RIP John Giorno (1936-2019)

We're very sad to learn that poet and Dial-A-Poem impresario, John Giorno, died on Friday at the age of 82. Giorno "turned to the world of art and the mechanisms of mass media to shake poetry loose from the page and embed it more deeply in the fabric of everyday life," writes Randy Kennedy in this weekend's New York Times. "His death, after a heart attack, was confirmed by the artist Ugo Rondinone, his husband." Reading on from there: 

Possessed of Greco-Roman good looks and a gregarious, benevolent spirit, Mr. Giorno played an important role early in his life as a muse and lover of other artists, among them Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, who created his seminal 1963 film “Sleep” by focusing a mostly static Bolex movie camera on Mr. Giorno’s slumbering body for more than five hours, turning him into a filmic, Pop-era version of Mantegna’s Christ.

But Mr. Giorno’s lasting contribution to art came through his restless experiments in the circulation and political potential of poetry, which he felt had been unjustly overshadowed by other genres of expression.

“It occurred to me that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music,” he told the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2002, adding that he had been inspired, in part, by the way the work of Pop artists jumped the rails of the traditional art world and reached a broader audience.

“In 1965, the only venues for poetry were the book and the magazine, nothing else,” he said. “Multimedia and performance didn’t exist. I said to myself, ‘If these artists can do it, why can’t I do it for poetry?’”

That year he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit foundation, to promote his work and that of his peers. And four years later, inspired by a phone call with his friend, the writer William S. Burroughs, he started Dial-A-Poem, a rudimentary mass-communication system for cutting-edge poets and political oratory.

Initially using six phone lines connected to reel-to-reel answering machines in a room at the Architecture League on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it was callable around the clock for anyone with a few minutes and a desire to be read to.

Millions of people dialed in, hearing verse recited by poets like Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Peter Schjeldahl and Ron Padgett, later joined by dozens of other poets and groups like the Black Panthers.

At a time when the culture at large and the art world were still relatively prudish and also deeply homophobic, Dial-A-Poem — which was featured in the highly influential Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 — was often unabashedly erotic and heavily gay in content. (The service is still in operation, now at the number 641-793-8122.)

Learn more at the New York Times.