America ― A History in Verse, 1962-1970

Edward Sanders is America's bard, the cheerful, chanting poet who sings our collective life and times, our "Seething Nation! Vast and Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!" His present project is a free-verse chronicle of the American Century, from the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor down to the present day. Two previous volumes, documenting the period 1900-1961, appeared in 2000. Now Sanders gives us a third, an account of 1962-1970, "the time of a randy young president with a bad back," of "a strange man named Johnson," then of "an even stranger man named Nixon."
It was the time of Vietnam, freedom march, space shots, and evil - "the only word for some of it." But it was also the time of the poet's radical youth, and oh what bliss to be young, alive, and high in those excruciatingly interesting times, those days "when we searched for meaning / in the sawdust floors of rebel cafes / or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze / or mind-stretching hours in front of 4- and 8-track tape recorders / getting our brains onto friendly oxide / while we outlined our livers / like a Dan Flavin sculpture"!
What a whirling hurry of years it was, what a flash of time. And what a necessary, 21st-century Whitman Sanders is, channeling Clio for our great nation, where so many "work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every bell tower, biome & blade of grass." Long may he sing us the 1960s, and long may his America dwell in peace, freedom, and equality "out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way."