America

In 1999 Black Sparrow published Ed Sanders' America: A History in Verse, Volume 1, 1900-1939. This second volume continues the series, covering the years 1940-1961. Inscribing the historical period in that speeded-up dream of history which marks the Sanders docu-epic style, this installment 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".

Sander's patented signature in poetry is an imaginative compression of historical fact into poetic myth; his mode of "compacted history", employed in such earlier Black Sparrow volumes as Hymn to the Rebel Cafe, Chekhov, and 1968: A History in Verse, reminds us repeatedly of Pound's critical insistence on economy in poetic writing (dichtung=condensare). 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 "relentless pursuit of data", Sanders has distinguished himself as the historically engaged poet of his generation, the one poet of imagination whose work also brings us an important vision of a world existing outside itself.