Investigative Poetry

by Ed Sanders

Book by Sanders, Ed

Genres: Poetry

40 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Louis Cabri]

This book is now also available as a free pdf through Ed Sanders's website, http://woodstockjournal.com/.

[Nora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curioso.

[Ned · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a writer, than you should have read this.

[Sparrow .]

In 1975, Ed made a startling discovery: all the great extended poems of the 20th century (and I quote him): “The Wasteland, The Bridge, the Cantos, W. C. Williams’ Paterson” – (page 15) all required historical research. The Romantic notion that poets are fed by inspiration, not by study, is a myth. Why can’t poets rewrite history – and, by doing so, MAKE history?

In the summer of 1975 – to give a historical background to his poetical historicity – Ed delivered a version of this book as a lecture at the Counterculture Festival in Montréal. Ed gave me this copy, just recently republished by Spuyten Duyvil Press (in their “Dispatches Editions”) and I read his manifesto for the first time. “My God! I should’ve been practicing Investigative Poetry these last 43 years,” I realized. But maybe in some inchoate way I have been. For example, here’s a poem of mine:

Favorite Clues

9 down, 12 down, 17 across

[New York Times crossword puzzle, April 13, 2013]

Let me open Investigative Poetry at random:

We have already mentioned Blake’s work on the French Revolution which he decided not to print; and the later work of Pushkin; how all this talk how poets calm down, how they “come to terms with it,” how they become “more objective” is bunk from a punk…

(Written around the time of the birth of Punk music…)