JOHN GIORNO

"In New York City, there was Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and John Ashbery," says the 73-year-old poet and performance artist in an interview from his New York City home, "but they only liked you if you did what they did. We were all gay men, so we all liked each other socially, but if you strayed from their school of poetry and kind of writing, they weren't interested. They were friends, but they were not helpful or supportive."Which may be why Giorno, long considered an unheralded visionary of the New York scene, tended to migrate toward artists of other stripes, most famously as a collaborator and sometime lover of Andy Warhol."In the 1960s, it was my good fortune to meet all of these artists,"says Giorno. "Nobody was famous and we weren't really looking to be. But seeing what they did on a daily basis--people like Frank Stella, or Bob Rauschenberg, Sol LeWitt-- this was an inspiration for me. I was empowered in a certain sense. If they could do that with painting and sculpture, then I could do it for poetry."

Calgary Herald
April 1 2009.