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2) What external factors sculpted Frank’s need to build a myth of place in his work? Did the fact he knew he was adopted force his hand to build a “family” within his verse? All that I’ve read mentions the shock Frank felt when he moved from where all his friends were predominantly black to a neighborhood where blacks were “unofficially excluded.” I welcome the opportunity to talk about Frank and his poems. I think I am almost the only one left from the poets at Arkansas that were close to Frank that first couple of years when he started writing in earnest. For me it was 1969 to 1971, fifty years ago. That was also Frank’s last years as a student at the university, and he only took courses in creative writing and poetry. Once he made up his mind to write poetry, anything else would just slow him down. At the time, I assumed he was working on a fifty year plan for his poetry, like the rest of us. But in retrospect, his plan was for ten years. More than once I heard him say he would never make thirty. He was twenty and I really thought that was just the melodrama we were all filled with at that age. Plath and Berryman and Jarrell were recently gone, and Lowell and Sexton were just around the corner. It was a different time back then. Frank was very aware of his adoption, which he was not aware of at all until, I believe, his stepfather died when he was fifteen. Until then, he thought his mother was his real mother. That’s what he told me, although I can’t help but think that such a belief would have required many, many other falsehoods. He also told me that he thought that he had the perfect biography for a poet. He did not know who he really was, so he could create any self he desired in his poems. And that is what he did. The poems he wrote in the late sixties and early seventies, and that would include much of “The Battlefield,” created this dream world, where I suspect Frank could have things the way he wanted them and not the way they were after his stepfather’s retirement when Frank was twelve. After the early seventies you can see Frank’s poems gradually move away from the child narrator or wunderkind protagonist and toward the first person voice of Frank as he wanted the reader to perceive he was in the present day. The obsessive voice turned from the past and his imagined violent childhood to an obsessive contemplation of violence and death by a man in his twenties. I think I once read something by CD Wright where she said Frank began to address Death as a “familiar.” A good way to put it. Of course, these are generalities and tendencies. You can find good poems of each kind throughout his whole work. As well as poems that do not have to do with either. At any rate, the adoption and the move away from Memphis and the Mississippi were enormously significant to his development as a poet. 3) How did his fascination with kung-fu movies, and especially the code of the Samurai influence his poetry? First, let me say that this was all fifty years ago, and when we spent all that time together Frank was 19 and I was 23. At that age, I know now, you really don’t know much about anything. When Frank’s stepfather died, he was fifteen. His mother just could not handle him, and so he was sent to Subiaco Academy run by the monks at Subiaco Monastery to finish the last two years of high school. As far as poetry prep goes, it was an incredible stroke of good fortune. The monks there introduced him to poetry and art, and the spiritual side of so many things, including Karate and Japanese Samurai spiritualism. In the tiny apartment Frank lived in above an old closed-down movie theater just off campus, we often spent the evenings drinking beer. Frank had a one sheet movie poster of Kirasawa’s Yojimbo hanging on the wall. He supported himself by teaching karate in some rooms across the street. One night he said he had to go to Ft. Smith the next day to try to win his black belt. Which he did. Often, Frank at night would begin to scratch himself and act almost as if he was possessed and laugh and I thought he might be possessed. It was only a few years later, after I had seen Yojimbo, and Rashomon and The Seven Samurai, that I realized he was imitating the characters played in those films by Toshiro Mufune. He loved them. Another writer he admired was Mishima. He was really impressed when Mishima committed ritual suicide in 1970. So even then Frank was spending time around the ideas he would later act upon. But at the time, none of this was clear to me. He just seemed the weirdest person I had ever met, and he loved poetry almost as much as I did. That first year or so, Frank was almost subservient to me. And to James Whitehead as well. I Issue 12| The Blue Mountain Review| 55