For ed sanders, the phrase “thirsting for peace
in a raging century” was definitive of any act that
questioned the myriad inconsistencies and injustices of its age; thus it becomes the unifying theme
to the six sections that make up the volume. Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century poetically challenges areas of social control, from missile carrying
submarines to sexual repression to an investigation
of control and rebellion in ancient cultures. In
1988 this volume won the American Book Award.
The first section, “Poem From Jail,” was written during the poet’s 1961 incarceration after attempting to board a missile-bearing submarine off
the coast of Connecticut. Written on toilet paper
and transcribed to sections of cigarette packages, it
had to remain hidden because paper, pencils, and,
of course, poetry were strictly forbidden in prison.
Many of the themes carried through in this volume
are established in this first poem.
As a “sort of secular version of the rather
more mystic crawl at the end of ‘Poem From Jail,’”
“The V.F.W. Crawling Contest” continues the idea
that was later articulated in “The Thirty-Fourth
Year” that the poet “can’t face life like a fist fight /
must crawl down lonely arroyos.” One of his most
popular poems, it depicts an epic crawl past vast
spaces of American mud, through dumps and fast
food restaurants, along litter-strewn highways in
the fumes of “rusty monsters roaring past.” At the
poem’s end, though near dead, limbs reduced to
stubs, the poet has declared victory over the pervasive American cultural machine, saying “I crawled
/ I groveled / I conquered.”
By 1973, just as Sanders was working on the
first volume of tales of Beatnik Glory while
writing many of these poems, he had also just
begun his poems for Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Thus,
many of the poems also illustrate Sanders’s interest in ancient cultures, specifically the artist rebels of dictatorial Egypt. He explains in the notes
that he “was looking for Lost Generations, for
sistra-shaking Dadaists in tent towns on the edge
of half-finished pyramids, for cubists in basalt, for
free-speech movements on papyrus.” As David
Herd suggests in “‘After All What Else is There to
Say’: Ed Sanders and the Beat Aesthetic,” Sanders
was looking “for a genealogy of dissent, for a historical angle of vision that shows the Beat project
to be not a momentary aberration but a further
eruption of a vibrant radical tradition.” He then
continues this “genealogy” through to New York’s
Lower East Side and on to “a.d. 20,000.”
As a final theme that was articulated in Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, in such poems as
“Homage to Love-Zap,” “Yiddish-Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side,” and “The Time
of Perf-Po,” Sanders encourages the power of the
poem as a historicizing device, where all history
should be caught in “sweet nets / of barb babble” to
create a “poem zone” used to “love-zap” injustice
and “make a New World / inside the New World.”
Bibliography
Herd, David. “‘After All What Else Is There to Say’: Ed
Sanders and the Beat Aesthetic.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 19, no. 1 (1999): 123–137.
Jennifer Cooper