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Ed Sanders is best known for his nonfiction account of Charles Manson and his cult followers. His most ambitions undertaking is a history of the United States in poetry. But his most important influence on American poetry came earlier in his career, as a young neo-Beat arriving in New York in the late 1950s, where he studied the classics at New York University (B.A. 1964) and proceeded to make himself the poetic center of 1960s counterculture. Even more than Allen Ginsberg, whose most important work was done earlier, Sanders epitomized the poet as hippie. A publisher, bookstore owner and singer-songwriter as well as a poet, Sanders became a pop culture icon, whose work and career stand alongside that of Phil Ochs and R. Crumb as much as they do Ginsberg and Robert Lowell. Sanders was born August 17, 1939 in Kansas City, one of the great musical centers of America, where he listened to jazz great Jay McShann, studied with the drummer for the Kansas City Philharmonic, and belonged to the Society of Barbershop Quartet Singers. He credits reading Howl as a 17-year-old with changing his life. Within a few months, he had dropped out of the University of Missouri and hitchhiked to New York, where he attended every Beat reading he could find, and was also drawn to political activism. Arrested in 1961 for a protest in which he attempted to board a nuclear-powered submarine, he wrote a 30-page poem on toilet paper and the inside of cigarette packs. On his release, he smuggled the manuscript out in his shoes and sent it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published it under the title Poem From Jail. In 1962, he started a literary magazine, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, dedicated to neo-Beat and political activist writing.The title was more scandalous then than it would become in later years, and it got Sanders arrested for obscenity In 1964, he opened the Peace Eye Bookstore, which became a countercultural center on the Lower East Side. Along with poet Tuli Kupferberg, whose work he had frequently published, he formed a satiric folk-rock group, The Fugs, in 1965. In addition to political satire and comic scatology, primarily written Sanders, The Fugs also performed musical settings of William Blake poems like “How Sweet I Roamed From Field to Field.” In 1971, Sanders published The Family, a history of the Manson family, based largely on entrees to the group permitted by his anti-establishment reputation. It became his most successful book. Other significant prose works which followed it were Investigative Poetry, which took Charles Olson’s work, particularly The Maximus Poems, as a starting point, and argued for a resumption of poetry’s responsibility for a theory of history; The Party: A Chronological Perspective on a Confrontation at a Buddhist Seminary, an account of a scandal involving the treatment of W. S. Merwin at the Naropa Instititute; and Tales of Beatnik Glory, a fictionalized memoir. Sanders has won the Frank O’Hara Prize of the Modern Poetry Association (1967) and the American Book Award (1988) for Thirsting For Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985. He has received National Endowment for the Arts awards (1966 and 1970), an NEA fellowship (1987-88), and a Guggenheim fellowship (1983-84). Sanders’ poetry is characterized by a base of colloquial, often obscene language, which can expand to accommodate a range of allusion, often to mythology (he has described Poem From Jail as being based on an ancient legend). It is often political, and offers an apocalyptic and absurdist worldview, with jeremiads against the powerful, and the hypocrisies of civilization. In his own words, his aesthetic was “total assault against the culture.” Sanders worked from the aesthetic principle described by Kerouac as “spontaneous bop prosody,” which had very little to do with the rigorous technique of bop, but did value spontaneity above all. His work has been criticized for the kinds of excesses that come from spontaneity, such as repetition and settling for easy but flamboyant effects, but it has also been praised for its powerful use of vernacular language, and its willingness to tackle large themes. After The Family, which took him a year and a half to write, he began to gravitate toward longer poetic forms, which frequently involved research. Following his own advice in Investigative Poetry, he wrote book-length biographies in verse of Anton Chekhov (1995) and Ginsberg (2000), and began a history of the United States in poetry, starting with one year, 1968, and continuing into a full-fledged history. In 1977, Sanders and his wife, the painter and writer Miriam R. Sanders, moved to Woodstock, NY, where in 1995 they started a weekly newspaper, the Woodstock Journal, devoted to Sanders’ twin interests of poetry and an assault on mainstream politics and culture. |