The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem by Edward Sanders
Brooke Horvath

Edward Sanders. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. Overlook Press, 2000. 252 pp. $27.95; Edward Sanders. America: A History in Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939. Black Sparrow, 2000. 385 pp. Paper: $16.00.

Poetry, Ed Sanders wrote in his 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, must “again assume responsibility for the description of history.” The urge to produce such poems has been with Sanders at least as far back as “The Entrapment of John Sinclair,” but it was with his book-length verse biography Chekhov and 1968: A History in Verse that Sanders began to answer his own call for a politically engaged, data-intensive poetry of epic proportions. This self-imposed project continues with The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg and the first installment of his three-volume work-in-progress, America: A History in Verse.

For many who grew up in the fifties and after, the author of Howl has been our Archilochus, Blake, and holy madman, and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg walks us carefully through what Sanders terms “the Forest Ginsberg.” It is an affectionate, personalized biography that presents the poet as “a great and positive beacon,” whose poetic genius, inexhaustible energy, and commitment to social justice placed him at the center of much that happened culturally and artistically in this country and elsewhere during the past half-century. Sanders covers familiar ground ably (the Gallery Six reading, Ginsberg as sixties guru) but is perhaps best when proffering the sort of insider information to which he was privy—Ginsberg making Ezra Pound listen to the Beatles and Dylan, for instance—and when recounting Ginsberg’s final decades, productive years still largely overshadowed by the legendary events of the fifties and sixties. Sanders accomplishes for his long-time friend and mentor what partisan criticism at its best must always do: to advocate for and thereby to send readers back to the poetry for a more informed, more sympathetic look.

What Sanders does for Ginsberg, he likewise accomplishes for the U.S. in volume 1 of America, which locates the first forty years of the American century in the context of world history—its politics, culture, scientific/technological advances—with particular attention to the working class and the American Left as both negotiated internal conflicts, capitalism’s hostility, the threat of fascism, and disappointments with Soviet communism. Like the Ginsberg biography, America occasionally threatens to sag beneath its accumulation of facts, sometimes frustrating a desire for elaboration and speculation or escaping the author’s control. But rewriting Howard Zinn’s A People’s History is not exactly where Sanders is at in America any more than competing with Barry Miles (Ginsberg) and Michael Schumacher (Dharma Lion) is his purpose in writing a narrative of Ginsberg’s life. Which leads to the question of what has been gained by producing biographies and histories in verse. Both books are prosodically of a piece with Chekhov and 1968, offering free-verse “data clusters” interrupted by small illustrations and headings that draw attention to certain events. The result is verbal collage (although strung along linear “time-tracks”) in which conventionally poetic lines are few. However, cumulatively the data clusters generate considerable power and a forward momentum that carries the reader feelingly through a world or a life.

Avoiding the prosaic requirements of textbook history or conventional biography, Sanders offers instead elegy and eulogy while avoiding the temptation to impose upon his subjects an undue interpretive/explanatory tidiness. If The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg is “a temporary path” through sacred terrain, a homage to one of the best minds of Sanders’s generation, America is a chant of praise and condemnation meant to inspire and outrage, a song of gratitude for the too-often unsung women and men who struggled to help secure a bit more of our birthright of freedom. Ginsberg was one bard in this struggle; Sanders is another. [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem by Edward Sanders Brooke Horvath Edward Sanders. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. Overlook Press, 2000. 252 pp. $27.95; Edward Sanders. America: A History in Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939. Black Sparrow, 2000. 385 pp. Paper: $16.00. Poetry, Ed Sanders wrote in his 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, must “again assume responsibility for the description of history.” The urge to produce such poems has been with Sanders at least as far back as “The Entrapment of John Sinclair,” but it was with his book-length verse biography Chekhov and 1968: A History in Verse that Sanders began to answer his own call for a politically engaged, data-intensive poetry of epic proportions. This self-imposed project continues with The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg and the first installment of his three-volume work-in-progress, America: A History in Verse. For many who grew up in the fifties and after, the author of Howl has been our Archilochus, Blake, and holy madman, and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg walks us carefully through what Sanders terms “the Forest Ginsberg.” It is an affectionate, personalized biography that presents the poet as “a great and positive beacon,” whose poetic genius, inexhaustible energy, and commitment to social justice placed him at the center of much that happened culturally and artistically in this country and elsewhere during the past half-century. Sanders covers familiar ground ably (the Gallery Six reading, Ginsberg as sixties guru) but is perhaps best when proffering the sort of insider information to which he was privy—Ginsberg making Ezra Pound listen to the Beatles and Dylan, for instance—and when recounting Ginsberg’s final decades, productive years still largely overshadowed by the legendary events of the fifties and sixties. Sanders accomplishes for his long-time friend and mentor what partisan criticism at its best must always do: to advocate for and thereby to send readers back to the poetry for a more informed, more sympathetic look. What Sanders does for Ginsberg, he likewise accomplishes for the U.S. in volume 1 of America, which locates the first forty years of the American century in the context of world history—its politics, culture, scientific/technological advances—with particular attention to the working class and the American Left as both negotiated internal conflicts, capitalism’s hostility, the threat of fascism, and disappointments with Soviet communism. Like the Ginsberg biography, America occasionally threatens to sag beneath its accumulation of facts, sometimes frustrating a desire for elaboration and speculation or escaping the author’s control. But rewriting Howard Zinn’s A People’s History is not exactly where Sanders is at in America any more than competing with Barry Miles (Ginsberg) and Michael Schumacher (Dharma Lion) is his purpose in writing a narrative of Ginsberg’s life. Which leads to the question of what has been gained by producing biographies and histories in verse. Both books are prosodically of a piece with Chekhov and 1968, offering free-verse “data clusters” interrupted by small illustrations and headings that draw attention to certain events. The result is verbal collage (although strung along linear “time-tracks”) in which conventionally poetic lines are few. However, cumulatively the data clusters generate considerable power and a forward momentum that carries the reader feelingly through a world or a life. Avoiding the prosaic requirements of textbook history or conventional biography, Sanders offers instead elegy and eulogy while avoiding the temptation to impose upon his subjects an undue interpretive/explanatory tidiness. If The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg is “a temporary path” through sacred terrain, a homage to one of the best minds of Sanders’s generation, America is a chant of praise and condemnation meant to inspire and outrage, a song of gratitude for the too-often unsung women and men who struggled to help secure a bit more of our birthright of freedom. Ginsberg was one bard in this struggle; Sanders is another. [Brooke Horvath]

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