on the Mississippi”), but Leon Stokesbury’s introduction to The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford (University of Arkansas Press, 1991), provides a fuller biography and stronger context for the poems.

A more accurate title for this book would have been The Collected Shorter Poetry, as New Directions did with Kenneth Rexroth and as Copper Canyon themselves did with Hayden Carruth. Or it could have been the first volume in a series, to be followed by The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (only 542 pages in the last edition!) in its own volume, and a third one collecting all of Stanford’s fiction.

Despite these minor problems, Copper Canyon should be lauded for publishing this much-needed collection—a must read for those who already know his work, and a chance for a new generation of poets to discover it. The publisher should also be commended for the well-chosen illustrations: photographs of Stanford, reproductions of handwritten and typed manuscript pages, a copy of the certificate Stanford received for fourth place in a 1958 poetry contest. These illustrations make the poet less a legend and more the complex young man he was. But what a singular individual, one of those startlingly original poets America always acknowledges far too late (as with Lorine Niedecker and Alfred Starr Hamilton, to name only two).

One last reminder of Stanford’s character can be found on the inside back cover of the book, in a note dated 11/16/74. “Dear Mr. Stanford,” the typed note from the Academy of American Poets begins, regarding his submission of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. “We just cannot accept a manuscript for the W. Whitman Award competition that is significantly longer than 100 pages. If you are not able to cut down your entry to that length, then you should not send it in to this particular competition.” No, he could not and would not “cut down” his manuscript. As he says in “With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes,” “You know there is no other poet on earth like me.” He may have been bragging, but he was speaking an undeniable truth.

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Roberto Calasso
Translated by Richard Dixon
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($35)

by John Toren

Reading Roberto Calasso's Ardor is a little like reading The Lord of the Rings, but from the inside out. Rather than introducing us to a cast of characters whom we accompany through fantastical landscapes full of adventure, mystery, conflict, and occult lore, Calasso draws us directly into a bizarre network of complicated rituals, mythological characters, and metaphysical enigmas—all of which, according to the body of literature he's dealing with, are merely different means of describing how the mind and the cosmos interrelate.

Calasso’s source material is The Vedas, a collection of pre-Hindu teachings that were brought to Northern India from central Asia during the Late Bronze Age. "It was the golden age of ritualists," Calasso tells us and a little further along in the narrative he elaborates. The Vedic world, he writes,

involved a cult, closely bound up with texts of extreme complexity, and an intoxicating plant. A state of awareness became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts. A mythology, as well as the boldest speculation, arose out of the fateful and dramatic encounter between a liturgy and rapture.

This is a daunting assortment of material to try to wend into a single prose narrative. It's made more difficult still by the fact that the mythological component of Vedic lore, unlike that of the Greeks, remained subservient to its more esoteric and metaphysical sides.

Calasso wisely reserves extended comment on those headier elements until he's familiarized us with a more concrete aspect of the Vedic world—the sacrifice. The Vedic sacrifice was "an attempt to redress a balance that had been upset and violated forever," when humans developed the technology to kill and eat other animals. Calasso suggests, however, that the sacrifice was not a means of expiating guilt; rather, it was designed to exalt the act of killing and eating. The sacrificial ritual underscored the "fact" that the sacrificial creature willingly submitted to the event. No one actually believed this, in Calasso's view, yet the fiction was essential, for "to carry out a gesture in that direction . . . is the supreme effort granted to thought, granted to action, where we come face to face with the irreconcilable."

And the sacrifice can take several forms: sometimes it seems to be an intellectual dispute, at other times merely the pouring of a few tablespoons of fresh milk on a carefully laid household fire to the accompaniment of ritual verses, some of them intentionally mumbled, others spoken aloud.

Reader may find it difficult to keep their bearings when thrown into such a hodgepodge of arcane assertions, digressions, elaborations, and asides. But to those who have read and enjoyed Calasso's previous books, this method of criss-crossing the landscape of a foreign time and culture will be familiar.

For example, at one point Calasso gives us an extended critique of the Vedic solution to the question: Why is it true that man should not be naked in the presence of the cow? He informs us how, in Vedic lore, the four phases of a household fire—first lit, burning, blazing, and reduced to embers—correspond to the divine forms Rudra, Varuna, Indra, and Mitra. He spends a few pages examining Vedic instructions for selecting a tree from which to fashion a post to which the sacrificial victim will be tied. It wouldn't do to select a tree from the near edge of the forest—too obvious—and it would also be uncouth to choose one from the nether side. No, the tree must be the nearest among the far, the farthest among the near.

After a review of the elaborate Vedic instructions on how long the sacrificial post must be, Calasso offers a typically grandiose gloss: "Here we see two fundamental impulses of brahminic thought brought together: the exasperating mania for exhaustive classification on the one hand; and the underlying willingness to recognize an immensity that overwhelms everything and can be felt everywhere."

As we proceed further into the mire of Vedic ritual and wisdom, sustained at times only by Calasso's sterling prose, the immensities multiply. In part, this is because in India, as opposed to the West, "mind" was elevated to a position above speech. That being the case, the words we use to describe the great mysteries of our own existence are likely to be inadequate to the task. Soon we're struggling, with Calasso as our guide, to make sense of a notion such as asat—the unmanifest. It's a sort of non-being that nevertheless corresponds in some way with praha (the vital breaths) and acts through the practice of tapas, a striving that overheats consciousness. Such tapas is the "ardor" of the book's title. As Calasso puts it bluntly, "too many palpable elements are attributed to this nonbeing."

In a later chapter, Calasso goes further, exploring the interrelationships described in various Vedic hymns between such closely related notions as the Self (ātman), the "I" (aham), awareness (citta), intention (saṃkalpa), knowledge (veda), meditation (dhyana), and discernment (vijñāna). This is only a sampling of the many conditions, mental states, and ontological categories involved, though Calasso keeps the narrative thread alive by introducing them one after another within the context of a ritual dialogue between Sanatkumāra and his pupil, Nārada. Along the way he offers brief references to Parmenides, Schopenhauer, Kafka, and Ignatius of Loyola, among other thinkers, to clarify similarities and (more often) differences between Vedic and Western concepts. A good deal is at stake here, because, at least according to Calasso, "the primacy of awareness over everything is the cornerstone of Vedic thought."

Calasso is occasionally forced to admit his own perplexity, as in the case of the emptiness (ābhu) in which the One that was born out of nothing was clad. In his efforts to gather material to illuminate such concepts (or articles of dress), he often refers to the views of Vedic scholars that few readers are likely to have heard of—men like Renou, Eggeling, and Geldner. On other occasions Calasso will single out a scholar only to emphasize how wrong-headed the man's theories are. Frits Staal, for example, comes in for extended criticism for advancing the notion that in order to appraise the Vedas accurately, we need to rid ourselves of the notion that they actually mean anything.

It's clear from Ardor that the Vedas mean many things, which perhaps come together in the "awareness" required to successfully perform the "sacrifice." But as usual, things aren't really that simple. At one point Calasso describes the underlying presumption of the sacrifice as follows: "Truth is an unnatural state for man. Man enters such a state only through the artificiality of the vow and the long sequence of actions (rites) connected to it. But he cannot remain there."

The idea that a ritual sacrifice could be truth is largely alien to post-Christian Western thought, and it seems unlikely that Calasso himself believes life's challenges can be reduced to the task of properly sprinkling clarified butter onto a campfire. All the same, it's a pleasure to follow the peculiar and refreshing lines of reasoning that follow from that notion. There are enough tidbits of both esoteric wisdom and anthropological insight on any given page of Ardor to keep us moving ahead. If the cumulative weight of such nuggets becomes onerous, it might be useful to know that the various chapters of Ardor, with titles such as "The Flight of the Black Antelope," "Vedic Erotica," and "Hermits in the Forest," aren't elaborations of a single unfolding theme, but largely independent essays on a variety of related subjects.

In the end, Ardor possesses all the qualities that readers have come to admire in Calasso's work. At one point he writes, "The Vedic seers regarded the passage of the mind from one thought to the next, and its ever deeper immersion into the same thought, as the model for every journey." Ardor describes a journey deep into the heart of Indo-European civilization, and with Calasso as our guide, it's a journey well worth taking.

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Caroline Bergvall
Nightboat Books ($19.95)

by Greg Bem

What is the nature of inquiry? What does it mean to “ask the question”? How does the poetic process have an impact on cultural excavation? Caroline Bergvall’s compelling Drift explores these questions and more. A larger project made up of linked components, this book is overwhelmed with the thoughts of an immense ethnographic space, a vast cultural chamber—one that exists above and around the poet, but also through which Bergvall approaches herself. She is the ongoing researcher, the protagonist bent upon seeking a truth through attentiveness:

The room was busy
the living were noisy
crowding out the place
the dead were marching through
noone was paying attention
thats when I started to

Opening this book is therefore akin to starting a quest, a quest for structure and truth amidst bending language and capsizing vessels of thought. We begin with a sequence of sixteen illustrations that may be tornados, monsoons, erased texts, sound waves, seismographic recordings, or even a contemplative scribble. Ultimately the mind wanders toward an interpretation of wind: scratches as broad in breadth as a blast of air. These pages open us to a windy sea.

“Seafarer” is the first text proper the reader encounters, and it’s posited behind a weave of narratives, navigations, and histories. Starting Drift, we become adrift in Bergvall’s own waves of material, to be awoken upon raging seas, cruel coastlines, and a bountiful “beyond” drawing us closer:

. . . gewacked by
seachops gave up all parts of me on gebattered
ship Yet a hungor innan mind stole me to more
weird comas let me let me let me let me freeze
Blow wind blow, anon am I

As the book’s source notes confirm, such text “uses and spins off from” medieval Anglo-Saxon quest poetry, making Drift at least partially a crisp but dauntingly abstracted series of translations. Mercy is not spared for the reader, who must read cryptically along the wash and noise of a dense set of song cycles. We are given the gift of anonymity by being readers: in the case of Drift, there is the anonymity of truth, of authorship, and of Bergvall’s conceptual conditionings and constraints.

In the moments we see translation, we witness erasure. We feel the currents of energy Bergvall passes from what she has read to that which she writes. A well-lit process hides behind the text itself, steaming out from beneath the printed characters in patterns. Patterns and cycles imbue the text with an aloofness, a quality of shuddering, a touch of transition: the flotsam and jetsam of language. Take the poet’s powerful and mysterious mash-up below, for instance:

Beat bells blow foghorns! Gebangbang for rumbly lowe!
When will the wind come? Where will the wind from come?
Will it come from the naught, bringing phobias and rationing?

Drift brings us statements and questions and deciphering and none of it is neat, as it need not be. Its joy is one of endurance, of fatigue, and of engaging an environment of poetry larger than ego, fathomable and intense. That which is represented is then tweaked, morphed, sculpted. But why?

The reader must hold off answering until the book’s finale. Truth is a moment of climax and authority, but the journey must be undertaken for the lessons to be learned. No clearer has the poet provided truth in journey than through “Report,” arguably the most powerful and the most anonymous space of the book. In it we follow, through ghostly reports and pixelated images, the deadly journey of Libyan migrants toward Italy. Their failed quest poses the ultimate question: why were they allowed to die? But more importantly, Bergvall’s own audacity to print this spectrum of her path of inquiry provokes, pokes, and prods the reader to dread in ways medieval poetry cannot. “This compass and the stars were their only means of orientation at this point,” she writes. And yet the language maintains a distance, a coldness, an anonymity. The poet is alive amidst the forceful, displacing currents of the tide.

Bergvall’s cunning poetry is born out of ideas. At the end of Drift, she provides the reader with a day journal, called “Log,” filled with hopes and imaginations. “To remind myself that this project is not an exercise in translation, however closely I work with the original text. It is a template for writing. And for excavating language. For finding the teeth of my own text, for locating its workable memory trails” Her insight is precious; it sorts out value for us, and becomes the warm heart of anthropology within an array of messy movements, of poetic image and sonic buzz scattered throughout the 185 pages of Drift. Reading them, we enter what feels maddening, and incorrigibly raw: the captain’s chambers in a gargantuan craft floating across an abyss of vision.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015