Subduing the
Demons in America
An Interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 4

Up Against the Wall
“It was after a period when things were really fucked up. I had worked on all these media projects when Abbie Hoffman came to me with the idea of WPAX. I had the capability of producing things and knew how to work with technology and poets.WPAX was about broadcasting to the American troops in South Vietnam on Radio Hanoi. Abbie did this at the end of his career before he got busted and went underground. In 1970 he was very big and famous in the popular culture.

“He did the best he could. He tried to make it a communal organization so he included blacks, gays, lesbians, conservative liberals and radical liberals with the idea of not making it an Abbie Hoffman ego trip. Then the fighting started. Everybody hated Abbie! He bankrolled it with $20,000 of his own money. We did it here in this room at 222 Bowery. We also rented a space at Bleeker and Lafayette Streets. It was like 20 or 30 people, all hating Abbie Hoffman. Thinking he was on an ego trip. Venom beyond comprehension. We’d have endless meetings. Nobody hated me because I’m easy to get along and work with.

“The gays and radical lesbians were the worst. Week after month I would say to myself ‘What am I doing here, I’m working for free with these assholes?’ It was nothing but anger. Abbie was at the end of his cultural icon thing and was a bit hurt. He never said it but it was the beginning of the end for him. It was then that I decided that I was out of all political activity. Radical politics or any kind of political act was gone! I realized this was just a mirror of the real world. The fighting that happened in this room and that building on Lafayette was the same as in congress or the streets of America or anywhere else. It was just anger on top of anger. Those who were the strongest and smartest were the ones who won, not the ones who had compassion or a level of realization. I couldn’t get out of it because I had made a commitment to Abbie. I counted my days. I was signed on for like 14 programs or something. Leaving that was like sending me on a rocket to India just to get away from the anger. All those things that caused me suffering in the microcosm were the macrocosm. When I left for India it was leaving this world because of the suffering we caused each other.

“I came down with testicular cancer in late 1971 after my first trip to India. I was operated on in 1972. It was in that period I wrote the poems that became the book Cancer in My Left Ball which came out in ‘73. There’s that sense of the multiplicity of thought using Buddhist imagery, current events and sex in those poems.

“One’s thoughts are constantly arising so it was an attempt to mirror that and present a picture of the mind. My mind was the same as everyone else’s with many thoughts appearing. It was trying to make a reflection of the mind and in doing so showing the empty nature of mind, the mirages that come up. I later pushed that into audio poems.

Part 1: Subduing the Demons in America
Part 2: Money, School and Drug
Part 3: Balling Buddha
Part 4: Up Against the Wall
Part 5: The Process
Part 6: Dial A Poem
Part 7: Grasping At Emptiness
Part 8: Kissing, Intimacy and Affection

Pornographic Poem/John Giorno