With Hymn to the Rebel Cafe (1994), Chekhov (1995) and 1968: A History in Verse (1997), Ed Sanders has developed a remarkable mode of "compacted history" (as one critic called it). Angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, these works offer a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic.In the present volume, Sanders embarks on his most ambitious project to date: an epic, neo-Herodotean finding-out-for-oneself of salient moments and movements in the public/private history of the American twentieth century. Bold, sweeping, data-retentive, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rending, thought-provoking, Sanders' History adds a brilliant new poetic patch to "the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds." And who am I, someone could ask, to write a history of America ? trained with my every breath for 41 years to chant & sing, whisper, shout, keen, dance with joy & try to trace with grace what the Fates & Human Mammals have wrought in the Time-Track of America (From the Introduction) A visionary longing for an earthly paradise of unviolated nature provides the poetic "fiction" which underlies Ed Sanders' dense fields of politically conscious factoids. His catalog of the obstacles to the fulfillment of that vision comprises a modern history of struggle, re-interpreted and illuminated by the imagination's light in each line of his poetic re-telling.

In "America", Sanders embarks on an epic, non-Herodotean finding-out-for-oneself of salient moments and movements in the public/private history of the American 20th century.

"Edward Sanders is America's bard, the cheerful, chanting poet who sings our collective life and times, our "Seething Nation! Vast and Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!" His present project is a free-verse chronicle of the American Century, from the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor down to the present day. Two previous volumes, documenting the period 1900-1961, appeared in 2000. Now Sanders gives us a third, an account of 1962-1970, "the time of a randy young president with a bad back," of "a strange man named Johnson," then of "an even stranger man named Nixon."" "It was the time of Vietnam, freedom march, space shots, and evil - "the only word for some of it." But it was also the time of the poet's radical youth, and oh what bliss to be young, alive, and high in those excruciatingly interesting times, those days "when we searched for meaning / in the sawdust floors of rebel cafes / or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze / or mind-stretching hours in front of 4- and 8-track tape recorders / getting our brains onto friendly oxide / while we outlined our livers / like a Dan Flavin sculpture"!" What a whirling hurry of years it was, what a flash of time. And what a necessary, 21st-century Whitman Sanders is, channeling Clio for our great nation, where so many "work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every bell tower, biome & blade of grass." Long may he sing us the 1960s, and long may his America dwell in peace, freedom, and equality "out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way."