Rise Up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball! (1968.2)

Dateline: 9/9/97

I’m in the sunset, the Amtrak Hudson Valley Local on the way to Albany from Mighty Penn Station. It’s the middle of August, summer’s greens turn to gold as the eye of the days settles lushly into the ease of the river. We’re in Rhinecliff, the stop for Woodstock, where I’ll be reading in a few days. Woodstock is home to Ed Sanders, a poet who has inspired me, over the years, to write, to read, to redefine the job of poet to be, simply, a job. To be a bard. To search out and gain knowledge, be serious about maintaining it, and pass it on. To hold on to the rigor and the vigor. To invent the new lyre. To set poetry free to be the news: to investigate. Ed Sanders is the poet/scholar/creator of Investigative Poetics.

And now, with the deaths of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Huncke, I open up the pages of the new Sanders book of poetry, 1968: A History in Verse, full of Olson’s open form, Ed’s Egyptian glyphs, footnotes, jokes, photos, ephemera. In 1968 rock and politics shared the air, and Ed’s playful, incisive language serves as time machine: if you were there (1968 as Place), it will cause you to resurrect that other world; if you weren’t, you’ll never believe that that year was squeezed into a year.

Yes, Mouth Almighty Record’s win in the National Slam brings a lot of poetry issues into relief. But it’s Ed Sanders and His Magic Pulse Lyre, Ed Sanders, lead warbler of the Fugs, editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and now the editor of his own weekly, The Woodstock Journal, it is Ed we turn to to find, “What does the poet say in times like this? What do we sing?”

“We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!”
         our leaflets thundered
“Rise up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball!”
---though, 30 years later, it seems a tactical error
to announce that 500,000 people
         were going to make love
                 in Chicago parks [p.17]

“I don’t care what you sing,
but if you jack off that microphone
                one more time
I’m going to arrest you. [p.23]

Nothing overt occurred
    no hover-job, no mist, no noise, no clank, no rustle
             [during Exorcism of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s gravesite, p.25]

NB: Now this is writing! This here post continues our homage and turn-on to Ed Sanders’ totally great 1968, the Poetry Book of the Year. We’ll be dipping into 68 often, as a compass to the future. Get your own copy by ordering here or by walking to your local indy libro lore store and forking over dough. The cover is amazing!

And then, as usual for a year of bullets
we flew away,
    and left the locals to sort out
        the knots of what we had done. [p.26]

--Bob Holman

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(1968.1) Drawing the Line: Ed Sanders' 1968 is Poetry Book of the Year. . .

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