Revs of the Morrow

by Ed Sanders

Poetry. Ed Sanders has been all over the map and always remained close to the center of counterculture resistance and in the forefront of defenders of freedom of speech. In this collection of new poems, he revisits some of his substantial fellow travelers, in poems to Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, and Olson. He pens odes to anarchist Emma Goldman and environmentalist Rachel Carson. He attacks our nation's leaders from Hamilton to Cheney, lavishes attention on a poem by Sappho (Greek included), and ends with a moving tale based on a story by Chekhov.

71 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

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

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though the poems name check back to Sappho and “Jake” Boehme, and forward into the dark present of George W., Sanders assembles a possible history—a history still actively in potentia—out of a constellation of affinities and affections with its axis in the American ‘60s, especially the ‘60s of Ginsberg, Olson, Agent Orange and psilocybin. This lends Sanders’s morrow a period air, but man what a period. “Ode to Rachel Carson,” which juxtaposes the progress of Carson’s cancer with the heat she took for Silent Spring, is a tear-jerker pulled from the drayage of history’s corporate muleteers.