The Review of Contemporary Fiction

1968: A History in Verse by Edward Sanders
Brooke Horvath

Edward Sanders. 1968: A History in Verse. Black Sparrow, 1997. 260 pp. Cloth: $25.00; paper: $14.00.

1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, My Lai and the Tet offensive, Soviet tanks in Prague and barricades in the streets of Paris, Electric Ladyland and Cheap Thrills, and much more. 1968 was also an important year for then-Yippie and rock star (with the Fugs) Ed Sanders, whose first novel, Shards of God, was inspired by the joint Chicago debacle that was the Yippie Festival of Life and the Democratic convention—events that figure prominently in 1968 as well.
If Shards presented itself as drug-laced, extraterrestrial “smut-porn” with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin cast as revolutionary epic goof-heroes, 1968—like Sanders’s 1995 verse biography Chekhov—reworks the events of that year in the light of ideas Sanders first propounded in Investigative Poetry (1976): that “poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history” through “relentless pursuit of data.”
The result is a verse history that is equal parts chronicle, personal anecdote, documented reportage, polemic, and paean. A powerful narrative of one year’s “chrono-flow,” 1968 takes its readers from Avenue A on the Lower East Side to “the halls of robokill” to remember and assess events large and now largely forgotten. Sanders may privilege the directly (prosaically) descriptive over the conventionally poetic, but his guns are locked on rock ‘n’ roll, and 1968 emerges as twelve months of Mardi Gras during the sacking of Rome, a love-in at a firefight with tracer rounds seen by strobe light. “How temporary it all was,” Sanders observes of that year, beautiful and disheartening by turns, yet finally how unforgettable:

. . . the tear gas grenades
Allen and I sprinted through
to get back to the Hotel Lincoln

The sweet sound
of Didi’s wrist bell
on Avenue A
. . . . . . . . .
the struggle
for freedom
& a just, sharing world

In his introduction several years ago to John Clarke’s The End of This Side (1979), Sanders called for “mythic poetry and National Epic.” With 1968 he has answered his own call. [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction 1968: A History in Verse by Edward Sanders Brooke Horvath Edward Sanders. 1968: A History in Verse. Black Sparrow, 1997. 260 pp. Cloth: $25.00; paper: $14.00. 1968 saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK, My Lai and the Tet offensive, Soviet tanks in Prague and barricades in the streets of Paris, Electric Ladyland and Cheap Thrills, and much more. 1968 was also an important year for then-Yippie and rock star (with the Fugs) Ed Sanders, whose first novel, Shards of God, was inspired by the joint Chicago debacle that was the Yippie Festival of Life and the Democratic convention—events that figure prominently in 1968 as well. If Shards presented itself as drug-laced, extraterrestrial “smut-porn” with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin cast as revolutionary epic goof-heroes, 1968—like Sanders’s 1995 verse biography Chekhov—reworks the events of that year in the light of ideas Sanders first propounded in Investigative Poetry (1976): that “poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history” through “relentless pursuit of data.” The result is a verse history that is equal parts chronicle, personal anecdote, documented reportage, polemic, and paean. A powerful narrative of one year’s “chrono-flow,” 1968 takes its readers from Avenue A on the Lower East Side to “the halls of robokill” to remember and assess events large and now largely forgotten. Sanders may privilege the directly (prosaically) descriptive over the conventionally poetic, but his guns are locked on rock ‘n’ roll, and 1968 emerges as twelve months of Mardi Gras during the sacking of Rome, a love-in at a firefight with tracer rounds seen by strobe light. “How temporary it all was,” Sanders observes of that year, beautiful and disheartening by turns, yet finally how unforgettable: . . . the tear gas grenades Allen and I sprinted through to get back to the Hotel Lincoln The sweet sound of Didi’s wrist bell on Avenue A . . . . . . . . . the struggle for freedom & a just, sharing world In his introduction several years ago to John Clarke’s The End of This Side (1979), Sanders called for “mythic poetry and National Epic.” With 1968 he has answered his own call. [Brooke Horvath]

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