Why the Poet Ed Sanders
Matters More Than Ever

“If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative when old, you have no brain.”
–variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Anselme Batbie, King Oscar II of Sweden…
*

It might as well be 1983 given how vividly I can hear Ed Sanders singing about the “O” Boat at SUNY Buffalo during his (Charles) Olson Memorial Lecture. Sanders playing his tie or that long electronic instrument I have forgotten the name of as he sang tone poems to his navigator Charles Olson. (Olson: “It rained the day we arrived and I have rowed the harbor since…” Maximus poems)

Sanders has never stopped rowing.

I can’t think of any other poet still with us whose expansive and expressive use of words and word-couplings and word tones and music tones, free association and political acuteness, bravery and chutzpah and joy and rage, who is as hopeful a peacenik, and with pure intellectual and human enthusiasm, is as orgasmic and pure as Ed Sanders.

We need him—though you will be hard-pressed to locate his poetry books in print. Black Sparrow published many, including the brilliant trilogy America: A History in Verse, and after being sold to Godine and distributed by Two Rivers, still publishes 1968 by Sanders. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore can be found. Investigative Poetry is available and a most critical component of why Ed Sanders matters. Really matters. Will always matter.

“This is the Age of Investigation / and every citizen must investigate.”

“Investigative Poetry, that poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history” appears on the contents page of the book. What follows has been compared, by George Butterick, to Olson’s Projective Verse. Sanders writes IP in 1975 serving as a template for all that comes after, whether in songs by his band The Fugs, or in every other performance, book, conversation (probably), since.

Ed Sanders is an icon. All poets should know his work as they know that of Allen Ginsberg, Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Anne Waldman, Roque Dalton, Whitman, Michael McClure, William Blake, Adrienne Rich, Charles Olson, and on and on. They should know his creations as they know Rauschenberg’s combines.

So, how do we celebrate this 87-year-old poet, philosopher, musician, observer of the agora? By writing our own investigative poetry. By witnessing and documenting. By rejoicing in the rich history of his corpus and using it to guide our own work. By reprinting what is out of print. By remembering those ecstatic moments of having witnessed him read and perform.

To paraphrase Olson, what is acquired by reading, listening to, watching Ed Sanders is a curriculum of the soul and so much more. We receive the past in a most deliciously nourishing way. Yes, even the barbed shards are digestible if you allow for gnosis.

In closing, from his book Revs of the Morrow:

I & all my comrades

Will falter, fail, fall

With the task unfin’d

But I call out to all the Workers of the Rose

To you, o Revs of the Morrow

Take it onward!

Declare it! Name it! Work it!

Correction needed, Ed: you haven’t faltered, nor failed, and as long as your words are available, you will never fall. Just thought you should know. (insert from youtube Hymn to the Rebel Café.)