Subiaco's Unofficial Poet Laureate: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School
Subiaco's Unofficial Poet Laureate: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School
Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School is a major step forward in scholarship around the late poet Frank Stanford.
Leo Lensing was a classmate of the poet Frank Stanford at Subiaco Academy, a college preparatory school for boys run by Benedictine monks at Subiaco Abbey that towers over the hamlet of Subiaco, Arkansas, near Paris, Arkansas on State Highway 22 between Little Rock and Fort Smith. Stanford transferred to Subiaco from the public high school in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1964; he and Lensing graduated on May 27, 1966.
Vivid, critical, and erudite, Lensing’s memoir draws on archival research, interviews with monks, classmates, and other contemporaries, the growing body of Stanford scholarship, and Lensing’s original close readings of Stanford’s poems. The book illuminates previously unexplored corners of the poet’s adolescence and early development as a writer and a thinker, especially in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation.
Leo A. Lensing’s memoir is a riveting book that further complicates the mythic work and life of Frank Stanford. In revisiting Stanford’s poems alongside Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate, I find new meaning among poems I’ve read many, many times. Alongside the work of other critics and biographers, Lensing is doing important work in this collection, work that will further our understanding of Frank Stanford as one of the most important poets of his time.
-Adam Clay, author of To Make Room for the Sea
Leo A. Lensing’s Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate: a Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School penetrates the heady mythology surrounding Frank Stanford’s life and poetry through resurrection of memory and media. A one-time classmate and friend of Stanford’s, Lensing conjures a poet of flesh and blood—flawed, wounded, and curious. Lensing handles facets of Stanford’s adolescence with care, interrogating whiteness and racism within Subiaco’s community in the 1960s, as well as the abuse of students at the hands of a prominent monk and teacher. For scholars of Stanford, this is an illuminating companion to his body of work.
- Canese Jarboe, author of dark acre
Leo Lensing's carefully researched and beautifully written microhistory captures Frank Stanford at a precise and pivotal moment in life--the last two years of high school. With vivid honesty and clarity, we get to see Stanford try out various identities--sometimes quietly, sometimes brashly--in a larger effort to embrace the literary fire already burning within. At the same time, Lensing's deft historicism weaves Stanford's inner life into the world around him, a variously mundane and majestic patch of northeast Arkansas marked by Subiaco Academy's gothic grandeur, strict but sincere Benedictine monks, the uglier legacies of race, and profound natural beauty. Accompanied with never-before-seen photographs of "Subiaco's unofficial poet laureate," Lensing's memoir is a welcome and necessary addition to the burgeoning field of Stanford studies.
- James McWilliams, author of a forthcoming biography on Frank Stanford
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: LEO A. LENSING
Leo A. Lensing is professor of Film Studies emeritus at Wesleyan University and lives in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and writes occasionally for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His publications include The Anarchy of the Imagination (1992), a selection of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s essays and interviews, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Träume (2012), a German edition of the Viennese writer’s dream journal.