In January 1967, John Sinclair - poet, political radical, husband, and father - was arrested for the "possession and dispensation" of two marijuana cigarettes. Convicted in July 1969, Sinclair had served twenty-seven months of his 9 1/2 to ten-year sentence when the Michigan Supreme Court upheld his contention that Michigan's marijuana laws were unconstitutional. Sinclair served most of those twenty-seven months in Marquette State Prison, five hundred miles from his home, family, and legal counsel in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Sinclair wrote prolifically throughout his incarceration. He published two books, Guitar Army and Music and Politics (both Douglas/World books), and composed innumerable poems, letters, and essays. The goal of this site is to use a sample of that writing - a poem Sinclair wrote for his wife on her thirtieth birthday - to illuminate the complex and dynamic relationship between politics and family in the life of one cultural radical. In striving to place the poem in its proper personal and historical contexts, I have, whenever possible, provided scans and transcriptions of the writings of Sinclair and his contemporaries themselves. My hope is that this format will allow the history - and poetry - to speak for itself.