When I met him, he had just written an epic poem called “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.” Here are the opening lines: The landscape and the culture of the rural South were in his blood, and they showed up in his poetry, which was suffused with a carnal sense of death, danger, and beauty. “How shitty white people were to them,” Frank said. Once an interviewer asked him what he learned by growing up with Black people. As a kid, Frank spent time in the levee camps, living with his family for months at a time among Black laborers. His adoptive father was an engineer who helped build the levees on the Mississippi River. He grew up in Greenville, Mississippi in Memphis and then, in his teen years, in Subiaco, Arkansas, where he attended a Catholic high school on the grounds of an abbey. He was born in 1948 in rural Richton, Mississippi, and was immediately put up for adoption. It was a pretty weird situation, married to one and living with the other, but Frank had lived a weird life. Carolyn helped with the publishing company he started in Fayetteville.
He was also living, on the side, with another beautiful, smart woman, the poet Carolyn (C. A land surveyor who wrote poetry-my kind of man.įrank was twenty-nine years old and married to a beautiful, smart woman named Ginny Crouch, who was a painter. When I met him, he was working as a land surveyor to make ends meet. He was a legendary figure in Fayetteville’s literary scene, though he never quite made a name outside of town. If the mood was right, I would get out my guitar and play songs.įrank had studied poetry at the university, but I don’t think he finished his degree.
He loved Chet Baker and John Coltrane and Bessie Smith and Lightnin’ Hopkins. He’d break out his Southern-soul records-Wilson Pickett, Ray Charles.
Dad was a poet who taught at the University of Arkansas, and he’d often host raucous literary parties. I had been living in Houston and Austin, plying my trade in the music scenes, working odd jobs in restaurants and health-food stores to pay my bills, but I often went to Fayetteville to visit my father and stepmother, and sometimes I would stay there for weeks or months at a time. I met Frank sometime in the spring of 1978. For me, the epitome of this kind of man was the poet Frank Stanford. The way I’ve often described this kind of man is “a poet on a motorcycle.” These were men who could think very deeply and have very deep feelings, but who also had a kind of blue-collar, roughneck quality to them. Very often a good conversation is more memorable than fucking.Īs I was growing up, I began to be attracted to a certain kind of man, and I would maintain that kind of attraction for the rest of my life. I realized early in my adult life that talking-real, honest, substantive conversation-could be superhot, and it didn’t have to result in anybody taking their clothes off for it to be erotic in a lasting way. The brain is the real erogenous zone, at least for me, so I have to connect with somebody intellectually and almost spiritually in order to be attracted to them physically, and that rarely happens immediately. I don’t disagree, but even though I had plenty of sex when I was younger, I was never promiscuous. I don’t sound like I did when I was younger it’s different, but just as good.
(The beds were cheap back then, at least the ones we were using.) I never did take to cigarettes, which I’m glad about, because not smoking has helped my singing voice mature. You’d just go and go and go until the bed broke or something. After I started the pill, though, I didn’t waste much time. They are bad for you.” We had a little deal, and I stuck to it. “I know a lot of teen-agers are having sex already, but if you hold off on having sex until you are eighteen, then we’ll get you the pill,” he said. In my teen years, in the late nineteen-sixties, my father was adamant about cigarettes and sex.
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