[1] In June 1970,[12] he met Irving Broughton, the editor and publisher of Mill Mountain Press, at the Hollins Conference on Creative Writing and Cinema.

[13] Five of Stanford's poems appeared in The Mill Mountain Review later that year,[14] and in 1971, The Singing Knives was published as a limited edition chapbook.

[1][8] For several years, beginning as early as 1970,[18] Stanford meagerly supported himself (and his second wife) by working as an unlicensed land surveyor.

Ladies From Hell appeared in 1974,[23] followed by Field Talk,[24] Shade,[25] and Arkansas Bench Stone in 1975;[20] all four books included drawings by Ginny Stanford.

[17] Returning to Fayetteville in 1975, Stanford reestablished relationships with local area writers and met poet C. D. Wright, a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Arkansas.

He was buried in St. Benedict's Cemetery at Subiaco beneath a stand of yellow pines, five miles (eight km) from the Arkansas River.

[1] In 2016, klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz) published an extensive essay-review[40] in Toad Suck Review (Univ.

of Arkansas), covering both the Collected and its companion volume Hidden Water: From the Frank Stanford Archives (Third Man Press).

[38] Lost Roads, editorship succeeded by C. D. Wright, published a posthumous chapbook of yet more of Stanford's poems, titled You (as well as a limited edition reprint of The Singing Knives), in 1979.

[47] Frank Stanford's poems—tall tales of wild embellishment with recurring characters in an imaginary landscape, drawn from his childhood in the Mississippi Delta and the Ozark mountains—are immediately recognizable, and his œuvre continues to be influential and well-received.

All-night readings of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You have also occasionally occurred, such as one organized by Brown University students in 1990[5] and another at New York's Bowery Poetry Club in April 2003.

[56] Despite continued interest in Stanford's work, his legacy has been largely overlooked in the canonization process of poetry anthologies and university literature courses.

Alan Dugan called Stanford "a brilliant poet, ample in his work," comparing him to Walt Whitman.

"[72] Leon Stokesbury introduces The Light The Dead See by claiming that Stanford was, "at the time of his death, the best poet in America under the age of thirty-five.

"[75] In his introduction to What about This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), the poet Dean Young described Stanford's poetry as, "something authentically raw, even brutal, which seems both very old and utterly new, its vitality coming from roots that sink deep into the primitive well-springs of art and the mud of the human heart and mind.

"[76] In a 2015 review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner says "Since Mr. Stanford's death, his cult has grown, but it's never come close to metastasizing.