John Giorno - Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment

In 1951, after a few weeks studying poetry, my sophomore high school English teacher said, Homework is to write a poem. Go home, write a poem, and bring it in next Tuesday.

I was shocked. Write a poem, not possible! It was like flying through the air like Superman, or being an opera singer, something I couldnt do. The 1940s and 50s were still medieval times in America. There were no day care centers where poetry was taught to prekindergarten kids. As the deadline loomed, on Monday I sat at the desk in my room and wrote a poem. I didnt know how to do it, but looking back, I already knew that you couldnt just imitate a poem. I stumbled onto something, inventing a poetic technique. Words arose in my mind, first as sound, the sound of wisdom or the sound of what they meant. I tried to focus on them, to see them clearly, and wrote them by hand on a piece of paper, and later typed them on the portable Royal typewriter. The poem is lost, and I am sure it was bad, but I was like a baby Olympic athlete going over the high bar for the first time, and crashing down to the ground. When I finished, I felt very happya bright white feeling, a brief moment of bliss. From which comes the words follow your heart.

I handed in my homework, and on the following Tuesday, Miss Glick said, I have read your poems, and I have liked them all. There are three that I like best, and I am going to read them to you.

She read the first poem, and then the second. The third poem was mine. I got a rush, holy smoke, wow! She looked at me, and said, John, very good.

And I really liked doing it. I said to myself, Im going to write more poems, and I did. And it was what everybody was supposed to do, follow your heart, seeing the bright feeling in your heart-mind, believing in it, and continuing with great diligence; the bright clarity being a reflection of ones true nature. At that moment, I became a poet.

The authors house on Old Brick Road

THE NEXT SCHOOLYEAR, my English teacher, Deborah Tannenbaum, said to me, John, you should go see Dylan Thomas at the YMHA. Hes great. You will love him. We had studied A Childs Christmas in Wales. Hearing her read the story, I experienced a slight rush of energy, and a warm, clear, happy feeling. She explained his innovations with voice and performance.

I took the train in from Long Island by myself to the YMHA on Lexington and Ninety-Second Street, and saw the world premiere full-cast reading of Dylan Thomass play for voices Under Milk Wood. He sat center stage with five performers, each on a wooden stool. His magnificent voice and the five other voices seemed to me like a great musical composition, like Bach. He smoked cigarettes and was drunk, sweat pouring from his face. The cast was composed of brilliant actors, cult figures in New York theater: Dion Allen, Al Collins, Roy Poole, Sada Stewart Thompson, and Nancy Wickwire. I was struck by lightning.

Two weeks later, Dylan Thomas again performed Under Milk Wood at the Ninety-Second Street Y. I got a seat front row center. It was too close, and I developed a pain in my neck from looking directly up. Thomas towered over me on the stage, and the cast of performers and bright white lights were overwhelming. But it was still a great performance. His breath and internal winds created heat, and as he perspired, sweat ran in droplets. When he threw his arms around, drops of his sweat swirled about, and some flew out into the audience: one hit me. A blessing, holy communion, I was anointed. He was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Not only were the poem and the performance great, he was poetry.

This experience changed my life. It resonated with the boundless possibilities of what poetry could be. I was a poet, and developed as a performer over the next fifty years, empowered first by Dylan Thomas.

After the performance, I bought two albums of Thomass poetry, released by Caedmon Records. I played them endlessly in my bedroom, fascinated and obsessed, trying to understand and absorb something. All the other poetry I knew was archaic. This was before Burroughs, Ginsberg, and the Beats. I was imprisoned in the stone age of the early 1950s.

In the fall of 1953, Dylan Thomas returned for yet another performance of Under Milk Wood at the Ninety-Second Street Y. I got fifth row center seats, and took my girlfriend, Marion Eisenberg. By now, I was becoming an expert in the subtleties of Dylan Thomass performances.

During the intermission, we were in the lobby smoking cigarettes and ran into friends from the High School for the Performing Arts, where Marion was studying acting. One of her classmates was Suzanne Pleshette, who very shortly would become a famous movie star. We were all sixteen years old.

Its very well produced, said Marion confidently.

The flow is extraordinary, said Suzanne. They were both being modest professionals.

Its so amazing, I said. Ive seen it twice before, but each time it is so shocking! Its dazzling poetry.

When the lights blinked, I had to go to the toilet and ran as fast as I could. I didnt want to miss anything. I pulled the bathroom door open at full speed, lurched forward, and collided with a man. My face hit his fat face, my chest against his chest, cheek to cheek for an instant. It was Dylan Thomas. I froze, wide-eyed and speechless. I stepped back, bowed shyly, and said in a tight, little voice, Hello!

Dylan Thomas gave a small, wonderful smile, and said hello softly in return. He continued on to the backstage door. I went back to my seat, transfixed. I felt he had reluctantly kissed me. I was blessed with a touch of his skin. The rest of the performance was like listening to great music, and I sat there in bliss.

Thomas died two weeks later.

As a teenager, I received all my spiritual training from reading great novels and poetry. I read Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Beckett, Jean Genet, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, Faulkner, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot. They said, in a nutshell, that one was doomed in a world bound by ignorance, and the only way to liberation was through love and sex, pure transcendent desire, and that always ended in disaster. Everything ended in suffering.

I received a full transmission of worldly knowledge by the time I was seventeen, and what I learned when I later studied at Columbia was redundant. There, I read Plato and Aristotle through to Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, Locke and Hume and Burke, Darwin and Marx, Nietzsche and Thomas Dewey. None of it did any good. Nothing solved the problem. I studied Buddhist philosophy, Asian literature, and oriental art, discursive and intellectual thought, and we had endless discussions. I liked it, but it did not solve anything either. Many years later, Dudjom Rinpoche, the greatest Buddhist scholar of his time, would say, No one becomes enlightened reading a book.