America: A History in Verse, Vol 1: 1900-1939

America: A History in Verse #1

by Ed Sanders

With Hymn to the Rebel Cafe (1994), Chekhov (1995) and 1968: A History in Verse (1997), Ed Sanders has developed a remarkable mode of "compacted history" (as one critic called it). Angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, these works offer a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic.

In the present volume, Sanders embarks on his most ambitious project to date: an epic, neo-Herodotean finding-out-for-oneself of salient moments and movements in the public/private history of the American twentieth century. Bold, sweeping, data-retentive, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rending, thought-provoking, Sanders' History adds a brilliant new poetic patch to "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds."

And who am I, someone could ask, to write

a history of America ?

trained with my every breath

for 41 years

to chant & sing, whisper, shout, keen, dance with joy

& try to trace with grace

what the Fates & Human Mammals have wrought

in the Time-Track of America

(From the Introduction)

A visionary longing for an earthly paradise of unviolated nature provides the poetic "fiction" which underlies Ed Sanders' dense fields of politically conscious factoids. His catalog of the obstacles to the fulfillment of that vision comprises a modern history of struggle, re-interpreted and illuminated by the imagination's light in each line of his poetic re-telling.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

About the author

Ed Sanders is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher. He has been called a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations.

Sanders was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of Missouri University in 1958 and hitchhiked to New York City’s Greenwich Village. He wrote his first major poem, "Poem from Jail," on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting against nuclear proliferation in 1961.

In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore (147 Avenue A in what was then the Lower East Side), which became a gathering place for bohemians and radicals.

Sanders graduated from New York University in 1964, with a degree in Classics. In 1965, he founded The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. The band broke up in 1969 and reformed in 1984.

In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the Tate-LaBianca murders. He obtained access to the Manson Family by posing as a "Satanic guru-maniac and dope-trapped psychopath."

As of 2006, Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York where he publishes the Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 36 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. He also invents musical instruments including the Talking Tie, the microtonal Microlyre and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

Reviews

[Dean Kritikos · Rating 4 out of 5]

An epic for our time (using Pound's definition of the epic, among others). Sanders' poem, or at least section one of it, is filled with jokey epithets and tethering adjectives any good translation of Homer gives you; I especially enjoyed the "-vom" (short for vomit) and "-slime" suffixes he'd attach to names of persons and groups of people he feels (rightly) that History ought to vilify. I think that what's most interesting about this book is the temporal juxtapositions it calls attention to. I also very much enjoyed the equal treatment of events in wars-and-treaties History and those in literary/artistic history. Most of all, Sanders' equalizing pen calls into question what ought to be considered History proper, and whether or not the capital-H should be used lightly. The "linen/deathbed" and "Novum in" lists at the close of each year-chapter were especially intriguing; I loved learning, for instance, that Kerouac was born the year that Proust died--and that Seamus Heaney was born the year that Yeats died. On the whole, I cn't wait to read the next volume.

[Oakley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"All hail the history of strikes!" All hail Ed Sanders and the Fugs!
This is a great historical satire written in a loose heroic verse. I learned a lot about the Wobblies and other radical groups from the early 19th century. There are details of long forgotten battles like the New York Rent Strike (Wish I was there). Basically, Sanders is writing the history of American Social Democracy and it's battle with the Rockefellers and other "cap-slime". His rapid fire adjectives are hilarious. It's also a good time to read this book with the modern health care debate raging.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Howard Zinn's "A People's History..." but fun. All the volumes are punchy & detailed overviews of what Sanders calls "the forces of Peace." Volume 3, covering Sanders' own '60s heyday, gets a little self-serving, but still worthwhile.