Ed Sanders, July 1

Beyond creating The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg & Ken Weaver, the quintessential 1960s satirical/political/avant-garde rock band, beyond being a founding member of the Yippies, & taking part in actions at the 1967 March on the Pentagon & the 1968 confrontation of the Democratic Party’s Convention in Chicago, or even his books, Tales of Beatnik Glory, or The Family, or multiple volumes of his poems, Ed Sanders' best contribution to world culture & to others in the “po-biz” is perhaps the concept & practice of Investigative Poetry or “history-poesy,” from in such works as 1968 (Black Sparrow Press, 1997), & Chekhov (Black Sparrow Press, 1995), & the biography The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem (The Overlook Press, 2000), & the multi-volume/genre America a History in Verse the 20th Century.

Now he has come out with Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy, A Graphic History (Arcade Publishing, 2018) with illustrations by Rick Veitch. Since the time he was writing 1968, perhaps before, he has been obsessed with the mysteries, confabulations, flim-flams, obfuscations, lies, etc. surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. I mean, just who is this Sirhan Sirhan & where did he come from? Over the years Sanders has accumulated 23 banker boxes of material — interviews with people who were there, eye-witnesses, cops, other researchers, government records, whatever. But he acknowledges that Broken Glory is not the final story, as he & others follow leads & evidence as the “true story” slips into the dark closets of history.

This day he was at the Kingston Artists Collective & Cafe, on Broadway in Kingston down by the Rondout before a packed house.  Sanders talked about his decades of research, which is still ongoing & read from the final section of the book, about the assassination in the Ambassador Hotel & the confusion as RFK is led away from his handlers & body-guards, & murdered by agents not yet identified. Then he turned to his lute to sing the dirge, “Robert Kennedy fell down by the ice machine with rosary in his hand.”

Sanders clearly admires what RFK was trying to do to end the war in Viet Nam, to correct inequalities in American society, to establish equal justice for all, the same struggles we are faced with today. He called RFK an amazing American, & continues to have faith in the American democratic process, acknowledging that while we may be only in the first 2 years of the Trump administration, at some point he too will be gone & the American people will carry on.