Author Description

Product Description “Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!” Bold, sweeping, investigative, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rendering, thought-provoking, Edward Sanders’ three-volume, America: A History in Verse uniquely and brilliantly tells “the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds.” It is by turns angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. Volume 2 1940-1961 begins and ends with America on the brink of a war and great changes―in 1940 “with greed & evil / somewhat in check / when compared to Europe,” and in 1961, “at the beginning of a decade / that revealed the best & the worst / of a great nation.”Sanders’ reinventions of past worlds offer a moving masque of time constructed out of multiple narrative aspects and tones, skillfully and variously implemented by a poetic style of compacted history. About the Author Edward Sanders wrote his first poem on jail-cell toilet paper after being arrested for protesting the launch of nuclear submarines in 1961. Political protest remains an intrinsic part of his poetic vision to this day. In 1976, Sanders founded Investigative Poetry; the principles of this movement appear most prominently in his History in Verse series.Sander's signature is an imaginative compression of historical fact into poetic myth; his mode of "compacted history." Angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny, Sanders' reinventions of historical worlds offer a moving masque of time constructed out of multiple narrative aspects and tones, skillfully and variously implemented by rhetorical techniques of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. "Poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history", Ed Sanders proclaimed in his momentous 1976 manifesto on Investigative Poetics. Dedicated since then to a "relentle