“It is more important than ever to pay attention and to bend human behavior to accommodate the story of Cassandra, ancient prophetess to whom no one would listen.” --Edward Sanders
Cassandra is a two-act music, video, electronic, poetic drama, based on Sanders’ poem set in the time of the Trojan War and its tragic aftermath. It traces the life of Cassandra, daughter of the king and queen of Troy, whose gift of prophecy was cursed by the god Apollo, so that no one believed her accurate predictions of the future, with horrifying results for Troy and her own story.
$10 General Admission; Members free
About Ed Sanders
Counter-culture icon Ed Sanders has participated in the dynamic Buffalo arts scene since the mid-1950s as a visiting scholar, poet, publisher, musician, and constitutional cultural historian.
Sanders wrote his first notable poem, "Poem from Jail", on toilet paper in his cell after being jailed for protesting the launch of nuclear submarines armed with nuclear missiles in 1961. In 1962, he founded the avant-garde journal Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders opened the Peace Eye Bookstore at 383 East Tenth Street in what was then the Lower East Side; the store became a gathering place for bohemians, writers and radicals. On January 1, 1966, police raided Peace Eye Bookstore[ and charged Sanders with obscenity, charges he fended off with the aid of the ACLU. Notoriety generated by the case led to his appearance on the February 17, 1967 cover of Life Magazine, which proclaimed him "a leader of New York's Other Culture."[
Sanders is the founder of the Investigative Poetry movement. His 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, had an impact on investigative writing and poetry during the ensuing decades.
In the 1990s, Sanders began utilizing the principles of Investigative Poetry to create a series of book-length poems on literary figures and American History. Among these works are Chekhov, 1968: A History in Verse, and The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg. In 1998, Sanders began work on a 9-volume America, A History in Verse. The first five volumes, tracing the history of the 20th century, were published in a CD format with over 2,000 pages in length.
Sanders received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1987.
Sanders lives in Woodstock, New York, where he publishes the online Woodstock Journal with his wife of over 47 years, the writer and painter Miriam R. Sanders. .He also invents musical instruments, including the Talking Tie,themicrotonal Microlyre, and the Lisa Lyre, a musical contraption involving light-activated switches and a reproduction of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.
$10 General Admission; Members free