Subduing the
Demons in America
An Interview with John Giorno

By Bill DeNoyelles

Part 5

The Process
“My whole performance thing started in 1964 when William Burroughs and Brion Gysin came back to New York and introduced me to sound poetry with people like Kurt Schwitters. It had a re-birth in 1959 with Gysin treating sound as a way of making a poem. The poem was written but the sound of it, which could be very abstract, was the attraction. Brion was given the BBC Studios in London to do his mutated poem I Am That. When he and William came to New York in 1965 they introduced me to that notion. I did my first piece as a collaboration with Brion called Subway Poem. I recorded sound on the subway. It was sent to Paris and presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in the Biennale of 1965. My first sound poem, I was thrilled. When you get given a little bit of acknowledgement it inspires you to go on.

I went on doing it thereafter.

“William came back to New York at the end of November 1964. It was the first visit to America by both William and Brion Gysin in about 10 years. It was calculated as coming to New York to conquer it so to speak. I met them at these various parties in January and February of 1965 like at Panna Grady’s at the Dakota. Diane DiPrima had a theatre on East Fourth Street where they did a reading. I got to know them.

“In an interesting way they are my very first spiritual teachers. Before I met them I was just this dumb American. At that time in spring of 1965 I took my first 34 LSD trips with Brion Gysin at the Hotel Chelsea in Room 703. I was in my mid-twenties but it didn’t matter, I was like a 14 year old. I had come out of the 1950’s. My mind was blown in the context of those LSD trips, which we took one or two times every week. The Chelsea was the only safe place for us to do that. I was living on 9th Street and Brion lived in the Chelsea in this nice big room. At those times [on LSD] you don’t want to be outside. We were lovers so we fucked all the time as well. Brion was not a Buddhist or Hindu but he was doing his own sort of meditation that he never told me about, some kind of magic. On those acid trips I would also sit. The mind being a wild elephant, we’d both sit on the bed in meditation, resting our minds. They were my first experiences with real meditation in terms of trying to deal with my mind. I went to Morocco with Brion in 1965.
“I was also good friends with William. He had introduced to me, on daily basis, to what he and Brion were working on. A thing called The Third Mind. Their daily work together was dealing with the nature of emptiness, the nature of phenomena arising and the nature of obstacles and suffering in this world. It was my first spiritual training–taking drugs and being with them everyday. Before the beginning of 1965 I was in the art world–Pop Art, Warhol, the dancers. Their spirituality was in their heart and only expressed through their work.

“Burroughs and Gysin left August 1st of that year after spending 9 months here.

“William came back on occasion through out the late sixties–just to sign a book contract or something. We developed a deep friendship. When he came back to the USA in 1968 we were lovers. We were friends from ’65 until he died in ’97. The sexual part of our relationship happened after he got done writing that article for Esquire at the Chicago Convention in August 1968. He was there with Terry Southern and Jean Genet. William stopped by New York on his way back to London and spent a month here. We had a love affair with lots of sex. The only time William and I had sex was during that four week period.

“In 1974 he moved to New York after telling me for years he wanted to be in New York. Of course I couldn’t believe it. He rented a loft first on Broadway then on Franklin Street. There starts this long friendship.

“I was asked by The Poetry Project at Saint Marks Church to do a reading in April of 1974 with William. William was a god to me, also a best friend on a personal level. On an external level he was the famous William Burroughs. It seemed incomprehensible for me to read with him. It was then that we did our first reading together.

“He lived on Franklin Street for a period of months until they raised his rent. He was here constantly for dinner. He’d be here once a week or I’d go there once a week or twice or three times a week. At one point he told me they were raising his rent and asked me if there was a loft available in my building. That very day my landlord asked me if I wanted a loft downstairs that had become available. I said no. I’m a poet, I don’t have much money and, at the time, couldn’t afford it. That very night William asks me this question. It was unbelievable. We talked about it so much. I remember we were a little drunk on Vodka. I thought about it for fifteen minutes and said to William ‘By chance the Landlord said to me today that there’s a loft directly below mine, the same size as mine, that’s for rent!’ I didn’t even know what the rent was. William says ‘I might be interested.’ I gave him the landlord’s number.

“A week or so later William came to look at the loft. I didn’t participate. I didn’t want to seem as though I was exploiting him. There was a tap at my door and it was William. He told me he was taking the loft. The landlord showed him a loft, which turned out to be The Bunker. It was just a storage area for the chair store downstairs. It had an internal staircase because it had been the boy’s locker room for the swimming pool. The store was where the swimming pool had been at one time when this building was the YMCA. It was huge–a locker room, the size of a gymnasium. Above the locker room was the gym where Mark Rothko had lived and worked in the sixties.

“William had seen the Bunker. It was dark because the windows were painted over and it was at the back of the building. William says to me ‘I’m taking the loft at the end of the staircase. It’s going to be my Bunker!’ He had walked in there, saw that there was no light and thought it looked like a bunker. William, being a junkie, liked the no light and the quiet. On his first entrance to the Bunker he named it–‘This is my Bunker!’ I thought it was great! A few weeks later he moved in. They had it renovated. For me it was too good to be believed. The upshot of that was that we lived our life together for many years. We had dinner together every night if William wasn’t going out or if I wasn’t going out to the baths or something. Every morning we’d meet to decide what was happening that night, generally eating in. We alternated days to buy food. If William had bought food yesterday, it was then my turn. Sometimes there would be people coming over so either he or I would buy more food. That went on until he left in 1981.

“After he left I would go to Lawrence, Kansas a few times a year. I’d try to stop over there when I was touring the country. William came by once or twice a year to stay. We’d have a few dinners. He was here a little over a year before he died. Who ever thought we’d be linked? The two of us being such different people. We had a life long close friendship. The Bunker has stayed the Bunker.

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