The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

by Frank Stanford

Poetry. Frank Stanford was called by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alan Dugan a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman. He was the founder of Lost Roads Publishers and the author of a number of important works, among them the epic THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, reprinted by Lost Roads under the editorship of Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright. Frank Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to 'reclaim the landscape of American poetry' - The Arkansas Times. Stanford ended his own life in 1978 when he was 29. The reprinting of this major book is a truly important, much anticipated literary event.

Genres: Poetry, Literature, 20th Century, The United States Of America, American, United States, Southern

383 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Frank Stanford was a prolific American poet. He is most known for his epic, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You— a labyrinthine poem without stanzas or punctuation. In addition, Stanford published six shorter books of poetry throughout his 20s, and three posthumous collections of his writings (as well as a book of selected poems) have also been published.

Just shy of his 30th birthday, Stanford died on June 3, 1978 in his home in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the victim of three self-inflicted pistol wounds to the heart. In the three decades since, he has become a cult figure in American letters.

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a secret to my ratings. If I know you, the book is going to get five stars. That’s because you deserve it and I can’t be critical with my friends. If I don’t know you and can’t understand your book, then I’ll also give you five stars. Because, who knows? Not me. Otherwise, I’m more of a four-star guy. I’ve got a good sense for what I’ll like and won’t often put a book down without finishing it, so that’s worked well for me. Three stars and I’ve got a problem. Less than that, I can’t be bothered. I’m not here to bury anyone. It takes a lot of work to write a book, that should get you a handful of stars to start. Stars, of course, are bullshit, and I mean that in all their forms. I’m no fan of celebrity and celestial bodies are suspect. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. I don’t know Frank Stanford, who died of three self-inflicted gunshots to the heart when I was still a teenager. THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU is his magnum opus, an epic, nearly 400-page unpunctuated poem that reads like a surreal autobiography. I approached it with care, but when I read it — whether I followed what I read or not — I was carried by the current of its words. There are episodes and lyrical passages, characters and self-portraits, history and culture, and everything in-between chiseled in its tombstone pages of text. But mostly it’s a tale of the South, not dissimilar to one told by Mark Twain if he came of age in the turbulent 1960s and had a seat on the bus with the Freedom Riders and Ken Kesey. There’s a whole life between these covers that feels as it its running past the pagination and continues on forever in some place between the poet and the reader. That’s worth at least five stars.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book used to be very hard to find ( I think it's easier now), but is completely amazing. It's a 542 page poem, but don't let that put you off. Some says it's the Great American Novel, even tho' it's a poem, and in many ways, it completely beats On The Road. The JK book is not a good reference point. TBWTMSILY is visionary swamp narrative... Maybe Huckleberry Finn, William Blake, plus Ulysses, set in the Mississippi Delta, not like Faulkner tho'... Stanford's writing is as powerful as Waits' and Dylan's, and is a torrent of imagination and knowledge. How's that for hype? I picked up a copy of the book in the late 80's from a small press bookstore in SF, on the advice of a friend who had lived and worked in Fayetteville during the 80's. This is very high level poetry, visionary, on the edge of insanity.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

i saw the shadow of an arm in the ventriloquist's back and so i knew
that god fondles our guts he likes to make his finger stink
with our suffering he likes to show out in front of the angels
he likes to have his boots licked he likes for them to smell his finger
like an oaf who talks all the time he leaves the maidens who
aren't maidens anymore in the woods i can see his point some of
the time but why does he have to have his ass kissed
when all i have is my lavender robe and my dreams like a wino

a 15,000+ line unpunctuated unparagraphed epic poem, the battlefield where the moon says i love you is frank stanford's 1977 cult masterclassic of southern gothic stream of consciousness vernacular storytelling, a saga sans stanzas. stanford passed at the age of 29 (in 1978), dead from three self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the heart. surely safe to say: there isn't another book anywhere on earth at all like this one.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book castrated me.

[Chris Ebert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best text I've ever read, but it's not for the faint of heart. Stanford's epic poem is best read as slow as possible and as many times as you can. It's written without punctuation, sentences, or structure, and the style makes you feel like you're being swept away by a flood. It's as dark as any material you'll ever find, but humorous at times; it shifts jaggedly between cerebral existential thought and loose narratives, all woven into a cohesive stream that transpires in a blink.

The poem is self-reflexively described as 'self involution and dreamlike continuity' - many parts are explained to be dreams, but some of those dreams are dreaming each other into existence; at one point the main character is writing the poem himself; at another it is implied the entire story is the death-dream of a man being carried on a boat.

The best part of the poem is the obvious meticulousness Stanford used in choosing each word, giving the reader hours of enjoyment realizing every thought the author invokes; I hope there are others who can experience Standford's beauty as thoroughly as I have.

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sort of poetry we need in high schools, not that those older won't also LOVE IT, I'm just saying THIS is the kind of poetry that can open kids up to poetry! And keep them open! It never lags, it's a constant whiplash!

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com






....

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really might as well never read another book after this one.
It might have been a mistake to begin this book at the beginning of my first semester back to college in 5 years. the semester's almost through, and now I have at last fought my way, outside of school reading, through The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You. The overwhelming gumption of this book cannot be understated. My edition was 383 pages, which is all good and well, except that it, as advertised, is one long poem without punctuation or really any sensibility to its line breaks. I became (re-obsessed) with Stanford a couple years ago, and having eagerly raced through his other books, I took this on.


So what is in here? Well, The Battlefield contains nearly every variety of mythmaking that could have possibly come into the mind of Stanford. He employs surrealist methods to twist and conjure these myths to serve all sorts of strange-as-hell perspectives. There are boxers, monks, Freedom Riders, leevee-men, and an endless variety of other characters which ghostlike reappear on and off throughout "The Battlefield...". These characters are woven like a strange menacing tapestry through the core of the poem. Baby Gauge, Charlie B Lemon, The Astronomer, and so forth, a cast that might of in some way have existed for Stanford, but never like THIS. They mutilate and fuck each and are generally contorted every way that Stanford can imagine and fit in his poem. There is an utter strangeness, derangement and desperation here. And especially for the first 2/3 of the book the burden of language piled on top of itself sometimes borders on incomprehensible.

So what did I get out of this? Well, Stanford is a master of the macabre, the Vanitas, the creepy, but in such a wonderful and impacting manner that to deduce it to just creepy doesn't do the scenes in this poem justice. The things that happen in here are so mythological as to be unimaginable. It's not always even very well written at times, but when Stanford does manage to hit his semantic stride, and he does often, there is such devastating bloody beauty as to be unparallelled anywhere that I've seen.

In "The Battlefield" is an America that bleeds its awful myths. When trying to describe to a friend how Stanford personifies race and racism in this book, I stumbled over my words, "It's maybe not the most tasteful way" I say, "It's just A way" he says. "Yea" I reply.

How do you rate and describe such an authentic and searing dream that is almost a nightmare, from someone else's long dead brain? Well Stanford lives, and perhaps someday a chintzy biographer will lay out his chronology for the obsessed like me. Till then, I have nothing left of his to read. I have finished, "The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You".

[Morgan McComb · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this risk of sounding very melodramatic and unnecessarily intense, this book/poem is everything. Though the book is obviously best understood after having read it in its entirety, open it to any page and began to read and this poet's words will move you. It (as well as the rest of Stanford's work, which I highly recommend) found me at a time where I needed to believe in the power of words to uplift and inspire. It has been doing that for me ever since.

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I give up. Literally two-plus months have been invested in reading The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, to the exclusion of all other books, and I have reached only page 258 out of 383. I am beaten and will go no further. Delivered in an idiom as unique to its author as Huck Finn’s voice is to Mark Twain, Frank Stanford’s sprawling prose poem is rich in Southern Gothic ambiance and incidence, and stingy with literary niceties—such as punctuation and stanza breaks—that afford a reader context, orientation and the comfort of ready comprehension. The relentless cascade of type is not quite as impenetrable as if it had been chiseled into walls of black granite, but I slid into a deep and not particularly restful sleep every time I banged my head into any given three pages of it. After several weeks of this disjointed progress, I am leaving The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You with the uncertain knowledge that the unstanchable narrator of this unwieldy epic is a white kid, perhaps in his early teens, from a family of privilege, growing up in the rural American South during some time resembling the mid-1960s. This fictional storyteller disdains all periods, commas, quotation marks and orderly line breaks. He revels in the companionship of impoverished and delinquent descendants of slaves; most of his cohorts are older males who have drifted further to wayward than the young scion and are happy to guide him into worlds and ways beyond the white child of privilege’s expected ken. The epic’s callow-wise narrator is subject to bouts of sleepwalking, dreaming while awake and intrusive three-act visions. The hallucinatory narratives, fluctuating between prophecy and divination, intersect with the fabulous adventures of the African Americans who have taken him in. Frank Stanford killed himself with three pistol shots to the heart, not quite 30 years old, in 1978; he was serious about what he bled out on his moonlit pages. His work is massive and not to be disparaged. Just attempting to read this monolith knocked me out; the awesome chore of writing it might easily have killed any author.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Francis is twelve, brilliant, an outcast already, prone to fits of metaphysical fugues, unattainable loves, and episodes of rage. The poem surges accordingly, in mesmerizing language. Many of the scenes, set against the backwoods of Tennessee, are truly harrowing.

[Jenni · Rating 3 out of 5]

He's a great writer and I love his selected, but this is one long poem, and I don't do too well with epics. I got maybe halfway through it and occasioanlly I'll just open to a random place and read a few pages. Blame the 3 stars on my own limitations as a reader.

[Mark Cooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting book. It's described as having a "loose plot" but honestly what you could call a "plot" just serves as a vehicle for Stanford's titanic imagination. It feels like a gothic American version of the Metamorphosis of Ovid, but written from the fringe of the slowly decaying inner world of Deep Appalachia. It reads like one compounding, 400 page explosion of images spewed from an extremely gifted mind raised in a creatively malnourished household. Maybe Stanford's suicide influenced how it read for me, but it felt like if a Jackson Pollock painting could make you feel sad when you looked at it.

[Josh Boardman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a lot of fun in the beginning. It was actually a lot of fun until the last hundred pages. Then, it lost any sense of narrative. This would be okay, if the language had held it up... but it didn't. I want to ctrl+f how many times Stanford said the words "moon" and "dream"-- god I hate those words to begin with. The narrative of the first 300 pages, though, was worth the read. Unlike other epic readz, however, this one doesn't have me constantly thinking about it for weeks to follow. It was a pretty clean break, and I was happy when it ended. Did love the ending, though. Tom Merton dream-cruise. I think his short stories will be loads of fun.

[Mike Soto]

It's hard to think of another work so unrestrained and daring. Stanford will leap from narrative sometimes for 6 straight pages of metaphor- I felt i was making a giant circle in my mind while reading.

I have to say though, the new edition put out by Lost Roads is pretty boring. CD Wright and Forest Gander added their intros to a flat, conventional edition set in Times New Roman. Though the original had unnumbered lines, it was set in Georgia (I believe) and the art and experience of reading it was far superior.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe nobody's reviewed this. It's like the best book ever written.

[in8 · Rating 5 out of 5]

read in 1995: http://www.5cense.com/19/639.htm

[Guion Pratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE feelgood summer romantic page turner of 1977. Excellent beach reading.

[avril lavigne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wave so long with a handkerchief
to the horses on the range of my dreams
every scene is sculptured from wood with splintered fingers

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the spirit of these words defy translation"

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The appeal is in the sprawl: to be overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the thing. Problem is, sifting through said sprawl takes persistence, and a willingness to trust the editorial judgment of Stanford's 25 year-old mistress, who I'm sure was telling him "no" all the time, keeping this at a svelte 500-something pages. Most admirable to me is Stanford's sense of mythology, connecting the frayed ends of a temporally ambiguous, death-haunted, hypnagogic Deep South, uniting the quotidian and the scatological with the cosmic. How to take the landscape that surrounds you and make it legendary. The back and forth between Francis and Jimmy is a perfect framing device, grounding the lyrical flights and surrealist subnarratives with a blunt, vulgar, and funny counterpoint. Too many garbage lines to call it a classic, though the flashes of brilliance are incandescent. Would have loved to see what Stanford could have done with a leaner sense of line and an editor who wasn't afraid to cross out entire pages, Pound-on-The Wasteland style.

[Nathaniel Klaung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read a book that's rating simply speaks for itself.


From page 28 of The Battlefield:

after a while it is my turn to stand up and recite fractions
instead I play a character from The Tempest by William Shakespeare
I get up on on the desk and yell I take off my shoes and break the lights I say
fuck arithmetic ...

............................

now I'm going to write fuck all over the boards I yell out the windows at the
little grades playing I say this ain't no school it's no stabling
it's a dog food factory go to hell

[Emily K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been dipping into this epic just shy under ten years, finally saw it through to the end. I'm grateful to have a book that I will revisit for the rest of my life. If you think I'm going to tell you what else I loved about it you're crazy as hell. But really, it's too big to put into a review on this site, just go find it and fall into its dream.

[Mir]

I'm not going to review this because I'm not poetry-smart enough to understand it. It for sure has interesting imagery, and is intense. Very impressive as an undertaking in sheer time and mental effort.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best there was

[Jeffrey Greening · Rating 5 out of 5]

Next level poetry experience

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Luxagraf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down the best American book of the 20th century. A bold claim I know, but I stand by it. There's a great little essay on Frank Standford at Alsop Review "It was Lorca who noted that poets have to be able to use the image to fuse details of the infinitesimally small with astronomic intuitions."

By the way if you go to buy this, don't do it through Amazon, way way too expensive. Try Amherst Books, the sometimes get it in stock.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello Stanfordites!

I'm writing a Master's Thesis on Stanford and can't fucking find where this quote is in this book: "Because none of you know what
you want follow me/ because I'm not going anywhere/ I'll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to
shine in."

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHERE THIS OCCURS? PAGE NUMBER? LINE NUMBER? ANYTHING???

Thank you for your help and for keeping Frankie alive.

Hope everyone is buying the re-issued books (The Singing Knives, You) from LostRoads! They're amazing.

[Carmelo Valone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the purest form of Southern Gothic poetry you'd even want to find and or read. I'm sure that this comment will piss off nearly every academic from here to Zurich, but this epic poem is better than the fucking Iliad by Homer.

A postmodernist Southern poet's take on the epic poem. Bleak and beautifully rendered, not unlike any finely crafted and or prepared corpse for an open casket viewing.

Be unafraid to wear black while reading this.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

So funny and elusive. the vignettes peppered in pull you through dreamy and confusing sand pits which populate the novel, cause they are so sweet and melancholic and funny. after the incident at the drive in the poem becomes incredibly dense and hard to make an idea out of, but in its finale the journey through the desert gives so greatly, intensely smart and personal and lyrical. first poem ive ever read and i dunno should i read any more?