KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a production of PoetryFoundation.org. And welcome to the UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith. And in this series of podcasts, we'll be giving you a tour of the more obscure gems buried deep within this trove of UbuWeb at ubu.com. This week we'll be focusing on John Giorno's Poetry Systems and Dial-A-Poem Poets, a series of LPs that he put out beginning in 1968 and going all the way out into the mid-80s. In 1965, John Giorno, who was the founder of Giorno Poetry Systems, was hanging out with people like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He was a poet and he knew everybody downtown. He began to look into the use of modern mass media and technologies being used by people like Rauschenberg and Warhol and thought, gee whiz, poetry 75 years behind painting and sculpture, dance, and music. And Giorno thought, if they can do it, why can't I do it for poetry? So he set out to connect with an audience using the entertainments of ordinary life, television, the telephone, record albums.

In fact, John Giorno, by setting up the Giorno Poetry Systems was actually predicting the internet. What he left behind was a fabulous trail of LPs, videos, artifacts, books. The entity that is John Giorno was a nonstop advocate for poetry. And so what I'd like to do today is just roll you through some brief cuts and basically what the Poetry Systems project does is it gives you a complete scope of what downtown New York looked like from the years 1965 to 1985. Really a New York that doesn't exist anymore. I'd like to begin our tour with a really great piece by an old, at this point, beatnik poet named Helen Adam. She was located in San Francisco and on January 1st of 1975, she recorded what was to become a rallying cry for downtown called the cheerless junkie song.

HELEN ADAM:
Cheerless junkie song. Seeking love upon a day, a day of summer's pride. I left Long Island suburbs for the Lower East Side. The train it roared and thundered and I sailed above in scream. There's a cockroach coming towards me, but it cannot spoil my dream. Love, love and LSD. It shall not spoil my dream.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The idea of an old woman getting up and screaming about free love and LSD was something that just absolutely electrified the St Mark's poetry crowd. And Giorno was there with his tape recorder recording all this stuff. There were and continue to be poetry marathons every January 1st in St Mark's church. So this is 1975.

HELEN ADAM:
I was where the action is. I blow my mind all day. While on Long Island's tennis courts, the black Suburbans play. And I was born suburban who would ever credit that. No chick who saw me frogging with the cockroach and the rat.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It was a crowd-pleaser. Along similar lines, John Giorno was the star of Andy Warhol's Sleep, eight hours of John Giorno simply sleeping. He was Warhol's lover at the time. And as a result, he had deep and intimate access to the superstars of the Andy Warhol scene. One of whom was Taylor Mead.

TAYLOR MEAD:
Motorcycles. Boom boom boom. Motorcycles. Boom boom boom. Crash. Crash. Chromium high handles man. High ass, low ass, high hands. Crash. Crash. Night far away. Lonely. Crash. Crash.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Taylor Mead was an underground film star and here he is doing a sound poem called Motorcycles that was recorded not at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, but in a small studio that John Giorno himself set up on the Bowery in a windowless space called the Bunker where William S Burroughs lived in the seventies when he returned to New York.

TAYLOR MEAD:
In a row. What municipality, unreality, Sigmund Freud, Constant Lambert, Vespa, Volkswagen, cemented, paved, demented, raved, caved.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Taylor Mead and Motorcycles. Because John Giorno knew everybody, he had access to everybody's archive and people would just throw all sorts of old and obscure recordings at him such as this. An extremely early psychedelic piece by Meredith Monk from 1967 called Candy, Bullets, and Moon. Of course, it sounds nothing like the Meredith Monk that we know and love today. As a matter of fact, this didn't appear anywhere except for this John Giorno Poetry System record. She recorded this in 1967 with, of all people, Don Preston from the Mothers of Invention. And that's Don Preston, putting the organ, electric bass and drums. This was recorded just prior to the Mothers run at the Garrett Theater in New York in 1968 when the Mothers had decamped in New York. So you have this fabulous mixing of West Coast psychedelia and the New York avant-garde and Meredith Monk. This finally appeared on the Giorno Poetry System's record called Better, An Old Demon Than a New God in 1984. One great thing about living downtown in that period was that people were just doing things, you know, simply for the love of it and for the art of it.

It was only later that they became rock stars. And so John Giorno could always, because he was hanging out, could always call in his chips. And one of the big chips that he was able to call in was Patti Smith.

PATTI SMITH:
Took the dart and named it Swift at the king's heart, and he started walking toward the castle, started walking toward the palace, started walking. He was walking. He was walking. He was walking. In this big step, I am taking seven seizures.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is called The Histories of the Universe, recorded at the St. Mark's Church marathon on January 1st, 1975. Just as Patti Smith was emerging as a rock star, but for many years had been a beloved member of the St Mark's poetry scene. It catches her at an incredible moment.

PATTI SMITH:
Love without exception, be a saint in any form. Thank you. (APPLAUSE)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
One thing that the St. Mark's poetry scene in the 60s and 70s was really famous for were tough women and Giorno loved tough New York women. There was a whole street smarts to these gals. And one of the highlights and one of the superstars of that scene and remaining a superstar today was Eileen Myles with this great Boston accent she has.

EILEEN MYLES:
Tuesday brightness. We had a fight, so we didn't fuck at night. The unemployment office was a series of lines and I signed up. And at home, I ate Philadelphia cream cheese, Thomas's English muffins, colour, Xerox, Catholic comics.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is something called Tuesday Brightness, recorded in 1977. It's all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

EILEEN MYLES:
And Sappho holes and all feel the wind shifting through a shiver when Sappho speaks of her heartbeat, it Pounding down through the ages old adrenaline gives me a rush. And morning sex was.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Another tough woman was Kathy Acker. This is something called I Was Walking Down the Street. And boy, is this ever tough.

KATHY ACKER:
I was walking along the street. It was night, late at night, and I was looking for some action. Times Square. The blue, yellow, green, red, white, and violet neon lights were still blinking. They wouldn't stop blinking for another two hours and it would still be dark.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Yeah, that's a lost New York. I Was Walking Down the Street by Kathy Acker, again, before she became the sort of mega institution that she became toward the end of her life. She was just hanging out at the Poetry Project with everyone else. One of John Giorno's great collaborators was Anne Waldman. They, of course, knew each other intimately involved in Buddhist practice and also at Naropa. They ganged together in the early 80s to protest against nuclear power, which was the cause of the day. They both had rock bands. And this is a piece by Anne Waldman called Uh-Oh Plutonium.

SPEAKER:
John's Plutonium! Love it, hate it. We'll all be glowing for a quarter of a million years! Teeth glowing!

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
At this point downtown, there was really no difference between rock and roll and poetry as evidenced by Patti Smith and Anne Waldman. And John Giorno himself, of course, was somewhat of a rock star. Everybody could have their 15 minutes in the downtown scene of John Giorno in the 60s and 70s. Speaking of John Giorno, here's a great piece of his called Grasping at Emptiness from the record Big Ego. And this was recorded at an upstate studio that John worked with in June 9th of 1978.

JOHN GIORNO:
My new poem is called Grasping at Emptiness. And you're walking down Lafayette Street, you're walking down Lafayette Street, you're walking down Lafayette Street, and your face twists up and your face twists up and it stops crying, and your face twists up and it stops crying, and it stops crying, you're walking down Lafayette Street!

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It's Giorno using his two tape recorder techniques to use this repetitious thing, John's Mature Style, often dealing with the confluence of sex, drugs, rock and roll, empty downtown and Buddhism, John Giorno himself, and in the UbuWeb archive there are just dozens and dozens of Giorno pieces. One of the things that Giorno did was he set up a telephone system, and hence the name Dial-A-Poem, and you could call in from anywhere and hear a poem. Much of what he recorded himself played on Dial-A-Poem telephone lines, but he also just went scraping around and he asked his friends, he said, what do you have for me? And people like Frank O'Hara dug into their archive and gave Giorno beautiful things.

FRANK O'HARA:
Which I like to write.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is recorded in 1963.

FRANK O'HARA:
And, you know, it isn't just what I see, but what I'm thinking about while I'm walking to. The first one is called poem. Lana Turner has collapsed. I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing. And you said it was hailing, but hailing hits you on the head hard. So it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
These were absolutely impossible things to hear. The only place you could hear them was Dial-A-Poem, and later on the records that John Giorno released. Likewise, somebody like John Ashbery.

JOHN ASHBERY:
Yes they are alive and can have those colors, but I in my soul am alive too. I feel I'm a sing and dance to tell of this in a way that knowing you may be drawn to me.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a recording that he made for a NETTV special about poetry. It's very short and very rare.

JOHN ASHBERY::
You hold me up to the light in a way I should never have expected, or suspected perhaps because you always tell me I am you, and write.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
At a minute 33 seconds you'd call up the Giorno poetry Dial-A-Poem and you get an earful of poetry. Giorno made no distinction between scenes, between gender, between sexual preference, between various ethnic groups. At the time Miguel Algarín was founding the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and he made sure to include this history.

MIGUEL ALGARIN:
(MUSIC) (SPEAKS FOREIGN)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is called (UNKNOWN) from Miguel Algarín. Can be found on the Giorno Poetry System record called Sugar, Alcohol and Meat at ubu.com. Of course, another downtown star to be would be Laurie Anderson, who was an intimate of John Giorno and William S. Burroughs. This is from You're the Guy I Wanna Share My Money With, and we're going to listen to a piece called Structural Filmmaking.

LAURIE ANDERSON:
Is sitting there cutting out pictures of hamsters from magazines and some of the pictures, the hamsters are pets, and some are just scenes where hamsters are somewhere in the background. She's got a whole pile of these cedar chips. You know, the kind.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is from You're the Guy I Wanna Share My Money With, that John Giorno put out a double record of Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, and John Giorno. This is from 1981, and right before Laurie Anderson really hit it huge, and went on to make her stardom, John Giorno was there with his tape recorder.

JOHN GIORNO:
And suddenly I realized that this is just her way of suggesting to me that I should become a structuralist filmmaker, which I had, you know, planned to do anyway.

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And this concludes the first UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast. Thanks for joining us. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith, and do join us again as we uncover more buried gems from the vast archive of avant-garde, outsider, and ethno-poetic arts that can be found at ubuweb.com.

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