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John Giorno's performance: completely inside of a totally mad situation
part 2

review by Vincent Tinguely

Giorno opened his first performance at the Festival Voix d’Ameriques on 1 February 2008 with a recent poem, "Welcoming The Flowers," which he performed solo. I think choosing to open with this piece was an important statement by Giorno on several levels. First, he made it clear that, despite all the media hype about

	... if there was any problem with it, I would get rid of the problem at the beginning, before it got onto the computer, or before it got onto the page in the typewriter...

his being "the last of the Beats" (Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Diane DiPrima and many other poets of the lineage might take exception to this), he was appearing at the Festival not as a fossil of a dead scene, nor as some kind of nostalgia act, but as a working artist. Second, the poem clearly demonstrated the grounding of his poetics in a Tibetan Buddhist tradition, especially concerning the concept of reincarnation. Like all his performative works, the poem demonstrated the marriage of Giorno’s artistic rigor – his willingness to spend weeks and months writing a poem, until he has arrived at the exact choice of words and form that he is seeking – with an aura of somatic ease, a loose-jointed stance on stage and an effortless delivery. This allows Giorno to take possession of the audience and the space without any of the usual overt working of the crowd or similar bombast that so many spoken word artists have borrowed from the annals of vaudeville and the comedy stage.

No, what takes possession of the audience in Giorno’s case is this wedding of a carefully worked text with a meticulously rehearsed delivery. As Giorno stated in an interview in 1999, "As I’m writing, I do the words ... I used to have a live mic just to hear it over speakers. You hear the quality of the word and the quality of the phrasing. I wanted to hear what it really sounded like as I was writing it down longhand, so if there was any problem with it, I would get rid of the problem at the beginning, before it got onto the computer, or before it got onto the page in the typewriter...

"... when I finish [writing] a poem, that’s that. But then I rehearse it for months. Because even though intellectually you’ve finished –- all the concepts are there, all the words and images are there -– inside of those words are musical melodies that one has no idea are there. The only way you can bring them out is by performing it. And so ... I just rehearse them over and over and over again, and then these things come out."

This extraordinary devotion to the craft of the spoken performance of poetry, not to mention the decades spent treading the boards of poetry festivals in Europe, North America and elsewhere, bring to Giorno’s performance style an unflappable calm. It was with this great centeredness, on 1 February 2008, without prior rehearsal, that Giorno performed three pieces with improv' violinist Malcolm Goldstein.

	click photo for larger view

The first was "The Death of William Burroughs," one of the prose pieces I’d first seen performed in 1996. The interchange between these two great artists began tentatively, but soon found itself in Goldstein’s gadfly insistence, which rebounded and resounded to the cadence and tone of Giorno’s delivery. Perhaps more successful overall were their collaborations on "Just Say No To Family Values" and "It Was A Bad Tree," both poems that feature Giorno’s robust sense of rhythm and meter. Here, there was a greater sense of predictability in Giorno’s delivery, which gave Goldstein something more to work with / around / against.

Giorno is certainly no stranger to collaborative work; in fact, his career is as much about collaboration with other artists as it is about the solitary work of the poet. In performance, his collaborative work began with Bryon Gysin’s recording of his texts for looped electronic sound compositions, and continued with the staging of multimedia performance events, using innovative lighting and sound design as well as prodigious quantities of psychoactive drugs in an effort to bring the audience into the work. He continued his exploration of electronic manipulation by performing live with multiple recorded tracks of the same poem; when he tired of this approach, he assembled a rock band and toured the club circuit. More recently he collaborated with dance choreographer David Newman, whose arrangements were based on Giorno’s characteristic body movements in performance. "Being a poet, I’m not really a dancer, even a rock and roll or even a disco dancer! But on the stage, when I move around ... I’m dealing with breath, and the internal breath generally pushes one’s limbs around or moves one’s body.... What [Newman] did to me stayed in my mind, because he in a certain way introduced me to another way of moving my body, by consciously connecting movement to words."

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