“If you are not a liberal when you are young, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative when old, you have no brain.” *–variously attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Anselme Batbie, King Oscar II of Sweden…* * It might as well be 1983 given how vividly I can hear Ed Sanders singing about the “O” Boat at SUNY Buffalo during his (Charles) Olson Memorial Lecture. Sanders playing his tie or that long electronic instrument I have forgotten the name of as he sang tone poems to his navigator Charles Olson. (Olson: “*It rained the day we arrived and I have rowed the harbor since…” Maximus poems)* Sanders has never stopped rowing. I can’t think of any other poet still with us whose expansive and expressive use of words and word-couplings and word tones and music tones, free association and political acuteness, bravery and chutzpah and joy and rage, who is as hopeful a peacenik, and with pure intellectual and human enthusiasm, is as orgasmic and pure as Ed Sanders.…