Event

Ed Sanders

Headlining our first Caff Lena Poetry Festival is Ed Sanders, famed counter-culture figure of the 60s, who built a bridge between the Beatnik and Hippy generations. Sanders arrived in Greenwich Village in 1958 where he opened the Peace Eye Bookstore and founded the avant-garde journal Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
His first major poem was Poem from Jail, written on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for anti-nuclear protest. Other career highlights include helping Abbie Hoffman exorcise the Pentagon, founding the Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg, and writing The Family, a highly regarded profile of the Manson Family.
Ed's poetry has been likened in its energy and ambition to William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, blending slang, neologisms, Classical Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. His most recent work is 1968: A History in Verse (1997), a book-length poem tracing the events of that year. He currently resides in Woodstock, NY where he publishes the Woodstock Journal and builds inventive musical instruments.