On Thursday, November 3, 2011, Hart House hosted an evening of poetry, prose and conversation with legendary poet and multimedia guru John Giorno, award winning poet and author Prof. George Elliot Clarke, Sachiko Murakami and the evening's host Sheila Stewart.
About John Giorno:
Legendary innovator of poetry and performance and lifelong New Yorker, John Giorno's career spans 50 years and has been intertwined with contemporaries like Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs. Whether written, performed, recorded, filmed or exhibited, Giorno's work—as a poet, sexual, spiritual and political radical—has been called "a shining jewel in the ongoing revolution of poetry and language in contemporary life." After gaining prominence as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep (1963), Giorno has gone on to establish the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem.
Giorno is renowned for his energetic live performances, honed in performance with William S. Burroughs in the 1970s and 1980s. His use of found materials, montage techniques and careful direct exploration of the nature of mind through has produced a vast body of explosively experimental works examining configurations of queer sex, spiritual practice and teaching, fused with fragments of everyday life.
