Every Room We Ever Slept in Book

Edward Sanders is a poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and founder of the Investigative Poetry movement. His 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry* was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books. He has been regarded as a link between the beatniks and the hippies.

In 1975 he realized that the great extended poems of the 20th century (such as Eliot's "The Wasteland," Crane's "The Bridge," Pound's "Cantos," Williams' "Paterson," etc.) all relied on historical research. This realization took him beyond the romantic notion that poets are inspired, if not by the Muses, then by some soulful, expressive passion. He urged poets to go beyond that myth. Poetry can come from research and study. Poets can not only rewrite history; they can make history.

Taking a further step beyond investigation, Sanders adds a pedagogical element to his theories. He claims poetry can teach readers about their history and politics. By going even one step further, education can lead to his ultimate goal, that of empowering readers to re-energize the traditions of activism and art.

From his manifesto, "Investigative poesy is freed from capitalism, churchism, and other totalitarianisms; free from racisms, free from allegiance to napalm-dropping military police states'a poetry adequate to discharge from its verse-grids the undefiled high energy purely-distilled verse-frags, using every bardic skill and meter and method of the last 5 or 6 generations, in order to describe every aspect (no more secret governments!) of the historical present, while aiding the future, even placing bard-babble once again into a role as shaper of the future."

He argued that "the essence of investigative poetry is to create lines of lyric beauty that descend from data clusters, empowering readers with a melodic blizzard of data‐fragments." By using data‐fragments, verse-grids and verse-frags, he created layered, historically rich, political poems. His book-length poems on literary figures and American history include Chekhov, 1968: A History in Verse, and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg.

In 1998, Sanders began work on a 3-volume America, A History in Verse. I read Volume 2, 1940-196. His work is very much in the spirit of Howard Zinn focusing on the people rather than on politicians He is quite often catty and rather sarcastic. Repeatedly the reader will iterate the refrain, "Hmm, I never thought about it that way," and "Wow, they didn't teach me that in school."

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