John Giorno

2024 Stock. John Giorno is perhaps best known as the star of Andy Warhol’s Sleep. More significantly, Giorno’s multimedia publication and performance projects have consistently transgressed and redefined the boundaries of literature and mass media. The publisher of Giorno Poetry Systems LPs, CDs, tapes, and videopaks, Giorno first made his mark in the late sixties as the innovator of the Dial-A-Poem System (1969): a twelve-line telephonic system allowing callers to hear one of twelve different poems each day, and offering some 700 selections by fifty-five poets and writers. Receiving 1,112,337 calls in its first five months, it moved from The Architectural League of New York, to The New York Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and elsewhere, despite the turmoil of being sporadically disconnected and threatened with lawsuits for broadcasting subversive and pornographic materials. Initially broadcasting recordings by Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders, John Giorno, John Cage, and other luminaries of the New York scene, Giorno’s LPs, CDs, tapes, and videopaks have expanded into the fields of new music and punk rock, with work by Patty Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and more recently, Diamanda Galas, Lydia Lunch, Husker Dü, Psychic TV, Einstürzende Neubaten, and Giorno’s own John Giorno Band. Like few other poets today, Giorno has consistently appropriated and explored what he terms the capacity of mass media “entertainment” to generate moments of “magic” when “the hearts of the collective audience get connected to yours.” John Giorno has met Carlo Gatteschi in ’98 and they have recorded nearly twenty minutes of music-poetry that is now published in this audio recording “John Giorno in Florence”