John Sinclair

Poetry of the Blues

I'm an old-school poet, me. I studied verse in college, American Literature in graduate school, wrote my master's thesis on Naked Lunch and carefully scrutinized the works of the poets who inspired me: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones. For 40 years I have composed in verse, set my poems to music and performed them with musical accompaniment by jazz and blues ensembles of many descriptions.

Before that, though, as a kid and throughout my teenage years, I got my real grounding in American poetry by listening to an endless flow of blues and R&B records on the radio, securing them for my own collection, and playing them over and over again in my room until I had absorbed every nuance of each great recording. Many times I didn't even know what the words were supposed to mean, but I was blown away by the way they were put together and the power with which they were delivered.

These songs spoke to me of a world I had never encountered, where Howlin' Wolf told how he had asked a woman for water "and she gave me gasoline," Muddy Waters heard his telephone ringing and "it sound like a long distance call," Jimmy Reed enumerated the incredible things he would do for his loved one "and you don't even know my name." Big Joe Turner was "like a one-eyed cat, peepin' in a seafood store," Ray Charles confessed "I'm just a little fool for you," and Wynonie Harris shouted at his woman, "Don't roll those bloodshot eyes at me."

Then there was Chuck Berry with his thrilling songs of car chases and school days and "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" and "Too Much Monkey Business," hollering at Beethoven to roll over and tell Tchiakowsky the news. Bo Diddley described himself as a dangerous man of insane proportion who could "walk 47 miles of barb wire, use a cobra snake for a necktie" and had a "brand new house by the roadside, made from rattlesnake hide."

This was clearly poetry of the highest order, set to the most amazing music I'd ever heard and sung with power and grace by grown men and women who seemed to have nothing at all in common with the adults who inhabited and shaped the world I lived in. The people and events and concerns they sang about were obviously situated in an entirely different reality than I had been exposed to, and hearing their recordings opened up a window on an alternative way of life that excited and fascinated me like nothing I'd ever encountered.

From that point on I followed the music to its source in the dense urban environment populated by Americans of African descent whose lives provided the raw material for the incredible songs and verses of the blues poets and musicians who told their stories with such eloquence. Now I've spent a lifetime studying the poetry of the blues and trying to apply the lessons learned there to my own work in verse, and I'll be investigating this music for the rest of my life.

(c) 2005 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.