According to its subtitle, John Giorno’s memoir, Great Demon Kings, encompasses “poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightnment.” A pie-chart style breakdown of the book’s content along those lines would dedicate decent-sized slices to poetry and art. Giorno was an off-and-on friend and admirer of Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and his best-known contribution to the New York cultural scene in the 60s and 70s was his canny blending of poetry and art happenings, both through live performances and the pioneering Dial-a-Poem phone service. A slightly smaller slice of the pie would be reserved for death and enlightenment. A Buddhist for much of his life, he wrestled often with spiritual matters, imperfectly applying them to his work; he writes about his work on behalf of AIDS victims and about the loss of his closest friends, including Burroughs. Giorno’s own death hangs over the narrative, too: He died on October 11, 2019, a week after completing the manuscript. “I have one more really important thing to do,” he writes on the final page, “and that is to die.”
For all that, the largest proportion of Great Demon Kings — a Pac-Man sized chunk of the pie chart — is devoted to sex. It was Giorno’s animating force, his reason for being, his means of communication, and often the heart of his poetry practice. It was his tether to the art world — he had extended affairs with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns — and the wedge that drove him from it. It made him shine and turned him monstrous. It makes his memoir interesting, in the way sex pretty much always does when it’s revealing and surprising. (“I was making love to the Grim Reaper himself,” he writes of one assignation with the spectral Burroughs. “I was fucking the Grim Reaper.”) And it makes his memoir dull, in the way that reading about sex can be when there’s no particular direction or meaning to it. And for a good long time, Giorno was a wayward soul.
Giorno’s adolescence and early adulthood were defined by a love of literature and a hatred of himself. He was attending the Iowa Writers Workshop in the late 50s but ended his pursuit of a more conventional poetry career after a suicide attempt in 1959. He returned to New York, regrouped, and found an early enthusiast and occasional lover in Andy Warhol, who made Giorno the subject of his 1964 film Sleep. Allowing him to be filmed asleep was a role he was born for, given his passivity — as he himself puts it, “I liked sleeping more than anything else.” Giorno is admirably candid about the privileges that allowed him this inertia — the son of well-off parents, he worked an undemanding Wall Street job that freed him to pursue his hedonistic instincts. In time, he recognized that as a strategic advantage as a would-be gay artist — unlike Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns, he felt no pressure from society or the markets to keep himself closeted. “And poets have nothing to lose, anyway,” he writes.
Somewhere amid the LSD experiments and the mind-blowing sex — the penises always large, the orgasms always thundering –Giorno arrived at something like a poetry practice. Disappointed with the blandness of the typical poetry reading, he worked to integrate poetry and performance in a way that echoed Warhol’s blend of art and rock and roll via the Velvet Underground. The smirkingly named Giorno Poetry Systems allowed him to access his most provocative and public-facing instincts — he created attention-grabbing pieces like the found poem “Pornographic Poem,” and would eagerly chase attention in ways that other poets resisted. In the 80s he found fellow travelers in the punk and alternative-rock scenes, and Dial-a-Poem was an admirable attempt to bring the form to a broadcast medium without waiting for radio or TV to care about it. When it launched in 1968, with recordings by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ron Padgett, and others, Giorno’s challenge was to make sure his jury-rigged phone set up could accommodate the flood of callers who’d heard about it from national newspapers and TV.
Giorno’s role as a poetry eminence is undeniable, and hard to underestimate. Still, as a poet, Giorno could be a pretty good lover: Repetition was his calling card — he routinely doubled down his proclamations, though in poems like “An Unemployed Machinist,” it feels like overinflated haiku. In many of his recordings of his poems, he slathered reverb over his resonant, stentorian voice, which gives his readings the feel of ersatz Steve Reich tape-loop experiments — little triumphs of sound more than content. But maybe the poetry was beside the point anyway. Giorno shares little in Great Demon Kings about his development as a poet, and he gives the sense that it was often a means to an end. His poetry was a way to find other poets, to cement relationships (he’d eventually invite Burroughs to move into his building on 222 Bowery), and to bolster his Buddhist practice. (One of his proudest moments in the book is handing a copy of his collection Balling Buddha to the Dalai Lama.)
Giorno’s spiritual awakening, even more than his sense of liberation as a gay poet, gives his memoir its brightest spark. You can feel his spine straighten when, after pestering Allen Ginsberg for guidance on meditation, Ginsberg blows his stack: “Arghhhh! Stop asking me all these questions! Why don’t you go to India and find out for yourself?” Meditative practice, though, was no guarantee of inner calm. He had a hard time letting go of past slights and could be ugly about it — in one interview he called Ginsberg a “pushy Jew.” In that case, he could see his error. He seems less self-aware in his chronicle of Burroughs’ death in 1997, when Giorno’s efforts to stage-manage his mentor’s journey to the bardo makes him prickly and officious. He commands Burroughs’ partner, James Grauerholz, not to touch the body because “subtle winds moving for many hours through the channels,” and bemoans a friend’s vocal mourning in Burroughs’ house for disrupting his efforts at “transforming the energy in the house to one of bright clarity and serenity.” (Among said friend’s flaws was that he was “very into women.” With few exceptions, Laurie Anderson most prominently, Giorno’s artistic circle was exclusively gay and male.) There was one way to properly mourn Burroughs, Giorno suggests, and there was only one person in possession of it.
Still, Giorno’s instincts throughout his life were open-hearted, even if in practice things didn’t turn out that way. Great Demon Kings is a memoir, most of all, about craving connection in all its forms — noble, ugly, and in-between. Networking, friendship, publicity, audience-building, status-seeking, fucking. The pie-chart breakdown I proposed isn’t entirely fair to Giorno’s own sense of self; for him, poetry, sex, art, death, and enlightenment were all connected. “I had based my life and work and practice on the concepts of liberation through love and sexual freedom,” he writes. “Transcendence and emptiness, sex and great bliss were spiritual accomplishments. I was fighting the battle of gay liberation in a homophobic world, and I was a heroic chamption of the golden age of promiscuity.” He was very much a product of the culture of the 50s and 60s. But in embodying the links connecting sexual and artistic freedom, he made a grand bid for immortality.
[Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 4, 2020, 368 pages, $28 hardcover]