Make Each of You a Superstar

In his posthumous memoir Great Demon Kings (FSG, 2020), the poet and artist John Giorno offers an origin story for his lively six-decade career. In 1963, he accompanied Andy Warhol to hear a poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. They sat in the back. O’Hara and Ashbery sat at a table up front and read their poems aloud—no amplification, nothing flashy, just a standard poetry reading. As Giorno recounts in his memoir, Warhol turned to him and asked, “Why is it so boring?”

In the early ’60s, neither O’Hara nor Ashbery should have seemed boring. Both poets were at the height of their powers; Ashbery had recently published The Tennis Court Oath, while O’Hara’s Lunch Poems appeared the following year. But Warhol’s question hinted at poetry’s cultural marginality. Poets are not, as the saying goes, rock stars—or, to use a favorite term of both Giorno and Warhol, superstars. But Giorno spent his entire career working to change that, and in the process made himself a cult figure in New York’s downtown art and literary scenes.

Giorno died last October, at age 82, and Great Demon Kings is both his final testament and a reminder of how energetically he used the cutting-edge technology of his era to realize the modernist mandate to “make it new.” He refuted Warhol’s petulant question about the boredom of poetry readings by expanding the form, delivery, and marketing of poetry. He used emerging recording technology to modulate and echo his voice; he created the Dial-a-Poem project, by which anyone could call in and hear a recorded poem; he conducted poetry readings during which he handed out LSD and deployed timed lighting; and his eponymous record label released approximately 50 LPs throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

In the cultural moment before Giorno, poetry was largely relegated to bohemian circles and college campuses. Radical figures like Allen Ginsberg occasionally surfaced in pop culture, but much American poetry at the time seemed staid. Giorno, perhaps more than anyone else, reconfigured poetry in the image of rock music. In his hands, poetry became sexual, performative, and dangerous—a polymorphous art that looked to the future rather than to the past. You can debate whether it was good to have poets on MTV in the 1980s and ‘90s; you can’t debate it was remarkable for them to be there at all. Giorno wasn’t the only one responsible for this breakthrough, but few poets worked harder to make it happen. Building on the powerful examples of Pop Art and Brion Gysin’s cut-ups, Giorno ushered 1950s poetics into a revolutionary new era.

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Giorno grew up in Brooklyn, the only child of a father who owned a clothing manufacturing company and a mother who was a fashion designer. He graduated from James Madison High School and attended Columbia University, where he met Ginsberg. After graduating from Columbia in 1958, he started at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Mired in the depression that haunted his entire life, Giorno attempted suicide at age 22. His landlady found him on the bathroom floor, and Paul Engle, then head of the Writers’ Workshop, called Giorno’s parents. He returned to their home in Roslyn Heights, on Long Island, in 1959, and, unable to figure out what to do next, took a job as a stockbroker on Wall Street.

The move was fortuitous. In the early 1960s, downtown New York was bursting with the creative energies of Pop Art, experimental theater, and Happenings. He met Warhol at the artist’s first solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1962; later, Warhol invited Giorno to the premiere of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Giorno reports being puzzled, since most of the art world had already seen the film; he surmises that Warhol wanted to go because the event “was the premiere, as in Hollywood premiere.” In what would become Giorno’s initial claim to fame, Warhol filmed a snoozing Giorno for Sleep (1963), a five-hour “anti-film” that ranks as one of Warhol’s best. These two aspects of Warhol’s aesthetic—a taste for spectacle and an interest in the found art of the ordinary—were  foundational for Giorno.

This aesthetic had a technological outlet in Dial-a-Poem, which started in 1969. As the New York Times reported, the project connected six phone lines to reel-to-reel answering machines set up in the city’s Architecture League building; callers could dial in 24 hours a day and hear poems read by Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, John Cage, Jim Carroll, and Giorno himself, among others. Dial-a-Poem garnered national media attention and received more than a million calls in its first five months. It was later featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s influential Information Show, in 1970. Dial-a-Poem has been restaged several times, most recently at MoMA in 2012. It was innovative, delivered often shocking content, and remains an indelible part of its era. (It’s also still active; you can try it yourself at 641-793-8122.)

And yet, despite Dial-a-Poem’s influence, it’s only one example of Giorno’s many innovations, which have as much to do with rock music as with poetry. In Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017), the poet and critic Daniel Kane groups Giorno with Lou Reed and Patti Smith, artists who also made careers melding rock and poetry. While Giorno never achieved their mass commercial success, rock provided him with the crucial elements of his oeuvre: the excitement of live performance, the possibilities of new audio technologies, and the distribution avenue of the long-playing stereo record.

Rock also allowed Giorno to expand the innovations he developed in the early 1960s under the influence of the New York scene. Pop artists had reveled in the possibilities of the readymade object: Warhol silkscreened advertisements, Robert Rauschenberg affixed ties and stuffed birds to his canvases, Claes Oldenburg made sculptures of hamburgers. Giorno grasped that the poetic equivalent of such work was found poetry, and set about scavenging texts from newspapers that he then chopped into line breaks, often with striking results. This method, now called “appropriation” or “conceptual poetry,” has found wide (and controversial) purchase in the work of recent poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place.

But Giorno pushed found poetry in surprising directions, using the cut-up techniques he learned from Gysin and Burroughs. Long before Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), which transcribed radio and TV reports of national tragedies, Giorno mined American media to scrutinize the country’s fascination with death. In his 1966 piece “Constitution of the United States,” for example, he folds bits of news reports into the text of the Constitution. The effect is Whitmanian in its collating of small stories of death and hospitalization, juxtaposed against the contemporary flotsam of advertising and drug use (Giorno even folds in a review of Burroughs’s 1961 novel The Soft Machine, which laments its “preoccupation with sodomy and the dubious joys thereof”). It’s a gorgeous work that far exceeds its gimmicky premise. “Article VII,” to take one case, excerpts a syndicated newspaper article from 1967 that features a Vietnam soldier’s last letter home:

I’m writing
this letter
as my last one.
You’ve probably
already received word
that I’m dead
and that the government
wishes to express
its deepest regrets.
Believe me,
I didn’t want
to die.

In 1966, the nonprofit Freedoms Foundation selected that letter as the year’s best expression of “faith, love and devotion to God and country”; it was read into the Congressional record for similar reasons. By excerpting the letter and interspersing it with the Constitution and ads for Manufacturers Hanover and Tinactin, Giorno turns it into something darker: a vision of ongoing death that the Constitution and advertising both authorize and elide. The poem acts as a textual analogue to Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (also the inspiration for Goldsmith’s Deaths) wherein Warhol silkscreened found images of electric chairs, car crashes, and suicides. 

Pop Art inspired Giorno to do more than just bring the readymade into poetry. In the ’60s, Warhol, Rauschenberg, and others experimented with emerging audiovisual technologies with enthusiastic assistance from Bell Labs. One example, covered at length in Great Demon Kings, is 9 Evenings, a 1966 series of events at the New York Armory assembled by Rauschenberg, Pontus Hultén, and the Bell engineer Billy Klüver. Giorno writes:

Open Score began with a tennis game played by Frank Stella and Mimi Kanarek, with the rackets wired for sound. The sound of the game controlled the stage lights. Each time the tennis ball hit the racket, it made a sharp popping sound, and one of the house lights went out— darker and darker with each hit. At last, when all the house lights were out, and the house dark, a cast of five hundred volunteers came on stage in the blackness. Their instructions were to do ordinary things, move about, take off a sweater, touch or hug someone.

Whatever was happening on that Armory stage—artistic compromise with Cold War industry, fetishization of technology—it wasn’t boring, and in his memoir, Giorno looks to this event as an example of what poetry readings could become.

Under the influence of 9 Evenings, Giorno began searching for ways to amplify, disrupt, and otherwise modify the poetic voice. Shortly after 9 Evenings, Rauschenberg introduced Giorno to Bob Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer. Giorno used the sound modification afforded by the Moog to modulate, oscillate, and echo his found texts, such that the poem becomes a sound collage.

One of the first, and most famous, works Giorno developed using the Moog is “Pornographic Poem,” a found poem that describes sex between the speaker and “[s]even Cuban army officers in exile.” Structurally, it’s modest: eight sentences from an erotic story chopped into lines of between one and four words. Still, it found some purchase in print: Ted Berrigan published it in C shortly after; Ron Padgett included it in An Anthology of  New York Poets in 1970.

In the recorded version, the poem becomes something more. The LP features 15 artists and writers—including Rauschenberg, the poet Peter Schjeldahl, and the choreographer Yvonne Rainer—reading Giorno’s poem (Giorno recorded them all himself, at his home at 222 Bowery, the building where Burroughs also lived and that was previously occupied by the artist Mark Rothko). Each recording takes approximately one minute; each voice has a varying level of echo applied to it. “I made sound compositions from each reading,” Giorno writes, “laying down two tracks, one on each track of the stereo tape recorder, slightly off sync. The repetition created a rhythm and a beat, and brought out the musical qualities inherent in the words and the person ’s voice.” The repetition and the echoing wouldn’t sound out of place on a Throbbing Gristle record.

Giorno built on the success of “Pornographic Poem” by releasing LPs of poetry and music, mostly on the Giorno Poetry Systems label, the jokey moniker under which he did much of his work. Giorno came up with the name in the mid ’60s, explaining

To receive and raise money for my poetry projects and events, I needed to create a not-for-profit organization, and that organization needed a name. So I took something commercial and industrial and gave it a wry metaphoric spin: Giorno Poetry Systems.

The early LPs drew from Dial-a-Poem and featured, among others, Burroughs, Waldman, Laurie Anderson, Richard Hell, and Meredith Monk. Eventually, these records embraced avant-garde rock, whereby on the same record you might hear Burroughs, Sonic Youth, the performance artist Diamanda Galás, and the John Giorno Band. (Difficult to find, these LPs now fetch top dollar on the used market.)

Giorno incorporated these recordings into poetry readings that were his version of 9 Evenings. He played them from speakers dispersed around a room, augmenting them with timed lighting and other enhancements. Here’s how he describes one of the early performances, conducted at the Architectural League of New York in 1968:

I used the compositions I had made with Bob Moog, the light organ analyzing their sound and displaying it in banks of four colored lights. And as part of my ongoing effort to involve all the senses, soap machines dispensed bubbles from the ceiling.

The effect was psychedelic, and Giorno often ensured such by handing out LSD and joints to the audience. When he couldn’t do that—for an event in Central Park sponsored by New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs, for instance—he set up “automatic aerosol dispensers [that] sprayed the arbitrary smells of strawberries and chocolate.” Everything was designed to make poetry a dynamic, vital experience.

Giorno’s Moog-enabled echoing was well-suited to live performance and recorded sound. Eventually, Giorno began to write the echoing into the poems themselves; in their obituary for Giorno, the writers Chris Kraus and Rebecca Waldron figure “the echoey loop” as Giorno’s “signature style.” For example, “Eating the Sky,” from 1978, uses repeated phrases in lines of varying lengths to describe going to a former lover’s house and being overcome with bad feeling:

the thought
 
of being
here
for 6 more
hours
the thought of being here
for 6 more hours,
I don’t
ever
want
to be here
again
I don’t ever
want to be
here again

Vexed, the speaker wants to leave, but is fixed in place by social niceties; the looping lines convey the situation’s irresolvability. Giorno used technology to transform the poet’s spoken voice, but technology finds its way back into the poems even in the low-tech printed page.

As the critic Ken Cormier has argued, all that echoing disrupts the singularity of the poet’s voice, creating “a poetics that no poet is adequate to articulate on his own, either on the page or in performance.” Cormier is among many who locate a kind of democratic impulse—a move to share—in Giorno’s project. Looking back on his career, Giorno summarized this aesthetic in one of his of best poems, “THANX 4NOTHING,” written when he was 70 years old:

it was wonderful we loved each other
but I don’t want any of them back,
now, if any of you
are attracted to any of them,
may they come back from the dead,
and do whatever is your pleasure,
may they multiply,
and be the slaves
of whomever wants them,
fulfilling your every wish and desire,
(but you won’t want them as masters,
as they’re demons),
may Andy come here
fall in love with you
and make each of you a superstar,
everyone can have
Andy.
everyone can
have Andy.
everyone can have Andy,
everyone can have an Andy.

It’s a generous account of all the people who churn through Great Demon Kings. Inasmuch as Giorno’s interventions made poetry less boring, they also helped make poetry more interconnected. In this sense, Dial-a-Poem is a synecdoche for all of Giorno’s innovations. He brought poetry to new and often younger audiences, who were enticed by the attitude and trappings of rock music. Traces of Giorno’s multimedia ethos and egalitarian spirit even underlie today’s Instapoets. Many critics dismiss their work, but its virality, and its performativity, are arguably aesthetic descendants of Giorno. Ultimately, he was less a rock star himself than a promoter, and a poet whose work could be personal but who seldom occupied center stage.