great weather for MEDIA was honored to host a very special reading featuring comrades and legends of the counterculture Edward Sanders and John Sinclair reading poems back and forth. Recorded December 5, 2020.
Hosted by David Lawton, with a special invocation by great weather for MEDIA co-editor George Wallace.
We’ve made a list of Edward and John’s books at Bookshop.org. Check them out!
EDWARD SANDERS is a poet, historian and composer. His recently published book, illustrated by Rick Veitch, is Broken Glory, the Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy, published by Arcade Publishers. His Glyphic History, A Life of Charles Olson , has just been published by Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil.
Other Sanders' books include Tales of Beatnik Glory (4 volumes published in a single edition); 1968, A History in Verse; and The Family, a history of the Charles Manson murder group. His 1987 collection, Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, won an American Book Award. His selected poems from 1986-2008, Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War, was published by Coffee House Press. In late 2011 Da Capo Press published his memoir of the 1960s, Fug You, and in 2015 Da Capo published his full-length biography of the actress Sharon Tate.
In addition, Sanders has received a Guggenheim fellowship in poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in verse, an American Book Award for his collected poems, a 2012 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Prize, and other awards for his writing. He was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs, which has released many albums and CDs during its nearly 50-year history. Sanders lives in Woodstock, NY with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.
Photo of Edward Sanders by Beth Blis
JOHN SINCLAIR is a poet, writer, and activist. While an underground journalist and community organizer in Detroit in the mid-60s, Sinclair became the manager of the avant-rock band MC-5 and organized the White Panther Party with the band and its allies. Infuriated by Sinclair’s activism, the government sent him to prison on a ten year sentence without appeal bond for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. The John Sinclair Freedom Rally held in Ann Arbor in December 1971, and the song John Lennon wrote and performed for it led to Sinclair’s release three days later.
Sinclair moved to New Orleans in 1991 where he was a popular radio DJ and began to tour the country with his jazz and blues poetry accompanied by musical collaborators of many stripes. Sinclair continues to spin records on his internet station RadioFreeAmsterdam.com and advocates for the legalization of cannabis and all recreational drugs. Among his books are Guitar Army and Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Delta Sound Suite. He has released more than twenty CDs of his music and verse collaborations, including Detroit Life.
Photo of John Sinclair by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Find David Lawton's interview with John Sinclair in the great weather for MEDIA anthology, I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand.