Poet/scholar A. P. Walton will read and discuss letters from his new book of poet Frank Stanford’s letters!About this Event
About the Book
Letters of a Poet Dying is a watershed publication—the first collection of correspondence by the virtuosic poet Frank Stanford (1948–78). Born in southeast Mississippi, Stanford lived most of his brief life in northern Arkansas, where he studied, loved, founded a publishing company, and wrote prolifically before ending his life at the age of twenty-nine. These strikingly original letters, postcards, and book inscriptions written in Stanford’s twenties to several dozen recipients—poets, editors, friends, lovers, and family members—illuminate his complicated and often tumultuous creative process.
Enhanced by A. P. Walton’s painstaking scholarship, Stanford’s correspondence reveals a poet intent on crafting and shaping his oeuvre as he approached the death he long anticipated. “I have never feared Death,” he wrote in 1972. For him, “Death was always there, a pale master holding the reins of my horse.” Yet these letters are much more than a contemplation of the poet’s own mortality—they demonstrate a lust for life and contain untold moments of beauty, providing intimate, moving glimpses into Stanford’s creativity, aesthetic beliefs, friendships, romances, and fears.
That these letters have survived obscurity for the many decades since the poet’s death is a small miracle. Stanford’s letters offer a clear window into the genius of one of the most gifted and prodigious poets of the twentieth century and stand in their own right as significant works of literature.
About A.P. Walton
A. P. Walton has been researching the life and poetry of Frank Stanford for nearly twenty years. He completed a Master of Arts at Lund University, where he authored a thesis on Stanford, Toward Innumerable Futures: Frank Stanford & Origins in 2015, and revised portions of that thesis appeared in a 2018 miscellany book, Constant Stranger: After Frank Stanford, in 2018. From 2018 to 2026, Walton gathered, researched, and edited Stanford's letters. The result is the new book, Letters of a Poet Dying: The Selected Correspondence of Frank Stanford, which has been published this year by the University of Arkansas Press. Walton is also the coeditor of the new third edition of Frank Stanford's major epic, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, as well as the author of a book of poems, Diorama Appalachia.
Event venue
Bookery Manchester, 844 Elm Street, Manchester, United States
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