Ed Sanders – In Honor of Ted Berrigan

We were both using the same
mimeo machine
at the Phoenix Bookshop in 1963
you for C Magazine
I for Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts

The opening lines of Ed Sanders’s poem For Ted Berrigan recall the origin of the friendship between the two poets on the Lower East Side, where Sanders had moved from Kansas City and Berrigan from Tulsa via Chicago in the early 1960s. The poem is one of two that have been printed in the joint Moloko & Sea Urchin edition In Honor of Ted Berrigan by Ed Sanders, which also contains glyphs and contact prints from Ed’s archive with photos taken on 29 January 1964 at Café Le Metro, New York. Originally created as a PDF for Ron Padgett in 2009, Sanders’s Berrigan tribute has now been redesigned by Anneke Auer into an intimate and loving tribute in print to a poet who, according to the author, was “as tall as Apollinaire, tall as his times”.

Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) was an American poet associated with the second generation of the avantgardist ‘New York School’. He served in the US army for three years before taking a B.A. in English at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1959. Berrigan, who considered himself a late Beat poet, was active in Chicago for a number of years before he relocated to New York City in the early 1960s. There he published and edited various books and his C Magazine, collaborated with other poets and artists and experimented with the traditional sonnet as a mold for his expressionist and innovative poetry. Berrigan’s notorious diet of Pepsis, amphetamines and Chesterfield cigarettes combined with his relentless literary activities took a heavy toll on his health and led to an untimely death at the age of 48.

Ed Sanders (1939) is an American poet, singer, social activist, environmentalist, author and publisher. In 1958 Sanders dropped out of the University of Missouri and hitchhiked to New York City. There he founded the avant-garde journal Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts and, a couple of years later, his Peace Eye Bookstore, which turned into a hotbed of poetry, art and radical activism. In 1964 he graduated from New York University with a degree in Greek and founded the seminal countercultural band The Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg. At the time Sanders’ subversive activities in the Lower East Side were described by William Burroughs as a “total assault on the culture”. An unstoppable anti-war activist, Sanders took a prominent part in the famous attempt to levitate and exorcise The Pentagon in 1967 and published Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961–1985 twenty years later. Sanders lives in Woodstock with his wife Miriam, where he has worked on his investigative 9-volume America, A History In Verse since 1998. In 2018 he published Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy.