He takes his job seriously, but with a healthy sense of humor. It was a mnemonic way of storing information. It began before writing. While he talks, his hands seem to move to his words, tracing statements in the air. This sense of purpose led to an approach that Sanders has dubbed investigative poetry.
Poets take a part of the responsibility for describing the time-track of civilization.
So I decided I better start exploring. All used his investigative-poetry method. A History in Verse is the latest and most ambitious exploration of this approach. Sanders takes his sunflower walking stick through the dense vegetation of American history. Starting in 1900, he unfurls lines of poetry to describe his vision of important events, with interesting minutae scattered across the landscape.