Following up from last weekend, here’s the conclusion of the Burroughs Jr.-Burroughs Snr. 1979 Naropa reading – a reading/performance by John Giorno
The audio for this final part if the reading can be heard here
The recording begins in media res with the final part of William Burroughs Snr.’s reading (of two classic texts – (“This is the space age, we are here to go…”… “It could happen again if we let that ape take the wheel”) and the Dr. Benway sequence from Naked Lunch (“The lavatory’s been locked for three hours solid…”…”Nurse, send a boy to fill this RX on the double)
Then, Anne Waldman introduces John Giorno.
AW (following brief announcement): I first met John Giorno about twelve years ago in New York City. I’d noticed him before, of course. I used to see him just quietly smiling, never saying very much. I saw him in Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (maybe some of you have seen?) sleeping for many hours, and I think it was the poet and editor Peter Schjeldahl who first brought his poems to my attention. He was published extensively in Mother magazine and other small magazines around the Village and he was also being published this time in the Paris Review (Tom Clark, poetry editor there), and his first book was published by Mother Press, The American Book of the Dead, and most of there poems were shorter than the work he’s been doing more recently, very startling images, a lot of them found from the newspapers, you know, sort of objet trouvé and John in his early readings was never to be found. He’d usually.. you’d hear tape recordings of other voices reading the words, usually put through some strange permutations, Moog synthesizers, echo chambers and the like. And then later he started doing the poems themselves in a very electrifying, startling way, and has since then varied that with also some words of his own voice on tape-recordings. He’s a real media-man, he’s worked in a lot of other areas, trying to get poetry…(he talked about this in his class yesterday, he’s visiting this week with the Jack Kerouac School and will be visiting with the students again tomorrow). (He) talked about..sort of..getting poetry out there to the masses and ways of doing that. He was the mastermind behind the Dial-A-Poem series in New York, which went on for quite a few months – You could call a number and get a poem at any hour of the day or night, and this was a variety.. (he changed the poems every couple of days, so all kinds of different poets doing two minutes of poetry). And then, he’s been very very generous to other poets, including them in all his many projects, most notably the Giorno Poetry Systems records, (which now number about eighteen discs, the latest one, based on the Nova Convention, this last year in New York, which was sort of centered around William Burroughs, coming out very shortly). And he’s.. I think Allen mentioned this.. he’s a Buddhist, and student of Dudjom Rinpoche, and also helped found the Orgyen Cho Dzong Center in Manhattan. And his books include Balling Buddha (is still in print, I think there are some copies at the Boulder bookstore as well as his own record) and a book called Cancer In My Left Ball. Please welcome John Giorno
JG: Thank you. I’m going to read two long poems tonight . And the first one was written a couple of months, about six months, ago for that Nova Convention and it’s called “Eating The Sky” – (“I don’t know what you’ve been doing today..”…”..going up in smoke/and we got no hope’)
I’m going to read one more poem that sort of was developed out of that last one and this one is called “Put Your Ear to Stone and Open Your Heart To The Sky” – (“I’m standing at the sink washing dishes..”..”and it’s empty and its empty and its empty, and jive”) {Editorial note, this second poem Giorno reads alongside a pure-recorded echo]
Allen Ginsberg concludes the evening with a fundraising note (this is 1979, and Naropa Institute (not yet Naropa University) remains precarious and in need of cash – “those who’ve heard the piper should help pay for the pipers”, Allen respectfully notes
AG: So, this particular combination of mouths and ears collected here. We’ve heard Bill Junior Burroughs transforming bodily suffering passion into compassion, Bill Burroughs Senior transforming the word of anger and aggression into satiric insight and humorous awareness and John Giorno transforming the empty echo of bewilderment, confusion and ignorance into a proclamation of wisdom mind, a task accomplished by all the poets which only could happen here, I think (well, this particular circumstance of the minds collected) – but that all has to be paid for (that means this hall had to be paid for, some money had to be paid to the poets though most of them are working free and often giving their work as offerings to the situation among us now). So there’s a desk over there where Naropa is collecting money for the fund-raising drive to finish the Summer session. So those who’ve heard the piper should help pay for the pipers. There’ll be further activities tonight (as Anne mentioned) “Steve Chlorofine’s Blue Serge Suit” (sic) going to take place now, after this reading at the Naropa Instiute auditorium,1111 Pearl Street, and Friday night there’ll be a cabaret night here in this hall, a general show by all the different faculties, music, dance, poetry, song – August 18th and 19th, Saturday and Sunday, there’ll. be a long arts festival fundraising marathon which will be (the) climax. Sunday…
Audio for the above can be heard here, (John Giorno’s reading begins at approximately five minutes in and concludes approximately forty-one-and-a-quarter minutes in)
***ADDENDA – John Giorno’s tell-all autobiography, Great Demon Kings – A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment, is forthcoming (out next month!). Publishers Weekly provide an advance notice on it here. Read brief excerpts from it – here and here