A poet’s song of the ‘60s

On Aug. 8, 1961, a trio of dinghies carrying a 22-year-old New York University student named Edward Sanders and seven of his fellow pacifists slid away from a dock in New London, Conn., and proceeded across the harbor toward Groton. The flotilla’s destination was General Dynamics’ Electric Boat shipyard, where the Ethan Allen, a nuclear submarine equipped with 16 atomic missiles targeted to eliminate 30 million people in the Soviet Union, was being commissioned. Sanders and his cohorts were determined to board the ship and get arrested, and the recently deputized shipyard workers who jumped from a tugboat to intercept them were only too happy to oblige.

Convicted of a breach of the peace and resisting arrest, Sanders and the others refused to pay their $150 fines and were sentenced to 77 days in jail. Over the next few weeks, writing on toilet paper rolls and cigarette wrappers, Sanders produced his first major piece of writing, “Poem From Jail,” which was published in 1963 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. With its classical references and hipster inventions, its invocation of Egyptian gods, its echoes of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” and Charles Olson’s “Maximus” poems and Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” its slanguage (“Goof City / the city of the / trembling flank”), its ecstatic diction (“& I breathe / the god breath / & dance / in the rays / of Nonviolence”) and its cracker-barrel charm (“and the salt-domes / rumble / as the arse / of a politician”), “Poem From Jail” announced the appearance of a poet-scholar-activist whose work remains news to this day.

After graduating from NYU in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in Greek, Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side. Over the next six years, the Peace Eye functioned as an incubator for the alternative culture, hatching, among other institutions, the pioneer underground newspaper EVO, short for the East Village Other, and the Fugs, a hairy, total-assault-on-the-culture folk-rock ensemble that performed songs like “Kill For Peace,” “Slum Goddess” and “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock.”

Sanders took an active role in the 1967 attempt to exorcise the Pentagon, when thousands of marchers at the end of a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington surrounded the building and chanted, “Out, demons, out!” With Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, he instigated the Yippie-sponsored protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the early 1970s, he settled in Woodstock, N.Y.

Since that time, Sanders has remained a paragon of muscular literary effort, publishing 15 books of poetry, including verse biographies of Anton Chekhov and Allen Ginsberg; writing and producing musical dramas (“The Municipal Power Cantata,” “The Karen Silkwood Cantata”); and releasing close to a dozen Fugs albums and a CD of ancient Greek poems set to his own music, which he plays on instruments he invented, such as the talking tie and the singing quilting frame. In 1988, his “Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985” won the American Book Award. His collection of 58 interlocking short stories, “Tales of Beatnik Glory,” is about to be reissued. For 8 1/2 years, he and his wife, writer Miriam Sanders, published and edited the biweekly Woodstock Journal. All the while, he has pursued a relentless schedule of readings, teaching and lectures.

In 1970 and 1971, Sanders covered the murder trial of Charles Manson and his followers for the L.A. Free Press, and his 30 or so articles became the basis of the best-selling and much-translated “The Family,” still the most important book on that dark phenomenon. During the several years he devoted to the project -- a “saturation job” he calls it -- Sanders began to think about the idea of a poetry that would marry his lust for information (he boasts nearly 100 filing boxes and drawers crammed with active files), finely tuned paranoia and poet’s unquenchable desire to sing. In a 1976 manifesto titled “Investigative Poetry,” he called on his fellow poets to “begin a voyage into the description of historical reality.” “Move over Herodotus,” the screed begins: “move over Thuc’ / move over Arthur Schlesinger / move over logographers and chroniclers / and compulsive investigators / for the poets are / marching again / upon the hills / of history.” He then began writing what he called historical poems. One investigated the premature death of Herman Melville’s father, possibly from mercury poisoning. Another celebrated the “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side.”

After warming up with a verse history of the year 1968, Sanders embarked in 1999 on his most ambitious project to date, a nine-volume history of America in verse. The first five volumes, he announced, would cover the 20th century, after which he would work his way back to the 15th, one century at a time. Volume 1 (1900-1939) of “America, a History in Verse” dealt with the labor movement and international politics, Volume 2 (1940-1961) with World War II and the Eisenhower era. He has just released Volume 3, which covers the years 1962-70.

As Sanders writes in the poem’s introduction, those years were:

... the time of my

youthful rebellion

... when we searched for meaning

in the sawdust floors of the rebel cafes

or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze

or mind-stretching hours in front of

4- and 8-track tape recorders

getting our brains onto friendly oxide

while we outlined our livers

like a Dan Flavin sculpture ...

Sanders is a character in his poem -- co-founding the Committee to Legalize Marijuana with Ginsberg, forming the Fugs with poet Tuli Kupferberg -- but his is only one skein in a complex weave rich with heroes and villains. The heroes are not so much thinkers as people who take brave and principled action. (“Nothing is possible,” as Sanders’ teacher, the great poet-scholar Charles Olson, wrote, “without doing it.”) Rachel Carson writes “Silent Spring” while battling cancer. The members of the Catonsville Nine are sentenced to two to 3 1/2 years in federal prison for grabbing 400 draft files from the local draft board and burning them. A soldier named Ron Ridenhour breaks the story of the My Lai massacre. President Lyndon Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act on TV even as he tells aide Bill Moyers that the law “delivered the South to the / Republican Party / during your life and mine.” At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos bow their heads and raise black-gloved fists in Black Power salutes on the victors’ platform as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played.

The poem’s villains are, in Sanders’ eyes, liars and hypocrites, including the “creepy smut-addict named J. Edgar Hoover” (Sanders catalogs the FBI director’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life), the “secrecy-batty would-be Metternich” Henry Kissinger and Richard “Lazy Shave” Nixon (Sanders returns again and again to their “secret bombing” of Cambodia) and the “military-industrial-surrealists” whom Sanders accuses of warping reality to sate their hunger for “domination, empire, space warfare, carpet bombing, napalming, and nuking.” Yet he is not afraid to examine his own errors. In an entry on the 1967 Summer of Love and the counterculture he helped spawn, he writes:

It made great copy for mass culture sources such as

The 6 o’clock news or Life magazine

but nothing is easy

& the long-time all-level fierceness

required to forge such social change

was not quite there in the Zone of Fun.

Sanders records hundreds of people and movements and events, from the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks to the resignation of LBJ’s Supreme Court appointee Abe Fortas, which, in Sanders’ estimation, “began the Court’s lurchy trek to the right.” The poem celebrates the legislation authorizing Medicare; the three days of riots after the June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, signaling the emergence of gay and lesbian political consciousness; the first Earth Day, April 22,1970, which occurred less than two weeks before four student antiwar protesters were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

The lives and loves and violent deaths of John and Robert Kennedy and King resonate throughout “America, a History in Verse: Volume 3.” Sanders tells these stories with a sense of the ineluctability of fate, though he looks at Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray as patsies, as victimized as the men they ostensibly gunned down on their own -- a larger, far more sinister tale. John Lennon and the Beatles are a recurring presence. Sanders writes of Feb. 1, 1964, as the day “The Beatles’ ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ became #1 / in a nation so eager for innocence / after the shudder of November / & the dogs of Birmingham.”

Underscoring everything is the ominous drum roll of the Vietnam War, growing louder and closer. Of the April 15, 1962, arrival in Vietnam of a helicopter unit of 400 men, one of the earliest official combat units to be deployed, Sanders writes:

If Euripides were writing it as a play

he would have had a chorus of the snipping Fates

swoon forth with a keening ee ee ee ee

like the eery ee-ing in Trojan Women ...

To succeed in this audacious enterprise, Sanders invoked a trio of New Muses connected to contemporary technologies: Retentia, the Muse of the Retained Image; Sequentia, the Muse of Sequencing and the Poetic Data Cluster; and Condensare, the Muse of Distillation. In a search for what he calls “the Distilled Essence, the graceful illumination, the thrilling or engrossing moment,” Sanders discovered his method in his own research. “I had noticed when I was writing ‘The Family’ that many of my hand-written pages tended to be broken into verse-like line breaks,” he recently remarked. “I found when I made notes while interviewing people, the lines tended to break into verse-like clusters.” Charles Olson was also an abiding influence, especially his 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” which insists that “the poem must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.” Equally crucial, Sanders says, is “the sequencing of the poetic data-clusters.” The January 1966 “Trips Festival” in San Francisco marking the advent of the LSD culture, for instance, is sandwiched between the slaughter of “100,000 ‘communists’ ” in Indonesia and the resumption of bombing in Vietnam after a peace pause of 37 days. Otherwise, this poem might as well be schoolwork -- gargantuan lists without resonance or evolutionary import.

The most radical aspect of Sanders’ poem is the occasional use of what he calls glyphs -- that is, faces and images to represent people and events. The enemies of peace and goodwill are characterized as “grrr-heads” or “nope heads” or “national security grouches,” with cartoon lightning bolts shooting out of furrowed brows. Any victory for democratic socialism inspires cartoon capitalist eyeballs (“cap-eyes”) to roll. A recurrent image throughout the poem is of the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building in Washington, with Hoover’s name crossed out.

The soul of Sanders’ epic is a patriotic attempt to apply Maat, the Egyptian feather of justice, to his native land (an illustration in the poem depicts the feather imposed on a map of the USA). “Between my country right or wrong / & my country sometimes right sometimes wrong / or my country terribly wrong / lies the / Feather of Justice.” A passionate optimist, Sanders roots for the good America and celebrates it every time it emerges. Neil Armstrong’s first moon-step “was a moment for America.” The arrival of folk singer and environmental activist Pete Seeger’s sloop Clearwater in the mouth of the Hudson, auguring the river’s clean-up, was another such moment, as was Justice William O. Douglas’ successful effort to stop a right-wing cadre led by then-Rep. Gerald Ford from impeaching him. All are elements of Sanders’ “rhapsody of a great nation”:

... where so many sing without cease

work without halt

shoulder without shudder

to bring the Feather of Justice to every

belltower, biome & blade of grass

in Graceful America ...

Our poets seem to have lived too long in solipsism. There are 348 creative-writing programs in this country, according to the Assn. of Writers and Writing Programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and I venture to say that almost none of them teach politics or history or economics or ecology or statecraft. I would even argue that such a huge number of writing schools exist precisely because external reality is not challenged by their teachings or writings. Since the fading of the Beat Generation, the poetry that is taught or anthologized or rewarded in this country is primarily inward-looking and partial to the so-called personal poem.

There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, with gazing inward on what Sanders calls the “swirlyswirly.” All poetry is personal, in the sense that it is apprehended by an individual poet, but the subject matter doesn’t have to be so limited. There’s also what Charles Olson called “the figure of outward” -- and the worlds of the material, which also require our attention. When Olson used the term, he was referring to the great American poet Robert Creeley. But time has bestowed that fine cognomen on Ed Sanders as well. In his life and his work, in “America, a History in Verse,” Sanders is showing us the way. *