World Class Poetry Blog

Dial-A-Poet: An Idea Whose Time Has Come And Gone
1 February 2008, the poet @ 10:24 pm

John Giorno is a giant among poets. He was friends with William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, lover to Andy Warhol, disciple of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, and has been an inspiration to at least two generations of poets since. That’s quite a pedigree.

This article plugging tonight’s performance of Giorno and Thomas Hellman in Montreal is quite a treat. I’d like to respond to some of its prose:

Charles Bukowski, the American poet, novelist and Giorno’s longtime friend, once described his experience in reading the great poets of the literary canon as amounting to “a goddamn headache.” Bukowski’s complaint is far from uncommon. Outside academia, popular audiences often regard poetry as traditional and arcane, elitist and unapproachable. But in the documentary Poetry in Motion – a project Giorno helped to coordinate – Bukowski stresses that this does not have to be the case. “Poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private hidden art….The reason it is not appreciated is because it hasn’t shown any dance, any guts, any moxy.”

If you can relate to Buk’s proclamation then you’d probably feel right at home with the Beats and their offspring. The Beats rejected much of Modernist poetics simply because, as Bukowski so eloquently put it, the stuff was stiff, esoteric, arcane, and just plain too academic. Ever since, there has been a raging battle between the high brow academics and the gutter stench street poets like Buk and his religious followers. I find myself stuck somewhere in the middle.

The Modernists And The Beats
T.S. Eliot is one of my favorite poets. “The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock” is still one of my favorite poems. But, like many of his critics, I find the constant footnotes nerve wracking. For that reason, I can do without his more popular poem “The Waste Land,” although I do agree that April is the cruelest month and that is an awesome line, but if a poem needs endless footnotes it should be an essay, not a poem. That said, I don’t mind one or two short notes to shed light on a word or phrase that may be borrowed or that an average reader might not understand the reference to. And just for the record, I find Ezra Pound, who was a close friend of Eliot’s and helped him prepare “The Waste Land” for publication, even worse.

Ah, but the Beats are not without their problems. Their admirers are even worse. Trash garage poetry has become so chic in today’s post-punk world that we will soon start seeing Bukowski imitators gang raping has-been Elvis impersonators in the foyers of national museums. But the hills do strangely look like white elephants.

All of that aside, however, Buk is right on point when he says poetry needs verseteers who can bring it alive, whether they come from the halls of academia or the dark and deadly alleys of Inner City, USA.

Performance Poets Versus Formalism

Giorno’s work literally breathes life into poetry: “If you are performing to an audience, it is just like a singer in that when I perform, I use my breath in a strong way and allow the sounds of the words to come out,” Giorno explains to me. “Music is just the sound of the words. But poets aren’t trained; it’s not like they go to singing school.” Giorno bounds and sweats on stage like a musician, too. “I am not playing with my body to amuse the audience, it is the poem that moves the body that way,” he says.

I’ve never been able to perform. I’m not a performer. To me, the performance can often detract from the actual poem. I love to read a good poem on the page. But I’ve seen many performance poets who can make their poem ring, and that’s OK. It sounds like Giorno has found his medium. Performance is good as long as it doesn’t take over. I still want poetry.

Like the Beats, his work is highly politicized and overtly critical of traditional and conventional values, but he is no stalwart disciple. After all, he was a full generation younger than a lot of the beatniks, and wasn’t afraid to immerse himself in other artistic movements. In 1963, he collaborated with Warhol – his lover at the time – as the star in the “anti film” Sleep, composed of a single long shot of Giorno lying in bed for five hours.

I think it is very important for poets not to get stuck. Immersing yourself in other artistic movements and literary styles can only improve your writing. If something doesn’t work for you, you can abandon it. No harm done. In fact, it might even make your poetry stronger. I think this is especially true of performance poets.

In the 1980s, as a student at the University of Texas at Dallas, I had the opportunity to show my poetry to a former editor of The Kenyon Review, Frederick Turner. Those familiar with Turner will know him as a formalist poet, which I’m not. At that time, in my early 20s, I was beginning to write in a style of contemporary poets - without rhyme, unique line enjambments, and in a conversational style. Although my poetry was much more lyrical than the norm, I was capable, due to being raised in a musical family, of creating poetry that could make its own music. I still like writing those poems even today, rhyme or no rhyme. But to shorten the story, Turner encouraged me to read - and write - more formal poetry and added, “It can only strengthen your own style and your voice.” He was right. It did.

Why Burroughs Should Be Beat

To explain his interaction with the Beats and Pop Art, Giorno borrows the metaphor of “the third mind” from another one of his long-time friends, William Burroughs. Burroughs’s model of artistic process rejects the idea that one artist directly influences another. Instead, he believes that two minds come together to create a work that is more than the sum of its parts, transcending either poet’s vision. “This metaphor of William’s,” explains Giorno, “is not so much about influence as it is the mind flowing together.” The two clearly admired one another: “He had one of the most brilliant minds in the world and so it was a great blessing to be with him. William and I lived together. I knew him for 40 years and I lived with him for most of it.”

I don’t agree with Giorno’s perception of Burroughs. Though regrettably, I’ve never met him. Had I, I might change my tune. But I’ve read other statements that Burroughs has made about things and I’ve never seen a quote from him that I thought made any sense. The Third Mind is such a concept. Artists do influence. The idea that somehow T.S. Eliot and I have collaborated on certain poems, or that Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes were co-creators, is just absurd. That is just metaphysical swill. I like Burroughs as a writer; I think he stinks as a philosopher.

The Future Of Poetry

John Giorno has worked tirelessly to bring poetry to the masses and to ensure its accessibility. In 1965, he started Giorno Poetry Systems, recognizing a great potential in mass media and technology to promote the arts. The project, perhaps best described as a non-profit artist collective, committed itself to the distribution of LPs, videos, vinyls, and tapes which featured performances by some of the most influential and innovative poets of the past five decades, from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Michael Ondaatje and Patti Smith. The idea was groundbreaking, but to Giorno, it seemed obvious. “One had a feeling that one should be connecting with an audience. It was common sense to work with all of the opportunities that media offered. Nobody had done this before, so I was walking a bit blindly into it.”

Until this article, I’d never heard of Giorno Poetry Systems. I like it, though. It’s a sublime idea and I agree with Giorno that such experiments are what poetry needs to keep it alive. I believe we are now on the verge of a new poetic movement, a digital movement that will transcend anything that has ever happened in the world of poetry. Keep your eyes open. This new digital poetry is about to explode and it will take the idea of the poetry slam to new levels. Just watch.

Giorno’s aim is not only to connect to an audience, but to evoke a response: “When you connect to an audience they can perceive the poem in their minds. They can relax, or you can shock them – any one of any feelings that can allow the mind to feel. It’s all a part of connecting to an audience. People tend to think a poem is like Beethoven or Mozart: you can’t scream! Audiences treat it like classical music.”

No truer words were ever spoken. Catharsis, to borrow a word from Aristotle. That’s the poet’s aim. Create catharsis any way you can.

As for poetry’s current status, both Hellman and Giorno are particularly excited about the growing amount of poetry slams in Europe and North America.

I think the days of the slam are coming to an end. Something better is about to emerge. Something really wild. I mean it. Keep your eyes open.

Giorno echoes this optimism. He entrusts today’s emerging spoken word artists with moving poetry forward – and with hip hop and slam poetry on the rise, his legacy is in good hands. “When you go to these slams, you see these kids who just get some real physical reaction in the heart and mind. Slams are all over the place. It is a fabulous phenomenon,” he concludes. Giorno is evidently an idealist at heart: We are in a “golden age of poetry,” he says.

Yes, this is the golden age, but the slam is history. It has run its course. Time to move on.

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