I was a poet before I was anything else. Before the MC5. Before the prison. Before the radio. Before the politics. I was a kid in Flint, Michigan reading Kerouac on a park bench and feeling the top of my head come off. That's what a poem does when it finds you. It does not ask permission. It walks in through your eyes and rearranges the furniture.

I read "On the Road" in 1959 and I understood that language could do what music does. It could move. It could swing. It could refuse to sit still and behave. Kerouac wrote the way Charlie Parker played — long lines, no edits, the breath carrying the phrase wherever it needed to go. I didn't know I was going to spend the rest of my life chasing that feeling. I just knew I had to start writing immediately.

The Detroit Artists Workshop was a poetry workshop before it was anything else. 1964. A room on John Lodge. We read our poems to each other. We argued about them. We drank cheap wine and smoked marijuana and read poems out loud and the poems got better because we were reading them out loud. That's the thing nobody teaches you in school. A poem is not a text. A poem is a sound. The page is where the sound waits between performances.

Ginsberg came through Detroit and read "Howl" and the room caught fire. Not literal fire. The other kind. The kind where forty people in a basement are vibrating at the same frequency because a man from New Jersey is yelling about the best minds of his generation and every single person in the room understands that he is talking about them. That's what a poem does. It makes the room smaller until everybody in it is the same person.

I call it investigative poetry. Not confessional poetry. Not academic poetry. Investigative. The poem goes out and finds the truth and brings it back and puts it on the table. The poem asks questions. Who has the power? Who doesn't? Why not? What happened to the money? Where did the music go? Why is this man in prison? The poem investigates.

Ginsberg did this. He investigated America. Kerouac investigated the road. I investigated Detroit. I investigated the MC5. I investigated marijuana laws. I investigated prison. Every poem I ever wrote was a report from the field. The field was wherever I happened to be standing, and I happened to be standing in some interesting places.

I wrote poems in prison. This is not romantic. People who romanticize prison writing have never been to prison. You write in prison because the alternative is losing your mind. The cell is eight by ten. The walls do not move. The window does not open. Time does not pass. It accumulates. It piles up on you like snow. The poem is the shovel. You dig yourself out one line at a time.

I wrote on yellow legal pads. I wrote about what I could see, which was walls. I wrote about what I could hear, which was other men. I wrote about what I could remember, which was music. The guards did not confiscate the poems. They did not consider them dangerous. This was a mistake. The poems were the most dangerous thing in the cell. More dangerous than the man. The man could be locked up. The poem could not.

Jazz taught me how to write. Not literature. Jazz. Coltrane taught me about long lines — how a phrase could extend beyond what you thought a breath could hold. Monk taught me about space — how the note you don't play is as important as the note you do. Sun Ra taught me that the rules were suggestions and the suggestions were wrong. I listened to jazz records and I wrote poems and the poems sounded like jazz because I was listening to jazz while I wrote them. This is not a metaphor. The music literally entered the writing. The rhythms. The phrasing. The willingness to go somewhere nobody expected.

Poetry readings are concerts. I have always believed this. You stand in front of people and you deliver the poem the way a saxophonist delivers a solo. With your breath. With your body. With the understanding that the audience is not passive. The audience is the other half of the circuit. Without the audience the poem is just ink on paper. With the audience the poem is an event. An event that happens once and is gone and lives in the memory of everyone who was in the room.

I published books. "Guitar Army" in 1972. "Thelonious: A Book of Monk" in 1988. "Fattening Frogs for Snakes" in 1999. "It's All Good" from the Amsterdam years. These are not my best poems. My best poems were the ones I read in rooms at two in the morning to fifteen people who were there because they wanted to be there and not because anybody told them to be there. Those poems are gone. They exist in the air of rooms that no longer exist. That's where the best poems live. In the air. Not on the page.

The page is a storage facility. The page keeps the poem safe until somebody picks it up and reads it out loud and the poem comes back to life. Every poem is Lazarus. Dead on the page. Alive in the mouth. The page is not the destination. The page is the airport. The poem lands there between flights.

People ask me if I'm a poet or an activist. This question makes no sense. A poem is an action. Writing a poem is doing something. Reading a poem out loud is doing something. Putting a poem in somebody's hand is doing something. The poem that made me want to write poems — "Howl" — was an act of revolution. It changed what was legal to publish. It changed what was legal to say. A poem can do that. A poem can change the law. Not by arguing with the law. By ignoring it so completely that the law has to change to catch up.

I went to prison because I would not stop. They did not put me in prison for two joints. They put me in prison because I would not shut up. The joints were the excuse. The poems were the reason. The authorities understood something that the literary critics did not — that a man who writes poems and reads them out loud in rooms full of young people and publishes them in underground newspapers and distributes them on the street is more dangerous than a man with a gun. A gun threatens one person at a time. A poem threatens the entire structure. A poem says: the structure is not real. The structure is a choice. Choose differently.

I am still writing. The body has its limitations. The hand is not what it was. But the poem does not require a strong hand. It requires a clear eye. And the eye does not weaken the way the hand does. The eye gets sharper. Sixty years of looking at the world and the world keeps showing me things I have not written about yet. That's the job. To keep looking. To keep writing what you see. To keep reading it out loud to whoever shows up.

The poem is the first technology. Before the guitar. Before the radio. Before the printing press. A person stood in front of other people and made sounds with their mouth that were not ordinary speech. That was the first poem. That was the first transmission. Everything I have ever done — the workshops, the concerts, the radio shows, the newspapers, this — is the same technology. A person standing in front of other people making sounds with their mouth that are not ordinary speech. The technology has not changed in ten thousand years. Only the amplifier.

John Sinclair Sinclair Transmissions — TX014

See also: The Book — Guitar Army, the book born in the same cell. The Archive — what survives, the Bentley Library. Jazz Is the Way — jazz as the way to listen. The Cell — the room where the poems were written. The Letter — the letters written in the same hand, the same cell. The Antenna — the poet and the MC share the same function. The Groove — the record that started everything, before the poem, before the prison.

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