Investigative Poetry

Ed Sanders’s great document is generative Ur screed for all investigation. It reclaims power for poets designating  “’istorin”, as  scrappy  yet  sophisticated, timeless, adventure.  Investigate the Abyss! perfect rallying cry for the Kali Yuga mess we’re in. Data as sanity, as earth-touching mudra to awakened mind. Down with cognitive dissonance! Key scripture to Jack Kerouac School Naropa’s pedagogy since early inception, Investigative Poetics holds ground in this elegant new edition with elucidating preface by Don Byrd. Long live the cultural intervention this text already was and continues to be. Facing ethical and ecological crisis and loss of historical memory and  dynastic corporate control and greed,  we needed Sanders’s IP anew and available.  It is powerful apotropaic medicine to the syndicates of samsara, a tool kit for survival, mind and senses in tact. And as brilliant antidote to distraction culture, you can actually wake up in the morning and DO something!

      We had early heady days at Naropa in Boulder Colorado, close to the great divide, and negative ions, and east & west sympathies and symmetries, and eidolons of TAZ and rhizome and icons and scions of the New American Poetry converging to test their mettle and imagination with one another, with  horrors of Viet Nam barely over, sixties burnout, New Contract with America on horizon.  We know the rest.  During our protests at Rocky Flats, Allen Ginsberg wrote his doc-po “Plutonian Ode” I think influenced by Ed’s method. We all knew how useful Ed’s ideas were and carried them with us to other places and into the work as well. Some of the energy for my own obsession with archive come to mind, as well as the trickle down to field poets everywhere.

     Anne Waldman