An Interview with Edward Sanders

Abstract

Born in Kansas City on August 17, 1939, Ed Sanders migrated to New York's Greenwich Village as a young man. From this point on, as voracious reader and tireless literary artiste, he became a full-fledged writer (of poetry, fiction, and investigative journalism), editor, Peace Eye Bookstore owner, musician (founding member of Fugs), and antiwar activist. appearance of Poem from Jail from City Lights Books in 1963 was followed by a steady stream of poetry collections, many of which are excerpted in Sanders's collected poems, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century (Coffee House Press, 1987). Sanders's work, despite its variety of intonations, has always remained committed to idea promulgated by his Investigative Poetry (City Lights Books, 1975): poetry should again assume responsibility for description of history. As Charles Olson once noted, Sanders's work advances in a direction of production which probably isn't even guessed at. In 1975 edition of Contemporary Poets, Don Byrd remarked that in Sanders's poetry the raw energy of a 1960s-style peace march, a rock concert, and an orgy impels a fine intelligence. Many of his poems can be read as political protest; some may be read, by a reader intent upon it, as pornography. This last possibility may explain why Sanders's work, soundly planted in his enthusiastic, scholarly study of classics, Egyptology, political philosophy, and English romantics, is not as widely circulated as it should be. In 1979, in an essay introducing John Clarke's End of This Side, The Clarke-Boat, O-Boat, and Bard-Boat, Sanders described modern poet's role as a perpetuation of Noah's task. He argues that the establishment of mythic poetry and National Epic,