JISCMail - BRITISH-IRISH-POETS Archives

Just a reminder that you can read a feature excerpt from Sanders's forthcoming RFK book at Dispatches, under the poetry section this month.

Sanders wrote the definitive book on the Manson Family ("The Family.") He's currently working on a book about Robert Kennedy. He's decided to sell the assembled work on which he's based his research.

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Ed Sanders is a kind of godfather scholar of the 1960s counterculture. He wrote the definitive book on the Manson family. He co-founded the rock band The Fugs. And his latest project is a book about Robert Kennedy. Now he's selling the massive archive of files he built over half a century to tell his stories. Jon Kalish visited Sanders at home in Woodstock, N.Y., and reports that the 76-year-old poet, musician and scholar has decided it's time to start thinking about retirement.

JON KALISH, BYLINE: Ed Sanders' archive fills 400 banker's boxes.

ED SANDERS: I have files on many things. I'm a compulsive filemaker.

KALISH: He could pass for a college professor with his bushy mustache and tweed jacket, sporting a button for Bernie Sanders - no relation.

SANDERS: This is a garage, which is packed floor to ceiling with my chronological archives.

KALISH: He's got them organized by date and subject, all carefully catalogued in a 200-page single-spaced directory. Attached to the garage is a small building that used to be his writing studio until it, too, filled up with boxes. Sanders opens one of them and pulls out a record of him performing a poem.

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "YIDDISH SPEAKING SOCIALISTS OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE")

UNIDENTIFIED MEN: (Singing) They were the Yiddish-speaking socialists of the Lower East Side.

SANDERS: You could send one of these to Bernie Sanders.

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "YIDDISH SPEAKING SOCIALISTS OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE")

UNIDENTIFIED MEN: (Singing) La, la, la, la, la, la, la...

KALISH: Three sheds on his property hold even more. None of them are climate controlled. One of the sheds contains 18 boxes filled with files, photographs and memorabilia Sanders accumulated while researching the Manson family.

SANDERS: Files and files and files and files.

KALISH: Manhattan publisher Steve Clay is handling the sale of Sanders' archive.

STEVE CLAY: I see Ed's archive as one of the great '60s archives out there. I love this one. This is a flyer. Protest against the rudeness, brusqueness, crudeness and violence of narcotics agents, a benefit featuring underground movies plus The Fugs

KALISH: The Fugs were Sanders' long-running band, and he's got their recordings archived too.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YODELING YIPPIE")

THE FUGS: (Singing) Well, I ride the left wing airlines, stirring up trouble at night, secret signs and secret deeds, I'm just a yodeling yippie.

KALISH: The band got its start playing at concerts and protests throughout the 1960s. That's also when he ran the Peace Eye Bookstore and became involved in First Amendment battles over obscenity.

KEN LOPEZ: Ed Sanders in particular was kind of right in the middle of a lot of that.

KALISH: Ken Lopez is a dealer who's handled the sales of archives belonging to writers William Burroughs and Robert Stone. He says Sanders' papers cover a crucial period in American history.

LOPEZ: Culturally and historically and literarily, this sheds a lot of light on important changes that were taking place. It definitely would be an archive with great scholarly value.

KALISH: Not to mention monetary. Estimates for the archive range from the low six figures to a million dollars or more. Sitting in his house, Sanders says the archive has become a part of his life.

SANDERS: I like my archive. It's a living thing. It's like a life form. It's like a big mushroom out there.

KALISH: The archive, of course, will stop growing once Ed Sanders sells it, but he's not quite ready to hand over all of his files. He'll hold on to some for a book-length poem about Robert F. Kennedy and for his unfinished multi-volume autobiography. For NPR News, I'm Jon Kalish in New York.

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On Aug 27, 2016, at 9:21 PM, Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Of course, the interesting question is, Why should an email be worth less money than a holograph letter or a typewriter-composed one?
If an email by J.H. Prynne, let's say--first name that pops into my head for a living Brit poet--that's been unseen by anyone save its recipient, contains more valuable information than a handwritten letter by same Prynne, why should the latter be judged to have more monetary worth than the former?
And what about toenails, actually? What if someone were to find, who knows where, but let's say somewhere ten of them appear in a vial, his own handwriting on the receptacle, with date, authenticating them: The toenails of William Wordsworth.
How much would the Bodleian pay for them? It would surely pay at least ten times what it paid for Wendy Cope's emails!
Don't throw anything away, poets.

>>> Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> 08/27/16 7:14 PM >>>
Strewth. I have some old toenails for sale plus an elbow patch once worn by the bard Algernon.

On 28 Aug 2016, at 00:41, Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Here's that article on the poet-email purchase. It was for 40K emails in Wendy Cope's files. The amount was not as substantial as I'd remembered. But 32 thousand pounds ain't bad. In dollars, that's over a buck per email. Though I know the pound has dropped since Brexit, so maybe not quite that. Still, though...
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/british-library-buys-poets-40000-emails-2270077.html

>>> <[log in to unmask]> 08/27/16 6:27 PM >>>

I'm more of book person than a ms. person. So I was very impressed a number of years ago (10 now probably) when it was reported that 2 and a half tractor-trailer loads of poetry books (including many rare and first editions) were delivered to the Emory Library...courtesy of Raymond Danowski:

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/danowskipoetrylibrary/danowski-biography/

I'm glad such places exist. I hope people in a hundred years still care about books. I imagine if I rolled up to my local library with just small panel van filled with poetry books, they'd probably turn me away. Not interested, they'd say...we're reducing shelf space and expanding our digital media lab.

I tried to get into the Emory Library poetry and ms. collection last fall when on a biz trip to Atlanta. But after making my way to top of the library, I was met with signs that it was closed for renovation and improvement. The guard who checked me in at library's door didn't seem to know that the top floors were closed off for renovations. Maybe next time I'll be luckier.

Finnegan

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Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2016 18:38:19 -0400
From: Pierre Joris <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Have any of you prepared for posthumous recognition?

Quote found on Emory U library (Heany & Rushdie papers among many others):

"Early to the Feast : The Archival Education of Undergraduates: I would guess that 99 percent of undergraduates in U.S., U.K., and European universities never darken the doors of their special collections library. Indeed, if they even know the location of such uninviting rooms, they may look upon them from the outside as alien inner sanctums inhabited by a strange cadre of dour graduate students and cadaverous old professors—a view inimitably universalized for them by Yeats: “All shuffle there; all cough in ink; / All wear the carpet with their shoes.” “

As news of Emory’s acquisition of the Salman Rushdie archive spread, the Director of Emory’s Special Collections received the following note of congratulations from Seamus Heaney, another writer whose papers are also in Emory’s Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library: “When John Keats compared a stack of books to a garnering of ‘the full ripened grain,’ he could have been thinking of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives & Rare Book Library. This is one of the world’s most important word-hoards, and the acquisition of Salman Rushdie’s papers—the gleanings of yet another ‘teeming brain’—is further cause for rejoicing in the work being done here and the work that will be done by scholars and writers in the future.”

Ed Sanders, Author Of Manson Family Biography, To Sell Massive Archive