Description: The first law of the data site, however, is relatively simple: if complex intelligence is to continue to evolve it must act so there are more possibilities to act next time. Don Byrd, from the introductory essay
Review Quotes:
....one of the most important documents, texts, textbooks, and manifestos or manifestations to come into my hands since--I guess it's the most important thing for me since "Projective Verse" itself.
George Butterick
Ed Sanders' clarion call is for American poets--in a paranoid time when poems, "news that stays news," get accused of false news--"to resume their ancient tradition of describing historical reality." The methodology he proposed in the 1975 "Investigative Poetry" lectures has already bequeathed to us, with Sanders' Lucan-like facility for poetry and scholarship, a quarter century of multi-volume verse histories. The advance of Investigative Poetry laps the formal innovation of "a poem including history" even as it answers Olson's consuming desire to establish a methodology. Sanders asserts that the long-poem is history. That poetry is the language of history. That our great poets (he names in the first few pages Pound, Crane, Williams, Olson, Ginsberg, Snyder, Rothenberg, d.a. levy) begin as scholars of primary sources. That the poem is a sharp instrument for investigating the era. A poem on the order of De Incendio Urbis is a threat to the despots of any era and all eras. Sanders' contemporary masters Sebald and Bolaño, lacking native histories of Investigative Poetry, nevertheless were moved to carry out detective work in prose fictions.
move over Herodotus
move over Thuc'
move over Arthur Schlesinger
move over logographers and chroniclers
and compulsive investigators
for the poets are
marching again
upon the hills
of history
Rich Blevins
A sense of victory in remaining embedded/embodied in/ as the-book-the-bard. Rather than useless "forgetful symbols"--transitory moments that pass on us or pass us by or pass along--it is from the stance of integrities of our involvement where we create bridges to future bards. "Sweet nets of bard-babble"--permission to speak freely. In the invitation, "you make law" by "concomitant chords." Freedom to create, I most appreciate the encouragement to keep going beyond the threat of being stopped--no matter how seemingly rich or convincing or historical that threat may be believed to be.
j/j hastain
Some of us had the fortune of discovering Ed Sanders' Investigative Poetry at our beginnings. For me it was the birth of the poet after many aborted efforts and has remained a major root. Sanders and the Fugs' incantation to exorcise and levitate the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam War, his coverage for the LA Times of the trial of Charles Manson and subsequent, extraordinary book, The Family, and his essay, Investigative Poetry, are the root of a whole generation of poets. With Dispatches' much needed reprint here it will become a root for generations of poets to come.
Sharon Doubiago