cover image Hymn to the Rebel Cafe

Hymn to the Rebel Cafe

Edward Sanders, Ed Sanders. Black Sparrow Press, $14.95 (194pp) ISBN 978-0-87685-899-8

Sanders, founder of the rock group The Fugs and editor of Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts , has been connected with almost every aspect of the counterculture. In his writing, he has consistently concentrated on social inequities, the environment and violence while gossiping cheerfully about like-minded poets such as the late Ted Berrigan or Jerome Rothenberg. This volume is not significantly different from earlier work. The poems are still irreverent, still laced with an easygoing, goofy comic quality (``The cafes come The cafes wane / but the best and the final rebel cafe / is inside the human brain''). His message--``The worst drug / is the culture of greed, demolishment / & destruction of open land''--isn't subtle, but it's hard to disagree with. More than a quarter of the text is given over to the tedious ``An East Village Hippie in King Arthur's Court,'' which interpolates the Camelot characters into the high jinks of Sanders's friends. It is filled with sophomoric jokes (an acid trip is described as ``Badus Tripus Ultimatus'') and a megalomania that assumes that the reader will willingly follow 61 pages of oblique satiric verse. One rather charming ingredient in the book is the inclusion every so often of Sanders's drawings or doodles. (June)