Brian Eckert, editor
8/9/2025
I have been aware of the legendary Arkansas poet for less than a year now, but he has quickly become my new obsession and passion project. In these handful of months, I’ve read What about This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, The Light the Dead See, quite a few sections from his 15,000-line epic The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, and Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives. After all of this reading, I don’t have any critical conclusions, yet. I want to write this piece not as criticism, or even a review, I want to explore the craft of Frank Stanford’s writing as an entryway into discussions of craft more broadly, and to hopefully find better ways to analyze Stanford’s poetry.
I recently moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas to start a PhD in English at the University of Arkansas and somewhere in the program search/application process, I discovered Frank Stanford. His work immediately grabbed my attention, as well as his biography of a tragically short life. James McWilliams recently published a comprehensive biography of Stanford, which I have not read, but much of Stanford’s life prior to this publication (and potentially even now) is shrouded in a mythic haze, exacerbated and obfuscated by his poetry. However, it is a fact that Stanford worked as a land surveyor leading up to what would be the last few years of his short life. Stanford often wrote of his childhood spent in labor camps along the levees of the Mississippi River…
Stanford’s writing is filled with energy, imagery, and vernacular speech. However, Stanford was also a master of craft, as evidenced by the photocopies included in Hidden Water, where readers can see how Stanford edited his own work methodically, writing and re-writing the same line with miniscule changes—not only repeating them aloud to determine which sounds better, but also repeating the writing process to determine which writes and reads better. There are several important points to make about this detailed approach to editing.
Another excellent poet and a friend of mine, Cody-Rose Clevidence, recently compared Frank Stanford’s writing to a friend of theirs “running a chainsaw with the chain on backwards.” This person was still able to cut through the tree, because they put their full force into the chainsaw blade, and even though the chain was smoking and nearly set the tree on fire, they finished the cut. Stanford’s writing is full of force and energy and a refusal to be contained. He is constantly running full throttle, like Dale Sr. blowing engines from racing too hard. And I believe Dale Sr. is the perfect comparison for Frank Stanford, although Stanford was not commercially successful, they both epitomize an uninhibited passion for their craft. Stanford is able to combine overflowing energy and passion into incredibly, precisely crafted lines; analogously Dale Sr. raced with aggression, no apologies, and no fear, with the full knowledge that he could die anytime he gets out on the track. The stakes may not seem as high for Stanford, but as a poet, I know there are many times when it feels like it’s life and death to write, to get a specific poem out, and especially the publishing process.
The craft of Stanford’s writing also reminds me of the practice and craft required for throwing events in track and field like shot put, discus, and hammer. I was a thrower in high school and briefly in college, but I relied on brute strength to get distance on my throws. The most successful throwers aren’t always the biggest, strongest athletes, but the athletes with the best form. In college, my throws coach would take us to the track and make us practice our spins for the entire 400 meters. The ring is 5 or 6 feet in diameter, so we would practice our spin around 80 times in a full lap. The point of this exercise, and most drills, is to make an aspect of the sport automatic. If my spin is perfect every time, I can spend more time developing strength and other specific parts of the throw, like the release and follow-through.
Stanford spent hours sharpening his poetic craft while he wandered through the woods as a surveyor, and even as a child exploring the levee camps and surrounding riverbanks. His archived notebooks and papers show how detailed he was in his editing on a line by line basis. However, he was able to apply that detailed eye to massive projects, like the 15,000 line Battlefield. (For reference of size, the original Lost Roads edition was 542 pages and the second corrected anniversary edition was 383 pages, due to line-printing constraints with the original). He practiced the detail-oriented skills of meter, line breaks, word choice, and punctuation to the point he was able to not only write an enormous, epic magnum opus, but also write with absolute precision for the duration.
A common refrain is that ‘mastery’ of a skill requires 10,000 hours of practice; whether that be textiles or smithing, cooking or throwing discus, or an art like painting or writing. As a poet myself, I often find these hours of practice come while performing some other physical activity. For me, it is often washing dishes at work, splitting firewood, or walking/hiking; for Stanford, it was wandering the woods as a land surveyor and presumably in his childhood as well. However, as Stanford’s papers show, it also requires hours of physically writing, and re-writing, and editing details just to edit them back to the original. In a way, this relates to another integral aspect of writing, and art more broadly, which is play.
Although it is not the most prominent aspect of Stanford’s writing, it is clear that despite his clear dedication to writing, he also allowed himself a certain level of inhibition. He wrote freely, and edited militantly.
On Tech: Stanford and many writers of the 20th Century had the advantage of living before computers, so they were often forced to physically rewrite or retype (with perfect precision) their own work over and over again for each submission, each round of edits, and every time they spilled coffee on a finished copy. This rewriting is the same as doing hammer spins around the track; the repetition builds up a sort of muscle memory that cantilevers further and further (physically, in the track metaphor) into new ideas, experimentation, style, and creative space.
Another example that I know offhand is Kurt Vonnegut’s best-selling novel Slaughterhouse Five. Vonnegut wrote nearly 20 distinct and complete (or very nearly complete) versions of Slaughterhouse Five over the course of 20 years before the published version was released to the public. He physically wrote this novel dozens, if not hundreds, of times between editing and sending it to publishers, and this helped him hone his writing skills and fine-tune every aspect of the narrative.
Stanford’s writing shows this same process of honing and fine-tuning through poems that are noticeably lower quality, with attempted edits on the page. Many times, in my opinion, when he adds a line, or changes wording, in the archival papers included in Hidden Water he is making an improvement, but also correcting meter and balancing the rhythm of the poem.
All it takes is another swing of the hammer to get it right.
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BRIAN ECKERT is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He has been a bartender, farm hand, fry cook, landscaper, and substitute teacher. Brian was born and raised in rural Indiana before attending Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2019, Brian was diagnosed with leukemia and spent several years undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatments, while also completing undergrad, and then starting and finishing a Master’s of Liberal Arts degree at Johns Hopkins University in May of 2022. He lives in Fayetteville and enjoys driving through the mountains and visiting every used bookstore.
Union Spring Literary Review 