Reality is Very Haunting: Reevaluating the Ouvre of John Giorno

• Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007 by John Giorno. Edited by Marcus Boon. Soft Skull Press, 2007. 387 Pages.

I.

John Giorno is the most important poet you’ve never heard of. Elaine Showalter calls him the father of performance poetry, though Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s definitive history of slam mentions him not at all, save Dan Nester listing him as an influence in his Introduction. The American Academy of Poets has a single poem by Giorno in their archive, though the Poetry Foundation has no listing for him at all. Giorno was born in 1936, the same year as June Jordan, C.K. Williams, and two years after Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde–but his name is absent from the poetry anthologies that include them. You’re more likely to find Giorno reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project than at NYU; more likely to find him reading at a Museum than at St. Mark’s. His most famous appearance is largely anonymous. He’s the star of Andy Warhol’s experimental film Sleep. He’s almost like Ray Johnson or Lou Andreas-Salomé–present at everything important, friends with everyone important, but keeping a lower profile than the stars they pal around with.

Part of the reason that John Giorno seems so far off the poetry radar is that he’s so well known in the art world as a sound artist. He’s included on seminal sound recordings like 10+2:12 American Text Sound Pieces with better known sound artists like John Cage and Brion Gysin. Giorno’s signature sound of a single voice repeated against itself at a slight delay is replicated on the page, but it’s more powerful on a record. Giorno’s "Give It to Me Baby"–which you can sample on iTunes–has a high-pitched, thin, female voice reading the poem, while the same voice returns at a five-second delay with it’s tones electronically altered. You can feel the influence of Giorno more strongly in Yaz’s album Upstairs at Eric’s or Lady Gaga’s "Poker Face" than in any of the Pulitzer Prize winners for poetry in the last five years. Tracie Morris is a contemporary figure with a similar footprint. She’s a poet, but her sound experiments resonate with the art world, not the poetry world (she was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, but has yet to find her way into a Norton anthology; Giornio’s big break was the Paris Biennale in 1965). Soft Skull Press’s Subduing Demons in America: Selected Poems 1962-2007 is an attempt to return John Giorno squarely to the world of poets, without downgrading his other accomplishments. As editor Marcus Boon asks at the beginning of his introduction, "Is he really a poet? Is he an artist? A multimedia wizard? A Beat? A Buddhist? A rock ’n’ roller? A Warholian Superstar?" The fact of the book insists on his being really a poet, while leaving open other possibilities. I’m inclined to agree.

Giorno’s work is defined by his use of found text, repetition, and erratic line breaks. Boon’s introduction explains that Giorno’s technique "is different from traditional lyrical approaches, in which words are considered a true reflection of the self, but different also from the avant-garde tradition, which posits that there is no such thing as a self and therefore only random, indeterminate aggregations of meaning exist" (xviii). Boon compares Giorno’s work to meditation where "thoughts arise in the mind in a natural way, coming and going, arising into awareness without attraction or aversion. The words are neither his, nor not his" (xviii, emphasis Boon’s). In "Give it to me Baby" Giorno mixes a sexual escapade, instructions for making shishkabob, news-clipping accounts of violence, real estate listings, and commercial jingles. Giorno’s poems are often hard to quote in small sections, because the work is so massive, and the feeling of the piece arises from the collage–and the collage dramatically alters throughout the piece:

Brush
meat
with marinade
and vegetables
with out.
 
The huge
prick
was in
my cunt.
 
Expansion level
for 2 extra Bedrooms
and Bath
 
I felt it
everywhere.
…….
As he arose
I clasped
my arms
around his neck,
and crossed
my legs
over his back.
 
Hi Ho Hey Hey
chew your little
troubles away.
 
While firemen
worked,
looters carried off
furniture,
appliances,
television sets,
and liquor.
 
Hi Ho Hey Hey,
chew Wrigley’s
Spearmint Gum.
 
"Give it
to me,
baby!
Oh, man!
Give it
to me
all the way!
Fuck me,
fuck me,
fuck me,
and don’t
ever stop!"
 
It focuses
the image
of the channel
you select
by shielding
the direct signal
from all outside
interference.
 
Some youth
hurled bricks at
firemen.

The effect of reading this poem is to be constantly short-circuited. No single voice can ever arise to fully take on a personality or experience pleasure or reveal an emotional investment. What is it that’s happening? There’s no center. The sex is not erotic, the violence is not scary, the information is not interesting, and the recipe is not appetizing. But the flatness of affect is itself compelling, and the recording of it (with the flat doubled voice) mirrors that flatness of affect. The sound of it all is the sound of it all, and Boon is right to compare Giorno’s technique to meditation. In a 1974 interview with Gay Sunshine, Giorno says, "Meditation makes perception clearer. Reality is very haunting. It’s always there. It’s like we all live in a giant haunted house, and the point is [to] make friends with it." Giorno is refreshingly clear that meditation is about boredom, and about confronting personal and worldly demons. He resists a (Hindu) feel good meditation in favor of a (Tibetan Buddhist) meditation practice that puts one at risk. "They bliss you out and leave you hung up there. Which is better than not doing anything at all, but why not go the whole way? In the Hindu yogas, it’s all milk and honey, and cheesecake. Making everything good and easy and sweet. Purifying yourself, removing yourself from the problem. Whereas there’s this giant shithouse of the world made up of good and bad." Giorno is firmly grounded in this shithouse of a world–his goal is not to leave it, but to find a way to live in it. The collage poems have the diffuse center of meditation–the heard voice moves neither by argument nor by explanation but by drift.

Other poems take on the kind of circulation and feedback of a pop song, where the lyrics flow and fade, alongside melodies and back up singers and instruments. In this section from "Grasping at Emptiness" the words attain a kind of pop song circulation:

The eyes circulate over the page because the text is repetitive. For Giorno, the line is not, as has been frequently theorized, a small pause, or an additional stress, but rather a new formulation of the text. I’ve never been entirely convinced by Charles Olson’s field of composition, but in these poems, I begin to understand how the page as a visual surface might interact with the flow and tumble of a poem. At other times, the repetitions feel like copies and feedback. With love lyrics, one tends to have the sense that the territory is familiar, that the circulation is the culturally established set of feelings, but Giorno starts in the familiar before moving to unexpected explorations and arguments. His repetitions begin to push and pull in a different way. In the long poem "Subduing Demons in America" the motion is tidal, washing in and out in waves. Boon explains that "Giorno, for me, is a poet whose work sometimes actually benefits from being skimmed or scanned, and in reading him, it helps to tune in to a tempo…." In "Subduing Demons in America," one can do almost nothing else. The repetitions create a sense of feedback and rewinding. The ideas keep coming at the same time that they’re being played back. The desire for linear development is both encouraged and frustrated as the phrases move lurchingly forward and back.

In stating that he has rejected both modernist and postmodernist maxims, Giorno is not just being self-congratulatory. He fits neither with the modernists, following Pound’s dictum that a poem is a rhythm cut into time, nor is he pursuing a postmodernist attack on the transparency of syntax and language. He trusts language like a modernist, but plays with it like a postmodernist. He allows the work to percolate, the ideas bubble up, repeat, and then allow forward motion. It’s not choreographed for the reader’s voice, but for the reader’s wandering eyes.

Many of Giorno’s poems do have unified speakers and coherent selves with a coherent audience. "Suicide Sutra" from 1974, begins like a Fluxus experiment: "Everyone is invited to participate in this poem. This is an audience participation poem. Please follow the instructions as you read them, and tighten the muscles of your body. Tighten each individual muscle and hold it. You should become uptight." The poems begins with the kind of muscular instructions familiar to anyone who’s taken a yoga class:

Tigthen
your fingers,
tighten
your hands,
tighten
your wrists,
tighten
your forearms

Though it later takes a far more ominous turn away from simply tensing and releasing:

There is
a gun
in your hand
there is a gun in your hand,
a 38-caliber
revolver,
and it’s pointing
at your face
and it’s pointing at your face
and it’s pointing at your face,
and you pull
the trigger
and you pull
and you pull the trigger,
the bullet
shoots slowly
toward
your head
shoots slowly toward your head,
you are committing
suicide

It guides the reader through suicide by gunshot, and then moves on to death by napalm, before arriving at reincarnation, where the poem concludes:

It’s like being
born,
a flower
opening,
and it is effortless
and it is effortless
and it is effortless,
and becomes
cooler
and cooler
and cooler,
and calm
and calm
and calm.
You haven’t gotten
anywhere,
only
here.

The poem acts as a kind of guide to his work–how to move into them, to vicariously experience the strands of his poems, before returning to the altered, but stable, self. Many of his early poems are small personality sketches that would seem at home in a collection by Gary Snyder or Jack Gilbert:

I’m Tired of Being Scared

An unemployed
machinist,
who traveled
here
from Georgia
10 days ago,
and who could not
find a job,
walked into
a police station
yesterday
and said,
"I’m tired of being scared."

But it’s often hard to find the line between found and composed text. In a sequence of similar character studies, the lyrics to the Rolling Stone’s "(I can’t get no) Satisfaction" appear. At his most autobiographical, Giorno slips to prose, as he does in the introduction to his 1972 volume Cancer in My Left Ball. But his most autobiographical is also his most obscure. In his introduction, "This Book is Cancer," he explains the experience that led him to the poem: "I had cancer in my left ball, which had gotten to be the size of a lemon and rock hard… They made this twelve-inch gash down the middle of my stomach, ripped out all my intestines and whatever else was in the way, then cut out fifty lymph nodes and sewed me up.". But part of what is so fascinating about Giorno is how unified thought and emotion are for him. Despite being heavily medicated, he describes the first few days as "white pain and hell fire. All in all it was my best tantric meditation. I sort of miraculously healed… To be in a bed next to a man who dies, to hear his last gasp, to know the moment he dies and hang on it, is pretty interesting." The word "interesting" is shocking, but comforting. And that engaged/detached tone remains steady for the whole of the book. The last poems in the volume, from 2007’s Everyone Gets Lighter are often quite funny and straightforward with titles like "Just Say No to Family Values," though retaining all of his innovations of style.

II.

Giorno might also be the most radical arts administrator in history. In 1967, he started his record label, Giorno Poetry Systems. GPS recorded a stunning line up of literary and political figures including John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Jim Carroll, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Bobby Seale, among many others. His hugely successful Dial-a-Poem project was announced in the New York Times on January 14, 1969 as "a new service, yolking the genius of the telephone company to the genius of living poets." The same article credits him for organizing readings in Central Park with audiences as large as 400 people. Dial-a-Poem started at the Architectural League, but after a move to the Museum of Modern Art, the project began to attract negative attention. Hilton Kramer referred to the information show at MoMA that included Dial-a-Poem as "the estheticization of political clichés." Giorno recounts how "The New York Post picked up on it and on page two was a two-column story with headlines on how you could call the Museum of Modern Art and learn how to build a bomb." The New York Times on September 3, 1970, ran a piece titled "Museum May Keep Dial-a-Poem Phones," that described the projected as featuring "many radical figures and writers, many of them denouncing government policy and advocating violence, some in poetry, others in prose."

Then in 1971, he began working with Abbie Hoffman to record programs for Radio Hanoi, and he ended up fleeing the country for India to avoid prosecution. Jane Fonda’s appearance on Radio Hanoi in 1972 prompted a congressional inquiry. By Giorno’s account, it wasn’t so much the fear of prosecution as that "The hassle was the typical Movement hassle: a community of thirty people, nobody doing anything and everybody is fighting about who makes the decisions, and how authority is shared. So it was Abbie battling with everybody and me doing all the work, because I knew how to do it. It got exhausting and depressing and I said ‘Fuck It!’ I got on a jet plane and flew to India." And once in India he began meeting the Tibetan Bhuddist figures who would influence America shortly. "I was driven in a VW bus… and found myself in the Dalai Lama’s living room with the Dalai Lama…. I met Nyichang Rinpoche… and after a while was taken to Darjeeling to Dudjom Rinpoche."

Giorno’s interviews are full of stunning phrases and sentences: "The poisons are the creativity, transformed." "It all boils down to everything is just like pornography. If it gets you off, what the fuck!" In the Gay Sunshine interviews, he comes across as the best dinner guest ever–charming, accomplished, and gentle, but firmly grounded. When I first read the interviews, I couldn’t quite believe that he’d done all those things, and yet, as I began to check, it all seemed backed up.

Part of what makes Giorno’s escapades so plausible is that he’s shockingly handsome–how else could he have bedded enough art world superstars (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol) to fill the Whitney–though by his account, none of them were famous when he was their lover, and he managed to alienate them all once they had become so. The Italian good looks of Giorno’s youth are reminiscent of the actor Enver Gjokaj, and at a reading I attended last year, he had lost none of his charisma. He has an open face, and seems entirely available and forthright and honest.

If the final question about Giorno is where to put him, the answer seems like a Zen Koan: everywhere and nowhere. His recordings, activism, and poems seem to exist on a parallel track to whatever we might call mainstream. He asserts his position in that place for insistently underground voices that are cherished passionately, but not anthologized or taught. He makes clear that he’s not interested in the kind of PR work that results in true fame. David Lehman’s book about the New York School Poets, The Last Avant-Garde, argues that there can be no more avant-garde, because the incorporation of the avant-garde to the mainstream has become predictable. It’s a formula, not a hope.

But Giorno, so close to the famous, and alarmed by the compromises they made for fame, seems pleased to remain in the margins where he can be himself. There’s something charged about the discovery of his work, a thrill in the eccentricities of his style, though the possibilities he reveals feel more like their own accomplishment. He doesn’t point the way forward, he shows what he’s become. 

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