"Battlefield" unearthed...and more on Frank Stanford
BY Ed Park
I'd love to hear comments from our Harriet bloggers and readers on Ben Ehrenreich's "The Long Goodbye," his epic, beautifully written piece on the work and life of the late Frank Stanford, up now on the Foundation site.
Traveling from Stanford's Arkansas haunts to Yale's rare-book library, Ehrenreich carves out a gripping story: of Stanford's formative years ("The beginning was a hole," E. writes) and obsession with death, the hard-to-find oeuvre and the massive The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You ("like the lost text of some esoteric faith"), his suicide and his lingering myth.
(The PF archive now has a meaty selection of Stanford poems, so you can experience them firsthand.)
Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days (Random House, 2008) and a founding editor of The Believer…
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