Album cover photo of Ed by Miriam Sanders for a 2023 poetry/classical music project
The 1960s was a time of tumultuous change, and Ed and Miriam Sanders actively led the counterculture. Ed was a rising beat poet, and Miriam was a young artist. Together they drafted missives supporting freedom of speech, and they demonstrated against the US’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The times were aswirl with Blacks marching for their civil rights and women demanding equality. The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 promoted awareness of the dangers of industrial pollution. The mores and ways of “my country, right or wrong,” promulgated by the establishment were under bitter assault. Young people expressed their disdain for the old ways by embracing bohemian lifestyles: wearing long hair, burning draft cards, and experimenting with drugs. Ed Sanders and the beat generation piped the march for change by fusing charged poetry with music.
In the 1940s, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr had intense conversations in the West End Bar in New York City. Out of these talks evolved a “New Vision” that became the genesis of the Beat philosophy. Barry Miles, in Ginsberg: A Biography, quotes from Allen’s journal: “Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art, is true expression and true art.” The Beats went on to embrace Gandhian non-violent demonstrations, peace, dope, the green movement, and civil rights—and their bridging vehicle was literature. The early experiments by the San Francisco beat poets to wed spoken poetry to jazz met with some success. Kenneth Rexroth, the Father of the Beat Poets, wrote, “We simply want to make poetry a part of show business,” and Ralph Gleason, the writer for Rolling Stone magazine, said, “the [beats] wanted to get poetry into the streets, to the people, and on jukeboxes.”
Ed Sanders, born on August 17, 1939, in Kansas City, Missouri, was electrified when he read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1958. Ed lived in Blue Springs, Missouri, a small farming community in the western part of the state, and was a freshman at the University of Missouri. He aspired to be a poet and a change-maker. During Easter vacation, he visited Chicago with friends and saw Josh White perform at the Gate of Horn, Albert Grossman’s nightclub in North Dearborn. White’s searing performance of “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching song, shook him. Another formative moment was when he visited Nat and Florence Cowen’s Central Bookstore, where the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of tens of thousands of books—many filled with first editions of the works of Keats, Blake, and Shelley—overwhelmed his senses. He purchased The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones by Conrad Aiken and a collection of poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The sightseeing trip ended with a stop at a professional art supply store, where Ed purchased some paints and a Pelikan art set.
During the summer, Ed worked for a few weeks at a factory where he boxed automobile air conditioners and banded them up for shipment. “Flying Purple People Eater” was a popular tune, and Ed remembers the line foreman singing it during the work shift. By this time, Ed had memorized and internalized the meter of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” He recalls riding in the backseat of a car drinking beer with a pair of buddies, Larry Faeth and Bob Quarles, chanting it at full volume as they circled the county courthouse. The cadences of “Howl” reset Ed’s mindset, and increasingly he wanted to be where the beat writers hung out to soak up their milieu—and write beat poems. He dropped out of college and was torn between going to San Francisco or New York. He applied to New York University and the University of California at Berkeley. His fate was decided when NYU accepted him. Fortuitously his sister, Jacqueline, lived in Westchester County and offered to put him up. So, in August, Ed gathered a few belongings in a suitcase borrowed from his father and hitchhiked east. His last ride got him to New Jersey, where he hopped a bus to Port Authority and checked his bag. He went to the Gotham Bookstore, which he knew was a vital cog of the New York City literary scene, and there he spent almost all his remaining money.
Ed resumed his studies at New York University and majored in the Greek and Latin classics. Soon after, he met fellow student Miriam Kittell in Greek class. She was an artist who had previously studied at the Catan-Rose Institute of Art. They married in 1961 as Ed embraced the beatnik philosophy and began writing and publishing his poetry in Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. Ed enterprisingly printed 500 copies of the publication on a mimeograph machine and mailed it to literary luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Becket, and Charles Olson. The magazine was irreverent and scatological, and its sly polemic humor was upbeat, downbeat, and outrageous. It was too much for some, like the local constabulary, and Ed was arrested on an obscenity charge. In 1962, the world held its breath as the Cuban Missile crisis played out. People didn’t know if they would wake up to live another day. As the realization sunk in that the country would survive, Ed and his fellow artists on the Lower East Side redoubled their efforts to effect change.
One day Ed met the well-known beat poet Tuli Kupferberg outside the Charles Theater on Avenue B on the Lower East Side. Tuli was selling his magazine Birth to movie patrons as they emerged. Ed asked if Tuli would like to submit a poem to Fuck You. The latter agreed. Tuli was born in 1923 and grew up during the Great Depression. His father was an unsuccessful luggage store owner with three stores that went bust during the economic depression. He ended up working as a clothing machine operator in a sweatshop. Over the course of his employment, he became a union man and was arrested several times. Tuli got a degree from Brooklyn College and started writing poetry and short stories in anthologies such as The Beats and the Village Voice.
In Fug You, Ed Sanders’s informal history of his Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, and The Fugs, he says that in high school, he followed rock and roll and country and western tunes, but by 1964 he was becoming more attuned to civil rights songs and jazz. Further, he was thinking about fusing his poetry with the new generation of pop tunes. One night in 1964, Ed and Tuli met after a poetry reading at Café Le Metro and watched poets Robert Creeley and LeRoi Jones dancing to the jukebox. Suddenly Ed proposed that he and Tuli form a group, and Ed said, “We’ll set poetry to music.” Tuli enthusiastically embraced Ed’s idea.
The pair drew inspiration from the dances of Dionysus, the poèms simultanés of the Dadaists, and the jazz poetry of the beats. They mixed in some of the explosive spontaneity of the Happening Movement and dug deep to invoke the songs of the civil rights movement. The self-taught musicians attracted a cult-like audience for their hard-edged, subversive poetry-infused lyrics. Ed Sanders and Tuli booked the band to play numerous gallery openings. As their anti-Vietnam war activities picked up, they played at rallies, benefits, and regular concerts at Fillmore West, Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, and on the bill with stars like the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin (Big Brother and the Holding Company). One of Ed’s anti-war stunts involved the National Committee to End the War in Vietnam’s March on the Pentagon. In this instance, Ed and such cohorts as Bob Fass of WBAI parked a flatbed in the war department’s parking lot and attempted to levitate the building by exorcizing the country’s war energy with chants of “Out, demon out” as thousands of demonstrators walked by. Ed and Tuli’s self-titled release, The Fugs, sold moderately well in 1966 and charted at 145 on Billboard. In 2003 David Bowie listed this release among his 25 favorite records.
After seven albums, the band broke up in 1969. Ed went on to write his national bestseller on Charles Manson, The Family, and, using a chunk of the royalties, relocated in 1974 to a small house in Woodstock, NY. Once here, he took on such community-minded efforts as strengthening the zoning code to enable the town to retain its viewshed and manage its growth. Another initiative was founding the Woodstock Journal with his wife, Miriam. In 1987 Ed earned an American Book Award for his verse collection, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century. In 1984, he and Tuli re-formed The Fugs and performed a series of reunion concerts. In 2010 Tuli tragically passed away from cancer. Still, Ed and the re-formed Fugs soldiered on, and in 2011 they appeared at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London as part of the Meltdown Festival, and their performance earned a four-star review in The Guardian.
“The Dreaming Doe,” an oil painting by Miriam Sanders
Ed and Miriam Sanders feel blessed to live in the Catskills, where nature’s beauty surrounds them. Miriam’s fascination and observation of her woodland neighbors developed into a column for the Woodstock Journal; her essays were paired with sensitive drawings, also penned by Miriam. In the 1980s, a doe visited the Sanders. Unfortunately, one of her hind legs had been ensnared in a trap, and she had to hobble about on the other three. Over the years, the Sanders dubbed her Rosalie. One spring Rosalie showed off her new fawn to the couple, and they named Rosalie’s child Rosie. Miriam memorialized Rosie in an evocative painting. In 2020, the Sanders’ imprint, Mead’s Mountain Press, collected and published a selection of work from Miriam’s nature column in Our Woodland Treasures. The next year they published Alf Evers: Life of an American Genius. Both books are local bestsellers and are sold locally by WoodstockArts.
In 2023, after a mild winter, as the days grow longer and the spring sun warms the earth, the world finds itself with the doomsday clock 90 seconds from midnight. The world faces the twin existential crises of nuclear destruction with the war in Ukraine and climatic disaster via industrial pollution. Fifty-eight years young and still too dangerous to be considered for Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame honors, The Fugs are releasing their latest album, Dancing in the Universe. This well-produced recording features Ed Sanders, Scott Petito, Steve Taylor, and Coby Batty, the same band members since 1985, except for Tuli. All sessions were held at Petito’s NRS Studio in Catskill, NY, and four numbers feature Tuli—from the vault. The buoyant, cheerful music sharply contrasts with the somber lyrics on numbers like “Birds,” which chronicles the massive die-off of the species, and “We Are Living in End Times.” There are shoutouts to Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara. My favorites include “God Bless Johnny Cash,” “Protest and Survive”—a pop song that should see radio play—and “Armaments Fair.”
As David Bowie noted before his passing in 2016, religion is over, and its spirit resides in the arts. The Fugs take no prisoners; artistic esprit de corps is alive and well and has come to rescue us. The new album is set to drop in stores in the late spring. Ever ready for a benefit, Ed and some of The Fugs will be performing at the Colony in Woodstock on April 7, 2023, with John Sebastian, Marc Black, and Jerry Marotta. They’ll be raising money for the great local singer, Tom Pacheco, in his time of need. I hope to see you there!
~Weston Blelock
There are unheard before Tuli tracks on Dancing in the Universe. Ed collected them before Tuli died in 2020,