Take stock if you would stock knock knock who's there it's the Ed Sanders Praise poem the Spirit of Woodstock Noli in Spiritu Combieri subscribe to the Journal of the Center of Time
Before the Beginning of time…
Hear now the praises of places dayses amazes scholarship hoot'n'hollership the Last Renaissance Man
His instruments
Now charitable bountiful munificent and liberal are not things we talk about these days without embarrassment considerable (unless we're in Woodstock)
so I've borrowed this praise chant from the Family Dembele of the Djibasso region of Burkina Faso
Ya ya the oral tradition is a way to give praise to someone without humiliating them totally
And now if I keep going on like this/ you'll have a first hand experience/ of why the oral tradition probably died out in the first place
Or today maybe we'll survive it revive it make it live it pass it on and leave this Festival humming hmmhmmhhmm
Ooo sing praises Edward Sanders - Y Laurie Ylvisaker
and I think we've now established the fact my last poem here's gonna be a praise song in the griot or jeli style of West Africa this one aimed at the beauteous curly-locked laurel wreath of our everlovin' bard Ed Sanders of Kansas, Loisaida, Woodstock, Earth
So I guess I can stop this singing that is if you call this singing though personally I just call it "Reading the Poem"
And Ed never stopped me from reading my poems in fact he's always encouraged me so now you can thank him for this embodiment of the perf
Because we are naked and because we have baked it and because we shake it we can break down the walls
Thanking somebody, Praising him for friendship
Sending appreciations like flowers delivered in a fogstorm
Friendship = antipraise
love is a dailiness,
the eye of the day
and the you of the night
and so we come to huddle in the puddle of the ocean that is Woodstock

mark it this name chant on a
pause the shifting of asses in chairs
the memories collecting corny as kumbaya campfires and tight as tomorrow's poems to be writ of today
Like Ed at the Olson conference seeding the future return in a rush to begin a tradition
someone's craning in the creek right now
someone's spirit is blowing blue out the window
Death don't stop here, a tree blossoms one
by one each a place you lived
and you shovel out the Mountainside as the big one
the sun rips the top of your head open
no it's gentle like can opener
peer inside slightly balding pate
of our dear mustachioed host I mean I know he's not the host
Laurie is is he would never have ordered chicken but it is his role to be centerpiece so we must we must let him
never looked so sweet as the moment when history became verse in his hand writ free of the Twentieth Century of dear Allen the Life and Times the warbling of the Fugs How sweet he roams to his Slum Goddess Miriam of the Creeks the deer as equals and the poem as language the pulsing of the lyre and stupid stupid stupid heart
What a marvelous idea it is to celebrate verse
with a three-day Festival in such a physically beautiful place as Woodstock, New York!
Festivals of course are among the most ancient of human activities,
and they chanted the poetry at the ancient Greek festivals,
including the Olympics.

Modern poetry is more free than it has ever been
in world history. Such diversity!

open verse, rhymed verse, chanted verse, spoken verse,
performance verse, musical verse, religious verse,
erotic verse, mad sonnets, sane sonnets,
or even sonnets that aren't even sonnets!
If you want to write tiny rhymed couplets
on the back of postage stamps,
it's okay!
Hear em at Woodstock's best performance zones,
F-Stop Cafe Center for Photography, Upstairs at Joshua's the astounding Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock's graceful Town Hall the Woodstock Youth Center, the Woodstock Library, and even at the peaceful Woodstock Artists' Cemetery. There will be an overnight poetry encampment at the nearby Opus 40 sculpture park. Was everybody there!
Woodstock Playhouse, now being restored, The Byrdcliffe Theater, Legends of Woodstock with its virtual museum of the Fletcher and the Hawthorn, My advice to everybody is to come hang out at the Festival, August 24-25-26, and experience some of the eternal delight that shines forth from the energy of poetry.
Organic food supply, safe air, nonpolluted water, a total end to poverty, national health care, personal freedom and fun

So in the interest of public tranquility, we list the following places in Woodstock for visitors not to smoke pot:
!) The Artists Cemetery
2) Parking lot behind Houst's Hardware
3) Anywhere near the nightclub called The Joyous Lake
4) In the beautiful open space near the Woodstock town offices on Comeau Drive
5) In the Woostock Green
6) "Down by the old Mill Stream" a swimming hole after which the famous song was named
7) The parking lot in back of the Chamber of Commerce information building

Comparing the handwriting of the rival Karmapas

Wherest puttest thou 800 pound elk on Rt 28

The poet Ed Sanders was born August 17, 20,000 AD in Kansas City, Missouri. While reading Allen Ginsberg's "Howl and Other Poems" as a teenage boy in 1957 returned to school the next day chanting 'Holy holy holy holy holy holy', in long continuous singsong sentences, at least four or five thousand times a day. He felt great. Every care assumed before evaporated. He read the poem to anybody who would listen and got into trouble almost immediately." School officials' admonitions to stay away from such "despicable ravings of a homo" were ignored, and before the year was up he'd be suspended for refusing to stop bringing "filth" onto school property. Go to law school like his uncle Milton, work in his father's dry goods store? After graduating from high school, he and a friend "got really loaded and then said goodbye. 'I'm going to New York to become a poet.' " Sanders founded the Fugs in 1964 with Tuli Kupferberg and Ken Weaver (the name came from the "fornicatory euphemism Norman Mailer had utilized in his novel, "The Naked and the Dead"). They created the Fugs because it was "better than working or graduate school, and it gave us a modest hope of earning our livelihood from art." Peace Eye Bookstore on East 10th Street in Manhattan, and "Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts." Other books include 'The Family' about the Manson family and 'Hymn to the Rebel Cafe'. The Party, Sappho, Investigative Poetics In the late 90's he presented his "Amazing Grace" project at St. Mark's Church in the East Village with 100s contributing verses to the old gospel song. He lives in Woodstock, New York, where he publishes The Woodstock Journal, a community newspaper with poetry and art. -- hewitt_pratt --

Rise Up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball! (1968.2)
Dateline: 9/9/97
Woodstock is home to Ed Sanders, a poet who has inspired me, over the years, to write, to read, to redefine the job of poet to be, simply, a job. To be a bard. To search out and gain knowledge, be serious about maintaining it, and pass it on. To hold on to the rigor and the vigor. To invent the new lyre. To set poetry free to be the news: to investigate. Ed Sanders is the poet/scholar/creator of Investigative Poetics.
And now, with the deaths of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Huncke, I open up the pages of the new Sanders book of poetry, 1968: A History in Verse, full of Olson's open form, Ed's Egyptian glyphs, footnotes, jokes, photos, ephemera. In 1968 rock and politics shared the air, and Ed's playful, incisive language serves as time machine: if you were there (1968 as Place), it will cause you to resurrect that other world; if you weren't, you'll never believe that that year was squeezed into a year.
Ed Sanders and His Magic Pulse Lyre, Ed Sanders, lead warbler of the Fugs, editor of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, and now the editor of his own weekly, The Woodstock Journal, it is Ed we turn to to find, "What does the poet say in times like this? What do we sing?"
"We demand the Politics of Ecstasy!"
our leaflets thundered
"Rise up and Abandon the Creeping Meatball!"
---though, 30 years later, it seems a tactical error
to announce that 500,000 people
were going to make love
in Chicago parks [p.17]
"I don't care what you sing,
but if you jack off that microphone
one more time
I'm going to arrest you. [p.23]
Nothing overt occurred
no hover-job, no mist, no noise, no clank, no rustle
[during Exorcism of Sen. Joe McCarthy's gravesite, p.25]
NB: This here part of the praise poem continues our homage and turn-on to Ed Sanders' totally great 1968, the Poetry Book of the Year. We'll be dipping into 68 often, as a compass to the future. Get your own copy by ordering here or by walking to your local indy libro lore store and forking over dough. The cover is amazing!
And then, as usual for a year of bullets
we flew away,
and left the locals to sort out
the knots of what we had done. [p.26]
Drawing the Line: Ed Sanders' 1968 is Poetry Book of the Year
Dateline: 8/26/97
My wife is an artist. I'm a poet. She draws, I end lines. This summer of 97 we lie in bed in early morning upstate New York and watch trees come to light. We drink coffee in bed, we read, we talk. Elizabeth is reading Middlemarch, and gasps amazed with the smarts of a writing circling the Reader until Reader is inside, is all the characters. The world vibrates. I am reading Ed Sanders' investigative poetics text 1968, the most amazing year of the century seen afresh and personal as Ed led the Fugs through the year of Chicago and RFK assassination. Occasionally we will chortle or cry in surprise, and bring the Other up to date.
Mayor Daley's people did not take kindly to Abbie Hoffman's smoking pot in the Mayor's chambers. I chortle. The image cracks me up: "Right On!" to Abbie's refusal to bend to hypocrisy. I read the section to E. "This is why the 60s failed," she starts in. "Little boys playing their games, getting even with Mommy and Daddy." Wonderful passion -- yes, the participants were all white middle class men. The Yippie movement was so infiltrated by cops -- 1 in 6 at Chicago park demonstration were undercover. Daley had no plans to grant permits, anyway. The Motherfuckers and Chicago radicals were opposed to the demo sans permits.
Do you get a permit to have a revolution?
What did we know? Nothing.
Say he had granted a permit -- then it would have been "Stand over here in lines in a part of the City where no one would notice." Hoffman began things on an even footing -- "your halls of power, my cultural mores." I may not be good at analysis, and pot may not be an issue to kill over, but freedom is what Yippies were all about. . . Let Daley have his martinis. Smoke the pipe, as the Natives do.
By now E is back in Middlemarch. And I am reading about Terry Southern and William Burroughs joining with Ed and Allen in Chicago. . . . hours of Om to keep the calm, calm.
This is 1997, not the most amazing year of the century, the year of the Death of the Beat Generation -- Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs. But we have he who has refused to be burnt out, torch-bearer Ed Sanders, providing us with a way forward through the past.
1968 by Ed Sanders is the Poetry Book of the Year.

So that's how The FUGS got started. We played at the Peace Eye. We had our roots in the Dadaists and in the Cabaret Voltaire. We had our roots in the Happenings at Judson Church with Allan Kaplan. We had our roots in Jazz Poetry, with Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen playing together. We had our roots in the whole modern drama. We were influenced by Brecht's Living Theater, by Lennie Bruce, and by Beatnik Poetry.
BUT mostly, we were influenced by the Dadaists-and the civil rights movement. We played in churches surrounded by the Klan, where they were threatening to kill us. This civil rights thing really made us into tough and ready-to-face-danger musicians. I wouldn't write some of the same songs today that I wrote then, but we were just wild, testosterone-maddened young men having fun.
Jessa: You also published an Art Magazine?
Ed: It was called Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts! I published 13 issues from 1962 through 1965, which preceded the Peace Eye Bookstore era. In '62, it was an imperfect publication, but everybody wanted to be published then. I published Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakowski, Diane di Prima, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Gary Snyder. I also published Ed Dorn, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, George Eklund, Rochelle Owens, d.a. levy. Lots of people--men and women. Some of the best poems were by women in the Fuck You Magazine.
Our position for the magazine was non-violent, direct action, pacifism, and liberation -- personal freedom at a time when the Vietnam War was happening overseas and the civil rights movement was happening at home.
I was so revolted by what they did, that I decided to tell it like it really was, because there was support for them in the so-called 'counter-culture' at the time. I wanted to write the real horror of what these creeps did, so that this affection for them in the counter-culture wouldn't abide. Yet, I just saw a Charlie Manson tee-shirt in the filling station in Woodstock, New York. So I guess this guy is the devil-worshipper's darling, still!
Jessa: What about your performance schedule?
Ed: I've been barding around, traveling all over, like an American bard -- traveling throughout the country and in Europe.
Jessa: What do you see for the scene evolving into the 21st century?
Ed: Like the Captain in Star Trek says, "We don't know now, but maybe we'll find it out in the past."
'From now on, nothing holds us back. Cacophony forever. No stopping'
Ed Sanders, at the first Fugs recording session

If there's anyone to credit/blame for punk rock and progressive-rock poesy, it's got to be the Fugs, a group of New York City poets who decided to be a rock band in the mid-60's. Even today, their music is as crude as some of their lyrics- even the garbage bands at the time sound like symphony orchestras by comparison. While many other rock bands at the time were indulging in electronic experiments, the Fugs were proudly lo-fi. Giving the FBI migranes (the Chicago branch contacted the Washington main office at one point to ask if they should arrest the FAGS for obscenity and un-American activities). Far from being babbling idiots though, Sanders and Kupferberg were (and still are) incisive, accomplished poets. Their celebration of free love and marijuana was not done just to tittilate but as an honest statement of purpose and freedom: you're not going to find Howard Stern or Marilyn Manson trying to exorcise and levitate the Pentagon. This is probably why the Fugs are not Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame residents or staples on VH-1 and are to be admired for it.
Hymn to the Rebel Café
Frenzy, Wet Dream and Ramses II Is Dead, My Love.

Miriam

Now I see I have taken time and not gone anywhere which is the purpose of a Praise Song to lead us right here
When here is Woodstock the Festival the zap coordinates this stage this mic this mouth these words for Ed Sanders our Bard
So without and with ado and adon't and a will a way the man who gives us everything and we don't mind accepting it
This is the fulfillment of the vision of the poem of the Mongolian cluster fuck as translated to a full mental jacket