Only If You Are As Real As They Are
By Dennis Formento
John Sinclair humbly takes the backseat to the subject of his poetry: the lives, music, and times of the jazz and blues musicians that he has idolized since the 1950s, when he began his career as a DJ, spinning records for high school dances. Like an able translator who graciously steps aside to let the poetry of the original language step through, John Sinclair lets the music speak.
In the present chapbook, Full Moon Night, he invokes the spirit of Coltrane's music, at a time when the master was still with us on this earth, and the world-shaking innovations of the new jazz came hard along with changes in American literature wrought by fellow travelers Kerouac, Baraka and Olson. It was to be a new America, made of America itself, in all its colors.
It is extraordinary to see someone devote so much attention to music in their poetry, an inclination that is at once populist and aesthetically tasty. Full Moon Night is a spiritual and metaphysical meditation on the meaning of the new jazz, circa 1965. This is the first time these works have appeared in print together. In a review of The John Coltrane Quartet Plays:
I write out of need it's that simple I write because I need to write, on whatever level, as, it makes living in this world possible. John Coltrane's music likewise comes out of that need, & likewise makes a life possible, for him, as maker, as well as for me, listening, here, wherever I am. John Coltrane's music suggests possibilities of feeling, emotion, thought of life finally that we all of us can make use of & should. Any other use of his music is specious.
--(www.johnsinclair.us)
The title of this chapbook was drawn from a recording of a Blues Scholars big-band performance at Kaldi's Coffeehouse in New Orleans, on September 20, 1994, in celebration of the saxophonist's birthday. These poems express John's near-idolatry of the musicians who made the last revolution in jazz in the mid-Sixties, and how the honesty of their music and their uncompromising attitudes formed his own attitude toward life, music and revolution.
This was the era during which Allen Ginsberg's Howl was still reverberating in the minds of young writers, and the times were times of spiritual rebellion and regeneration. One could be young/and made of America, full of hope, and at the same time, furiously aware of the places they had made for us, whoever we were, black and white alike, cornered and separated.
These poems are spirituals, sounded through Charles Olson's projective model ( I have the feeling that I am one with my flesh ):
The music moves inside my self,
I mean I feel saxophones in-
side my meat, a force in-
spiring that meat
to sing pure electricity
The music inspires the meat matter and becomes one with it, the meat is spirit, meat energy, the electric charge:
The music moves inside,
& stays there. A part of what you are. & NOT
from . But the song of meat energy
burning to come through you. In charge. & that energy
makes its way. Yes, shapes it, & is in charge. In,
goddammit, IN the meat,
and of it.
--( consequences )
For Sinclair, the work is primary and it's not about me. This he said as he sat before his computer console in a room lit only by a single lamp and the bluish glow of the screen, surrounded by books, papers, and stacks of new and worn-out CDs. But who is he, anyway?
When I first saw John Sinclair's 1988 selected poems, We Just Change the Beat, published by Ridgeway Press, Detroit, I thought he was a light skinned black man. With a goatee like Monk's or Eric Dolphy s, dark, tightly curling hair, and heavy dark-rimmed glasses, he looked like some Creole intellectual from the islands or from here in New Orleans.
This cover was wrapped around a volume of poems concentrating on jazz and the blues, starting in the Delta:
black men & women
dragged in chains
& shipped in chains
& whipped
into Mississippi
where the music
came to life
under the whip
& the gun
& hours of relentless sun
beating down every day
on the slave peoples
--(We Just Change the Beat: Selected Poems, Ridgeway Press, 1988, p. 15)
The poetry seemed to have been written by someone who knew more about the music than any single white man could possibly know. It never occurred to me that I already knew who he was, until I met him at the late Ahmos Zu-Bolton's Copastetic Bookstore in 1990. This was the guy who had been the subject of a song by John Lennon, notorious throughout the country as the manager of the legendary avant-rock band, the MC-5, and chairman of the White Panther Party. He did his first reading on a national stage at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, having been invited by Robert Creeley. The poems of Homage to John Coltane were new then although a few had yet to be written.
Amiri Baraka, his teacher in the meaning of jazz and running partner since their first meeting in the winter of 1964/65, has written about John:
If you been in America and ain t sleep then I don t have to begin where I wdda begun if you was just another dumbass American, souped up on not and aint. But suppose you had some feeling for what Dis is we in and how it's the opposite of Art, and how as an Ain t one of it's chief physical/psychological/philosophical, soc-ec-pol, functions is to kill or make impossible the existence of Art. Then you would dig from the top, how rare and necessary is the John Sinclair work. Especially, if you know that many people think JS is, no shit, WHYTE!!!
(A dude told me this getting on the Mother Ship. I told the motherfucker that if the MS was segregated they was gonna shoot that johnson down! But you know, a hard head make a soft philosophy.)
--(Introduction, "John Sinclair: Fattening Frogs For Snakes: Delta Sound Suite", Surregional Press, 2002, p. 7)
And he adds, This book is a marvel in that it is not only poem but research, bibliography, discography, of the most copious yet careful and earnest kind, an incredible work of passion, perception, and song. (p.11)
It's what Charles Olson called a saturation job, taking in everything on a subject until it becomes part of you, part of your skin, your meat, assumed into your body and thus into the deepest parts of your self. A for-instance: to learn how Charlie Parker's solo style developed, Sinclair pulled together all of the Charlie Parker recordings ever released and arranged them in chronological order. Then he recorded the individual tracks on tape, not in the order of their release, but in the order of their actual recording. Having done so, he could follow the progression of ideas across Bird's span of most intense development, until he had a road map of the brilliant reedman's musical thought.
Thus armed, he could study until he had it down and
sit for days, literally days,
& play the records through our meat,
--( blues to you )
Poetry screamed out of his skin in response to the brilliance he heard from Coltrane and his quartet. It was a partnership of ecstasy, the kind that makes you walk smack into a pole/after forty-five minutes of Elvin Jones, lost and hypnotized, possessed by the loas of music.
Olson's notion of proprioception and the conviction that one is one with one's flesh, mortal and spiritually integrated with one's environment, are psychedelic notions. With the doors of perception opened, the poet simply walked into a room populated by men and women striving for pluperfection on their instruments.
He walked into jazz at a time when the rising masters were also searching outside of themselves for scales to climb on and modes of music from the outer reaches of the globe and beyond the reaches of their skin, for new expression of their flesh.
we needed them to speak to us
of pure revolution. to put down their saxophones
& spout pure poetry, or our lives
weren't shit. were gobs of dream
splattered against the world.
--( blues to you )
Spiritual illumination and political revolution were twin goals of many of the jazz artists in the 60s, and John was right there with them. Adding later a penchant for investigative poetry, an approach invented by Sinclair's friend, Ed Sanders, a follower of Olson s, the meditative poet became the chronicler of the blues that he is today.
There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more & more clearly what we are &we have to keep cleaning the mirror.
--John Coltrane to Nat Hentoff,
quoted in A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltranes's Signature Album
by Ashley Kahn
(c) 2006 Dennis Formento. All Rights Reserved.
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