John Giorno. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA). Photo: Sonja Garnitschnig
Seminal poet and artist John Giorno became known for the effervescent, physical nature of his work in the early 1960s, shortly after meeting Andy Warhol (that’s Giorno dozing in Warhol’s 1963 film, Sleep). Inspired by a friend group that included Robert Rauschenberg, Giorno effectively turned his poems into multimedia pieces, recording his poetry with synthesizers to create sound installations and developing the famous Dial-A-Poem. Prompted by a conversation with his close friend William Burroughs, Dial-A-Poem allowed anyone to call Giorno Poetry Systems (his non-profit production company), for free, to hear a poem by a number of writers (Anne Waldman and John Cage among them). The poetry often referenced pertinent social issues of the time; Giorno, born in 1936, became both a gay rights and AIDS activist, founding the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984. Later, he would discover Tibetan Buddhism.
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Giorno’s desire to make poetry accessible is purely compassionate, and it’s well-aligned with O, Miami Poetry Festival’s goal to help “every single person in Miami-Dade County encounter a poem during the month of April.” The festival culminated with a reading by Giorno, presented in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA). More accurately, the reading took place at the Moore Building, which is attached to ICA Miami and where Elastika, an installation by Zaha Hadid, connects to the atrium like a spongy, humanoid tendon. In the image below, Giorno reads to the quiet mass of people, too many to fit into the available chairs and for whom the poet’s words visibly resonated.
John Giorno. Courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA). Photo: Sonja Garnitschnig
In a nod to Giorno’s practice, Obsolete Media Miami (OMM), a media archive and art collective founded by Kevin Arrow and Barron Sherer, debuted their installation, Untitled (triple gem), 2016 [a deconstructed exploding plastic inevitable]. The piece was comprised of three screens placed along the Moore’s first-floor staircase, the center of which displayed a series of 16mm Andy Warhol screen tests, on loan from the MOMA circulating library. Above and below were 35mm slides that, explained Arrow, “felt” like Giorno’s poems (we noticed 1960s photographs, a dolphin, ocean views). “I went through the slides pretty much for a month,” he told us.Without providing a literal backdrop for Giorno, the installation acknowledged the ever-changing scope of who he is. Giorno was preceded by Edinburgh-based poet Ryan Van Winkle, whose poem “My 100 Year Old Ghost” felt especially poignant:
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“And even back then / the power went out, long nights when they had no kerosene/ And my ghost tries to sell me on simpler times:/ the grass soft, endless –/ lampless nights,/ pools of crickets singing.”Then, from his extensive oeuvre, Giorno read “Thanx 4 Nothing,” “Everyone Gets Lighter,” “It Doesn’t Get Better,” “God Is Man-Made,” and “The Bad Tree,” and while it would be unfair to simplify each work to their core, all of them contain a humor that’s equally sardonic and touching, crystallizing the human experience by mirroring it (life is pretty dark and wistful, too). From “God Is Man-Made”: “Heaven is living in your eyes/And seeing everybody in the world/As gods and goddesses/Every wretch, ugly, grasping person/Is a deity swimming in light.”
Slide presentation by Obsolete Media Miami (OMM). Courtesy of the Artists and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA). Photo: Sonja Garnitschnig
He spoke each verse like a story relayed for laughs, shifting occasionally into an out-of-breath repetition that mirrored the mantras of his chosen religion. Giorno, long before his fame, was born a writer. “I’ve been writing since the age of ten, a poet since I was 14,” he says. Over the past several decades, his work has become increasingly experimental—consider his poem paintings, which distill his poems into short sentences on canvas or walls. They're fitting, given the brevity with which we speak through technological platforms. That, too, can be poetic; says Giorno: “This is a golden age of poetry. There are so many ways to express ourselves now, even through text messages. The limitations of poetry, when it was strictly for a small privileged few, are gone.”
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