Frank Stanford’s Rural Avant-Garde: Infrastructure, Mediation, and Poetic Community

Abstract

Frank Stanford was an Arkansas-based poet who produced a substantial corpus of poetry through the 1970s. His best-known work, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977), narrates the ways that mass media technologies and state infrastructures shaped regionalism and social structure in the post-1945 rural US South. The afterlife of Stanford's writing has been subject to its own form of mediation: from Stanford's death in 1978 up until the present, a cult following has kept his work in print through communal practices—trading photocopied manuscripts, participating in marathon readings of Battlefield, and organizing Frank Stanford festivals. While the aura surrounding Stanford has often disassociated him from the structures and communities that shaped his writing, both his work and its legacy disclose the institutional, mediatic, and infrastructural forms that enable rural avant-garde poetic practice.