Seven Poems by and for JOHN SINCLAIR
John Sinclair performs his ‘Homage to John Coltrane’ in the second Poetry Ball at Chuck Perkins’ Café Istanbul in New Orleans, February 2013. Tom Worrell played piano, Gary Underwood played drums-set, and Herve Fernandez played electric guitar that night.
April 3, 2024
Today my duty and honor is a Tribute to John Sinclair The poet, producer, musicologist, and activist, co-founder of the White Panther Party, guide to the MC-5, sustained Radio Free Amsterdam on-air and online from 2005 onward. He toured and performed prodigiously, never ceasing to celebrate the Beat and Bebop and ‘Free Jazz’ artists who inspired him. John took his final rest yesterday, April 2, in Detroit’s Receiving Hospital, age 82, due to congestive heart failure.
I feel from John’s passing the kind of void that was the wake of giant, benign energies such as Glenn Spearman and Idris Muhammad leaving their bodies on this Earth. “That hurts my heart,” Kidd Jordan said to me when I related to him that Tim Green had died.
In January 2021 John featured my album The Time We Have, Meld #1 on two Hours of his Show over Radio Free Amsterdam. He invited me to talk with him about the album. I used the opportunity to expand expectations. I asked if I could read poems of his—poems that especially touch me and that I feel give some representation of the breadth and depth of his work. Offbeat magazine in New Orleans previewed the two Hours on RFA that came about.
A Web-page over on the Ur1Light.com is studded with links to John on Bandcamp and on Radio Free Amsterdam. I urge you check it out. Texts for all seven poems are in screen-shots there along with many images.
Below, here, are the seven poems of John’s that I read for those shows, along with excerpts from our talk. I hope that you find them as RICH a contribution to our Americas as they remain for me. The subjects in the entire line of them are:
HOUND DOG TAYLOR—’Good-bye, Hound Dog Taylor’ at 0:00
ALISON MINOR—’Thank You, Pretty Baby (for Alison Minor)’ at 0:45
HOWLIN’ WOLF and MICHAEL ERLEWINE—’Just One Big Heart’, said Howlin’ Wolf’—at 2:28.
CHARLES OLSEN and ROBERT CREELEY and the University of Michigan’s Library in Flint—’Four Tiny Sutras’—at 6:15
JACK KEROUAC at Minton’s with BIRD, DIZZY and MONK; ALLEN GINSBERG, WILLIAM BURROUGHS, NEAL CASSADY—’Brilliant Corners’—at 8:10
BLUES performers and the Music Business—’Fattening Frogs For Snakes’—at 13:52.
The ‘process’ that delivers some poems “whole, like gifts from God,” John says, while others have to be “worked on” over days and even years—at 18:37.
JOHN COLTRANE and Language of the Body that will make everyone a poet—’Love’—at 19:20
I hope that you enjoy John’s work like you might anything very fine, conscious, liberating and warm.
Now, let me give the poems separately, with a view toward Radio and other Media selecting them for play, as each appears on Bandcamp.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, JOHN SINCLAIR!