The Fug Rolls In

by Sparrow and photographs by Beth Blis, March 04, 2009

 

“I remember mudball fights between supporters of Dewey and supporters of Truman in my elementary school in 1948, where the Democrats shouted, ‘Phooey on Dewey!’” says Ed Sanders. He himself was the author of that chant: “It might have been my first rhymed presentation to the Universe.”

This is fitting for one of the most prominent political poets in America.

Sanders grew up in Blue Springs, Missouri, 15 miles from Kansas City. “I was raised on the edge of the prairie,” he remembers. Near his house, cows and pigs grazed. His father was a traveling salesman. “It was a middle-class life. We had a nice brick house. And I was a regular American kid. I was in the Boy Scouts; I was president of my high school student body; I was in the Order of De Molay [a fraternal order].” But in some ways Sanders’ parents were unusual. For example, his mother designed their house—and had aspired to be an engineer in her youth. “My mother was quite good with her hands,” Sanders explains. “She wanted me and my brother to take piano lessons, so she bought an old box piano at an auction, and took it completely apart in the living room, and reglued the hammers, put the strings on, reconstructed it.” Also, there was literature in the house. His mother would read Dickens to him at night—and was a Mickey Spillane fan. The family subscribed to magazines, including the avant-garde art magazine Tiger’s Eye, as well as Punch, the New Yorker, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Sander’s father would often invent spontaneous story poems.

Nearby, in Kansas City, was jazz; young teenagers were allowed in nightclubs. Sanders saw Big Bob Dougherty sing risqué tunes like “Stick Out Your Can, Here Comes the Garbage Man”—“plus he played a mean tenor saxophone.” The crowd was interracial. “You could go to these clubs and dance in the forbidden mode—because jazz was a freedom zone.”

At the age of 15, Sanders discovered Dylan Thomas in Redbook magazine. He had already begun writing poetry. Sanders ordered Thomas’s books from Cokesbury Bookstore, in Kansas City, and began memorizing them. Visiting the University of Missouri bookstore in 1957, he found Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Sanders converted to beatnikism.

In 1958 Sanders arrived in New York City to attend New York University. “I thought I might become a rocket scientist,” he remembers. The Mercury program was just beginning. In a Greek class he met Miriam, his future wife.