"Ed Sanders invented everything"

From The American Bard in New Orleans :

In his youth, Sanders had the vision of the social movement that both cheerleaders and detractors refer to when they conjure the 1960s. While most people may be unaware of the bigness of Ed Sanders' work, they've not missed his colorful feathers that have graced our landscape for decades. "Ed Sanders invented everything," our mutual friend John Sinclair once told me. He's a Renaissance hyphenate and one of the first public figures of his generation to live seamlessly within the realms of politics, art and fun. In the process of self-reinvention, he became the first cousin to Che Guevara's paradigmatic New Man -- albeit thoroughly American and anti-authoritarian. To list all of Ed's prodigious accomplishments, we'd need more space than is available to us, given the reason I write these words: to praise the man's contemporary recordings.

In particular, his latest: the masterful Poems For New Orleans . He read and recorded his history of the Crescent City and Hurricane Katrina with musical accompaniment over four months in 2007 and has released it on Paris Records, a label on which proprietor Michael Minzer has also released spoken word by Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Robert Creeley and a collab twixt Corso and Marianne Faithfull. Ed creates a people's history in the Zinn tradition and his own American verse histories by tracing the story of New Orleans through the eyes of the fictitious Lebage family, from Lemoine to his great great great great granddaughter Grace.