1. John Giorno was an American poet and performance artist.
25 Facts About John Giorno
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John Giorno founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events.
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John Giorno gained prominence through his association with pop art luminary Andy Warhol, sparking a creative partnership that propelled his career to new heights.
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John Giorno was one of the earliest Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, inviting various Tibetan teachers to New York City and hosting them.
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John Giorno's impact extended globally, as he continued to perform, collaborate, and exhibit his work, leaving an enduring legacy in the worlds of poetry, performance art, and multimedia exploration.
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John Giorno was born in New York City, and was raised both in Brooklyn and the Long Island town of Roslyn Heights.
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John Giorno attended high school at James Madison High School in Brooklyn and graduated from Columbia University in 1958, where he was a "college chum" of physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer.
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In 1962, John Giorno met Andy Warhol during Warhol's first New York Pop Art solo exhibit at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery.
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Warhol's 1964 silent film Sleep shows John Giorno sleeping on camera for more than five hours.
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In 1965, John Giorno founded a not-for-profit production company, John Giorno Poetry Systems, in order to connect poetry to new audiences, using innovative technologies.
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In 1967, John Giorno organized the first Dial-A-Poem event at the Architectural League of New York, making short poems by various contemporary poets available over the telephone.
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Some poets and artists who recorded or collaborated with Giorno Poetry Systems were William Burroughs, John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Robert Rauschenberg, Anne Waldman, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
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From 1976 to 1979, John Giorno hosted The Poetry Experiment and presented his eight-part series Dial-A-Poem Poets, with Charles Ruas, on WBAI-Pacifica Radio.
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John Giorno's text-based poetry evolved rapidly in the late 1960s from direct appropriation of entire texts from newspapers, to montage of radically different types of textual material, to the development of his signature double-column poems, which feature extensive use of repetition both across columns and down the page.
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The poems feature increasingly radical political content, and John Giorno was involved in a number of protests against the Vietnam War.
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John Giorno traveled to India in 1971 where he met Dudjom Rinpoche, head of the Nyingma order of Tibetan Buddhism.
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John Giorno became one of the earliest Western students of Tibetan Buddhism, and participated in Buddhist communities for several decades, inviting various Tibetan teachers to New York City and hosting them.
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Some of John Giorno's poetry reflects Buddhist and other Asian religious themes beginning with his earliest verse, but the poems in Cancer In My Left Ball and those that follow involve a highly original interpenetration of Buddhist and Western avant-garde practices and poetics.
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John Giorno stopped using the found elements of the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp tradition in his poetry in the early 1980s and henceforth pursued a kind of experimental realism, using lyrical incantation and minimalist art-like repetition.
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John Giorno founded an AIDS charity, the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, which continues to give direct financial and other support to individuals with AIDS to the present day.
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John Giorno performed at poetry festivals and events, notably in Europe where he was an active participant in the sound poetry scene for several decades.
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John Giorno lived at 255 East 74th Street, when a small carriage house was located on the property.
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John Giorno later lived and worked from three lofts in a building in the Bowery neighborhood on the Lower East Side.
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In 2010, John Giorno had his first one-person gallery show in New York City, entitled Black Paintings and Drawings, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, wherein he exhibited works that chronicled the evolution of the poem painting.
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John Giorno died of a heart attack at age 82 on October 11,2019, at his home in Lower Manhattan.