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Issue 106 Winter 2009
Watch John Giorno’s video performance of Everyone Gets Lighter from Antonello Faretta’s poetry film Nine Poems in Basilicata!
John Giorno. Photo: Peter Ross. All photos courtesy of John Giorno.
I met John Giorno at his home on the Bowery in downtown New York, on the third floor of a former YMCA where he has lived since the mid-1960s, when he started publishing his explosive poems using sound images, collage, and, later, sound compositions. Beat godfather William S. Burroughs, Giorno’s friend and collaborator, lived on the mezzanine floor, which housed the Y’s locker room and back in the ’70s was known as The Bunker. Today the space contains a Tibetan Buddhist shrine where Giorno hosts teachings in the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism which he has practiced since meeting his own teacher, H. H. Dudjom Rinpoche, in 1971. This interview took place in one of the mezzanine’s rooms; it has a large fireplace where Tibetan Lamas conduct fire rituals. On one side of the fireplace is a complete set of the Buddha’s teachings translated into Tibetan. On the other side is a large collection of reel-to-reel tapes containing the recordings for Giorno’s celebrated Dial-a-Poem series. Having debuted in 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art, it is a Who’s Who of late 20th-century American poetry that became a series of LPs issued by his multimedia poetry company Giorno Poetry Systems. Giorno’s poetry burns with the ferocity you’d expect to come from the friction between two such remarkable archives.
Giorno is truly a “poet among painters,” to use Frank O’Hara’s phrase. His early poems were written in response to the work of a series of illustrious lovers including Andy Warhol (Giorno starred in Warhol’s film Sleep), Robert Rauschenberg (who provided the cover for his first poetry book), and Jasper Johns. Following in these artists’ footsteps, Giorno helped bring poetry into the age of multimedia by working with appropriated mass media images and montage techniques. Today, looking out his loft window, you can see the shiny New Museum of Contemporary Art, whose exterior is adorned with a rainbow-colored “Hell Yes!” neon sign made by artist Ugo Rondinone, Giorno’s partner. On various walls in Giorno’s space are the poem-prints he has been making for several decades—they feature slogans like “Life is a Killer” which, so far, has proven inaccurate in his case. Now in his seventies, Giorno still writes and performs his work at poetry festivals around the world, fueled by a renewed interest in his work that will surely grow with the publication of his Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962–2007, which I had the good fortune to edit. Giorno and I met on a Sunday morning in May, my birthday as it happened, and as we talked, we drank coffee and then champagne, to loosen up our “conceptual thinking” a little.
(Interview)