America, a History in Verse: Volume 3: 1962-1970
Edward Sanders
David R. Godine
388 pp., $19.95 paper

Reviewed by Lewis MacAdams
Poet Lewis MacAdams is the author of “Birth of the Cool: Beat, Be-Bop, and the American Avant-Garde.” He is at work on a biography of Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone.

University student named Edward Sanders and seven of his fellow pacifists
slid away from a dock in New London, Conn., and proceeded across the harbor
toward Groton. The flotilla’s destination was General Dynamics’ Electric
Boat shipyard, where the Ethan Allen, a nuclear submarine equipped with 16
atomic missiles targeted to eliminate 30 million people in the Soviet Union,
was being commissioned. Sanders and his cohorts were determined to board
the ship and get arrested, and the recently deputized shipyard workers who
jumped from a tugboat to intercept them were only too happy to oblige.

Convicted of a breach of the peace and resisting arrest, Sanders
and the others refused to pay their $150 fines and were sentenced to
77 days in jail. Over the next few weeks, writing on toilet paper rolls
and cigarette wrappers, Sanders produced his first major piece of writing,
“Poem From Jail,” which was published in 1963 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s
City Lights Books. With its classical references and hipster inventions,
its invocation of Egyptian gods, its echoes of Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” and
Charles Olson’s “Maximus” poems and Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish,” its slanguage
(“Goof City / the city of the / trembling flank”), its ecstatic diction
(“& I breathe / the god breath / & dance / in the rays / of Nonviolence”)
and its cracker-barrel charm (“and the salt-domes / rumble / as the arse
/ of a politician”), “Poem From Jail” announced the appearance of a poet-scholar-activist
whose work remains news to this day.

After graduating from NYU in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in Greek,
Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore on the Lower East Side. Over the
next six years, the Peace Eye functioned as an incubator for the alternative
culture, hatching, among other institutions, the pioneer underground newspaper
EVO, short for the East Village Other, and the Fugs, a hairy, total-assault-on-the-culture
folk-rock ensemble that performed songs like “Kill For Peace,” “Slum
Goddess” and “I Saw the Best Minds of My Generation Rock.”

Sanders took an active role in the 1967 attempt to exorcise the Pentagon,
when thousands of marchers at the end of a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration
in Washington surrounded the building and chanted, “Out, demons, out!”
With Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others, he instigated the Yippie-sponsored
protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the early 1970s,
he settled in Woodstock, N.Y.

Since that time, Sanders has remained a paragon of muscular literary
effort, publishing 15 books of poetry, including verse biographies of
Anton Chekhov and Allen Ginsberg; writing and producing musical dramas
(“The Municipal Power Cantata,” “The Karen Silkwood Cantata”); and releasing
close to a dozen Fugs albums and a CD of ancient Greek poems set to his
own music, which he plays on instruments he invented, such as the talking
tie and the singing quilting frame. In 1988, his “Thirsting for Peace in
a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985″ won the American Book Award.
His collection of 58 interlocking short stories, “Tales of Beatnik Glory,”
is about to be reissued. For 8 1/2 years, he and his wife, writer Miriam
Sanders, published and edited the biweekly Woodstock Journal. All the while,
he has pursued a relentless schedule of readings, teaching and lectures.

In 1970 and 1971, Sanders covered the murder trial of Charles Manson
and his followers for the L.A. Free Press, and his 30 or so articles
became the basis of the best-selling and much-translated “The Family,”
still the most important book on that dark phenomenon. During the several
years he devoted to the project — a “saturation job” he calls it — Sanders
began to think about the idea of a poetry that would marry his lust for
information (he boasts nearly 100 filing boxes and drawers crammed with
active files), finely tuned paranoia and poet’s unquenchable desire to
sing. In a 1976 manifesto titled “Investigative Poetry,” he called on his
fellow poets to “begin a voyage into the description of historical reality.”
“Move over Herodotus,” the screed begins: “move over Thuc’ / move over Arthur
Schlesinger / move over logographers and chroniclers / and compulsive investigators
/ for the poets are / marching again / upon the hills / of history.” He
then began writing what he called historical poems. One investigated the
premature death of Herman Melville’s father, possibly from mercury poisoning.
Another celebrated the “Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side.”

After warming up with a verse history of the year 1968, Sanders embarked
in 1999 on his most ambitious project to date, a nine-volume history
of America in verse. The first five volumes, he announced, would cover
the 20th century, after which he would work his way back to the 15th, one
century at a time. Volume 1 (1900-1939) of “America, a History in Verse”
dealt with the labor movement and international politics, Volume 2 (1940-1961)
with World War II and the Eisenhower era. He has just released Volume 3,
which covers the years 1962-70.

As Sanders writes in the poem’s introduction, those years were:

… the time of my

youthful rebellion

… when we searched for meaning

in the sawdust floors of the rebel cafes

or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze

or mind-stretching hours in front of

4- and 8-track tape recorders

getting our brains onto friendly oxide

while we outlined our livers

like a Dan Flavin sculpture …

Sanders is a character in his poem — co-founding the Committee to
Legalize Marijuana with Ginsberg, forming the Fugs with poet Tuli Kupferberg
— but his is only one skein in a complex weave rich with heroes and villains.
The heroes are not so much thinkers as people who take brave and principled
action. (“Nothing is possible,” as Sanders’ teacher, the great poet-scholar
Charles Olson, wrote, “without doing it.”) Rachel Carson writes “Silent
Spring” while battling cancer. The members of the Catonsville Nine are
sentenced to two to 3 1/2 years in federal prison for grabbing 400 draft
files from the local draft board and burning them. A soldier named Ron
Ridenhour breaks the story of the My Lai massacre. President Lyndon Johnson
signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act on TV even as he tells aide Bill Moyers
that the law “delivered the South to the / Republican Party / during your
life and mine.” At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, track stars Tommie Smith
and John Carlos bow their heads and raise black-gloved fists in Black Power
salutes on the victors’ platform as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played.

The poem’s villains are, in Sanders’ eyes, liars and hypocrites,
including the “creepy smut-addict named J. Edgar Hoover” (Sanders catalogs
the FBI director’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr.’s sex life),
the “secrecy-batty would-be Metternich” Henry Kissinger and Richard “Lazy
Shave” Nixon (Sanders returns again and again to their “secret bombing”
of Cambodia) and the “military-industrial-surrealists” whom Sanders accuses
of warping reality to sate their hunger for “domination, empire, space
warfare, carpet bombing, napalming, and nuking.” Yet he is not afraid to
examine his own errors. In an entry on the 1967 Summer of Love and the counterculture
he helped spawn, he writes:

It made great copy for mass culture sources such as

The 6 o’clock news or Life magazine

but nothing is easy

& the long-time all-level fierceness

required to forge such social change

was not quite there in the Zone of Fun.

Sanders records hundreds of people and movements and events, from
the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points against the Knicks to the
resignation of LBJ’s Supreme Court appointee Abe Fortas, which, in Sanders’
estimation, “began the Court’s lurchy trek to the right.” The poem celebrates
the legislation authorizing Medicare; the three days of riots after the
June 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, signaling
the emergence of gay and lesbian political consciousness; the first Earth
Day, April 22,1970, which occurred less than two weeks before four student
antiwar protesters were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

The lives and loves and violent deaths of John and Robert Kennedy
and King resonate throughout “America, a History in Verse: Volume 3.” Sanders
tells these stories with a sense of the ineluctability of fate, though
he looks at Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray as patsies,
as victimized as the men they ostensibly gunned down on their own — a
larger, far more sinister tale. John Lennon and the Beatles are a recurring
presence. Sanders writes of Feb. 1, 1964, as the day “The Beatles’ ‘I Want
to Hold Your Hand’ became #1 / in a nation so eager for innocence / after
the shudder of November / & the dogs of Birmingham.”

Underscoring everything is the ominous drum roll of the Vietnam War,
growing louder and closer. Of the April 15, 1962, arrival in Vietnam
of a helicopter unit of 400 men, one of the earliest official combat
units to be deployed, Sanders writes:

If Euripides were writing it as a play

he would have had a chorus of the snipping Fates

swoon forth with a keening ee ee ee ee

like the eery ee-ing in Trojan Women …

To succeed in this audacious enterprise, Sanders invoked a trio of
New Muses connected to contemporary technologies: Retentia, the Muse
of the Retained Image; Sequentia, the Muse of Sequencing and the Poetic
Data Cluster; and Condensare, the Muse of Distillation. In a search for
what he calls “the Distilled Essence, the graceful illumination, the thrilling
or engrossing moment,” Sanders discovered his method in his own research.
“I had noticed when I was writing ‘The Family’ that many of my hand-written
pages tended to be broken into verse-like line breaks,” he recently remarked.
“I found when I made notes while interviewing people, the lines tended
to break into verse-like clusters.” Charles Olson was also an abiding influence,
especially his 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” which insists that “the
poem must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points,
an energy-discharge.” Equally crucial, Sanders says, is “the sequencing
of the poetic data-clusters.” The January 1966 “Trips Festival” in San
Francisco marking the advent of the LSD culture, for instance, is sandwiched
between the slaughter of “100,000 ‘communists’ ” in Indonesia and the
resumption of bombing in Vietnam after a peace pause of 37 days. Otherwise,
this poem might as well be schoolwork — gargantuan lists without resonance
or evolutionary import.

The most radical aspect of Sanders’ poem is the occasional use of
what he calls glyphs — that is, faces and images to represent people and
events. The enemies of peace and goodwill are characterized as “grrr-heads”
or “nope heads” or “national security grouches,” with cartoon lightning
bolts shooting out of furrowed brows. Any victory for democratic socialism
inspires cartoon capitalist eyeballs (“cap-eyes”) to roll. A recurrent image
throughout the poem is of the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building
in Washington, with Hoover’s name crossed out.

The soul of Sanders’ epic is a patriotic attempt to apply Maat, the
Egyptian feather of justice, to his native land (an illustration in the
poem depicts the feather imposed on a map of the USA). “Between my country
right or wrong / & my country sometimes right sometimes wrong / or
my country terribly wrong / lies the / Feather of Justice.” A passionate
optimist, Sanders roots for the good America and celebrates it every time
it emerges. Neil Armstrong’s first moon-step “was a moment for America.”
The arrival of folk singer and environmental activist Pete Seeger’s sloop
Clearwater in the mouth of the Hudson, auguring the river’s clean-up, was
another such moment, as was Justice William O. Douglas’ successful effort
to stop a right-wing cadre led by then-Rep. Gerald Ford from impeaching him.
All are elements of Sanders’ “rhapsody of a great nation”:

… where so many sing without cease

work without halt

shoulder without shudder

to bring the Feather of Justice to every

belltower, biome & blade of grass

in Graceful America …

Our poets seem to have lived too long in solipsism. There are 348
creative-writing programs in this country, according to the Assn. of Writers
and Writing Programs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and I venture
to say that almost none of them teach politics or history or economics or
ecology or statecraft. I would even argue that such a huge number of writing
schools exist precisely because external reality is not challenged by their
teachings or writings. Since the fading of the Beat Generation, the poetry
that is taught or anthologized or rewarded in this country is primarily
inward-looking and partial to the so-called personal poem.

There is nothing inherently wrong, of course, with gazing inward
on what Sanders calls the “swirlyswirly.” All poetry is personal, in the
sense that it is apprehended by an individual poet, but the subject matter
doesn’t have to be so limited. There’s also what Charles Olson called “the
figure of outward” — and the worlds of the material, which also require
our attention. When Olson used the term, he was referring to the great
American poet Robert Creeley. But time has bestowed that fine cognomen
on Ed Sanders as well. In his life and his work, in “America, a History
in Verse,” Sanders is showing us the way. *

Published: March 21, 2004 New York Times

James Turrell is known for making art out of light and thin air, challenging our notion of how we see. The artist says that his work is ”like trying to make the emperor’s clothes visible.” Turrell calls his
latest work — a 350-square-foot concrete ”skyspace” — a garden folly. It hangs 200 feet above Benedict Canyon in Los Angeles, cost more than a million dollars and took 13 years to complete because of its precarious site. It even outlived the renowned modernist architect John Lautner, whose
office got the commission, and was completed by Lautner’s project architect, Duncan Nicholson.

realize that we perceive the outside reality incompletely. We think we areseeing the whole, but in fact we are only seeing part. We think we exist
independently of nature, but we are very interrelated. We even influence
the colors that we see.”

So does Turrell. Like the Wizard of Oz, he pulls the strings to
transform what we see. More than 5,000 computer-programmed L.E.D. and
incandescent lights, concealed beneath the floor, wash the walls with
a symphony of colors — which in turn transform the sky outside from blue
to red to molasses black. At times it feels as if the whole room is pulsating
with energy. ”The colors work on the senses like abstract music,”
Turrell said. ”It is profoundly emotional work.”

Often the reaction it elicits is awe. ”Everyone’s mouth falls open
when they see it,” said James Goldstein, an entrepreneur, who commissioned
the skyspace. Twice a day he navigates the 230 or so steps down a near-vertical
hillside from his house to visit his folly, which is equipped with a wet
bar and a sound system — two distinctly un-Turrellian additions. The
artist would prefer that his patron listen to the sounds of the planets,
but he doesn’t dictate how the space is to be used. Turrell’s own dream
(apart from completing the Roden Crater, the celestial observatory that he
has been building in a sleeping Arizona volcano for the last 30-plus years)
is to build a sky-viewing house where he can live, eat, bathe and sleep
year-round. ”Light is strangely fragile,” he said. ”It needs to have
a home where it is cared for.”

Published: July 15, 2004 New York Times

Their faces long with disapproval, the anchors announced that the reason for the war had finally been uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and it was “groupthink,” not to mention “collective groupthink.” It sounds so kinky and un-American, like something that might go on in a North Korean
stadium or in one of those sex clubs that Jack Ryan, the former Illinois Senate candidate, is accused of dragging his wife to. But supposedly intelligent, morally upstanding people had been indulging in it right in Langley, Va.
    This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it’s hard to find any thinking these days that doesn’t qualify for the prefix “group.” Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate
culture prides itself on individualism, but it’s the “team player” with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone “out of step with the American people.” Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.
    This summer’s remake of the “Stepford Wives” doesn’t have anything coherent to say about gender politics: Men are the oppressors? Women are the oppressors? Or maybe just Glenn Close? But it does play to the fantasy, more widespread than I’d realized, that if you were to rip off the face of the person sitting in the next cubicle, you’d find nothing but circuit boards underneath.
    I trace the current outbreak of droidlike conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren’t cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he has since backed down) that Americans “need to watch what they say.” Never mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it’s soothing to underestimate the enemy, it’s often fatal, too.
    And what was that group thinking in Abu Ghraib? Yes, the accused guards seem to have been encouraged to soften up their charges for interrogation, just as the operatives at Langley were pelted with White House demands for some plausible casus belli. But the alarming thing is how few soldiers demurred, and how many got caught up in the fun of it.

   Societies throughout history have recognized the hazards of groupthink and made arrangements to guard against it. The shaman, the wise woman and similar figures all represent
institutionalized outlets for alternative points of view. In the European carnival tradition, a “king of fools” was permitted to mock the authorities, at least for a day or two. In some cultures, people resorted to vision quests or hallucinogens — anything to get out of the box. Because, while
the capacity for groupthink is an endearing part of our legacy as social animals, it’s also a common precondition for self-destruction. One thousand coalition soldiers have died because the C.I.A. was so eager to go along with the emperor’s delusion that he was actually wearing clothes.   Instead of honoring groupthink resisters, we subject them to insult and abuse. Sgt. Samuel Provance III has been shunned by fellow soldiers since speaking out against the torture at Abu Ghraib, in addition to losing his security clearance and being faced with a possible court-martial. A fellow Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, Specialist Joseph Darby, was praised by the brass, but has had to move to an undisclosed location to avoid grass-roots retaliation.
    The list goes on. Sibel Edmonds lost her job at the F.B.I. for complaining about mistranslations of terror-related documents from the Arabic. Jesselyn Radack was driven out of her post at the Justice Department for objecting to the treatment of John Walker Lindh, then harassed by John Ashcroft’s enforcers at her next job. As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: “We need to understand in this `land of the free and home of the brave’ that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families.”

   This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.