Drawing the Line: Ed Sanders’ 1968 is Poetry Book of the Year
Dateline: 8/26/97My wife is an artist. I’m a poet. She draws, I end lines. This summer of 97 we lie in bed in early morning upstate New York and watch trees come to light. We drink coffee in bed, we read, we talk. Elizabeth is reading Middlemarch, and gasps amazed with the smarts of a writing circling the Reader until Reader is inside, is all the characters. The world vibrates. I am reading Ed Sanders’ investigative poetics text 1968, the most amazing year of the century seen afresh and personal as Ed led the Fugs through the year of Chicago and RFK assassination. Occasionally we will chortle or cry in surprise, and bring the Other up to date.
Mayor Daley’s people did not take kindly to Abbie Hoffman’s smoking pot in the Mayor’s chambers. I chortle. The image cracks me up: “Right On!” to Abbie’s refusal to bend to hypocrisy. I read the section to E. “This is why the 60s failed,” she starts in. “Little boys playing their games, getting even with Mommy and Daddy.” Wonderful passion -- yes, the participants were all white middle class men. The Yippie movement was so infiltrated by cops -- 1 in 6 at Chicago park demonstration were undercover. Daley had no plans to grant permits, anyway. The Motherfuckers and Chicago radicals were opposed to the demo sans permits.
Do you get a permit to have a revolution?
What did we know? Nothing.
Say he had granted a permit -- then it would have been “Stand over here in lines in a part of the City where no one would notice.” Hoffman began things on an even footing -- “your halls of power, my cultural mores.” I may not be good at analysis, and pot may not be an issue to kill over, but freedom is what Yippies were all about. . . Let Daley have his martinis. Smoke the pipe, as the Natives do.
By now E is back in Middlemarch. And I am reading about Terry Southern and William Burroughs joining with Ed and Allen in Chicago. . . . hours of Om to keep the calm, calm.
This is 1997, not the most amazing year of the century, the year of the Death of the Beat Generation -- Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs. But we have he who has refused to be burnt out, torch-bearer Ed Sanders, providing us with a way forward through the past.
1968 by Ed Sanders is the Poetry Book of the Year.
--Bob Holman
NB: In future posts, Holman will revel in the brill of 68 and in Sanders' wordblend of Blake, Rumi, and Woody Guthrie. Stay tuned for more of what happened in 68 and how a poem becomes history. And pick up your own copy of 1968: A History in Verse like today!
- Literary Kicks' bio, Fugs discography & Sanders bibliography is a good place to start if you want to read more about Ed Sanders.
- Delerium's Psychedelic Web has a vast archive of American and British bands of the 60s & 70s, including The Fugs & The Holy Modal Rounders.
- And Timothy Miller's historical essay “Roots of Communal Revival 1962-1966” provides a fascinating introduction to the context of 1968, by way of describing the social background that led to the founding of The Farm.
