When I decided to take on this assignment and investigate my father’s crimes, I knew that I would be writing with and against the conventions of genre mystery, but I didn’t realize that I would also be working in a direct lineage of radical poets.

It was scholar Antonio Delgado who directed me to the work of counter-culture icon Ed Sanders.

Ed Sanders is an activist and author who pioneered an investigative writing process that resulted in the books “The Family” (about Charles Manson) and “Broken Glory” (a graphic-verse history of RFK’s final years).

In 1975, Sanders gave a lecture at Naropa University entitled “Investigative Poetry.” The manuscript, published the following year by City Lights Books, is a fascinating manifesto—at turns literary theory, instruction manual, and poetic performance—which theorizes a practice of “Investigative Poetry” as the inevitable conversation of literature with emergent technologies.

In Part 1. “The Content of History Will be Poetry,” Sanders asserts that “Poetry, to go forward… has to begin a voyage into the description of a historical reality.”

“The Goal: an era of investigative poesy wherein one can be controversial, radical, and not have the civilization rise up to smite down the bard. To establish and maintain it. POETS MUST REMAIN IN THE RADIX, UNCOMPROMISING, REVOLUTIONARY, SEDITIOUS, ABSOLUTE.”

Sanders imagines “the POET as Investigator / Interpreter of Sky Froth / Researcher of the Abyss / Human Universer / Prophet without death/ as consequence.”

And he advocates for research-based, data-driven poetics that will liberate the poet (and by extension the reader). By creating “new modes,” the poet has the potential to “make reality” and/or “make freedom.”

Which is, essentially, why I am writing this story: to be free of it.