It was over 60 years after Walt Whitman declared “I sing the body electric” that another American poet, John Giorno, one-upped him by literally connecting poetry to a Marshall stack. As York University’s Marcus Boon relays in his introduction to a new anthology of Giorno’s poems, Giorno sat with Andy Warhol at a Frank O’Hara reading in 1963, suffering through atrocious acoustics while Warhol pleaded, “It’s so boring. Why is it so boring?” Soon after, Giorno decided to amplify his own voice with multi-channel mixes at LSD-drenched happenings. At that point you could call Giorno the Les Paul of poetry but within a few years he would already advance to being the RZA of poetry. Influenced by his friends in the world of Pop Art, Giorno started scouring advertising for words, assembling them into percussive, horny incantations. Over the next three decades these would be the basis for countless performances, silk-screened posters and recordings.
As a figure at the nexus of several mediums and scenes, Giorno is known more for his facilitating — his Giorno Poetry System compilation LPs in the 1970s and ’80s, featuring everyone from Glenn Branca to Tom Waits, were affordable roadmaps to alternate universes — than his own work. Boon’s compendium redresses that oversight. Collected in one place, Giorno’s texts operate like scores and even resemble (after he developed a dual-column approach) multi-track windows. He eventually moved away from appropriating the banal, but the formal minimalism and repetition stuck. While quoting any several lines out of context here destroys the sum effect of the work, Giorno’s words are nothing if not inherently understandable. He’s all at once as familiar as a New York street-ranter (“The air of unreality / The air of unreality / was thick / was thick / was thick / here / as President Nixon / as President Nixon / on as beautiful a day / a day / on as beautiful a day / as anyone / could wish for”), an avuncular bathhouse aficionado (I lost count / of the times / I was fucked / by them / in every conceivable / position) and a disco mystic (but after all these long years / my meditation / isn’t so / good / my meditation isn’t so good, / the guy / on the 2nd / floor / the guy on the second floor / is mostly / stoned / on grass / is mostly stoned on grass, / listening / to disco”).
History has a tendency to ignore medium-jumpers like Giorno: there just aren’t any awards and foundations for a person so excited by new forms that they can leave old ones behind like shed skin. While the sonic impact of Giorno’s performances is sorely missing from this collection — a glued-in CD would have worked easily — reading Subduing Demons in America is a good start for opening up your ears.