JOHN GIORNO R.I.P.

John and I were friends during a few years in the 1970s. He introduced me to William Burroughs and took me to Burroughs' pad—"the bunker"—in a converted men's locker room in an old "Y" on the Bowery (at least as I remember it). John was a star in the downtown scene and poetry world, with his reverb style of reading poems where the words echoed, each word or phrase or line repeated. He admired the confrontational sexual honesty in my sometimes controversial poetry of the time, not unlike some of his. But then he included part of a reading I did at The Saint Mark's Poetry Project on one of his "Dial-A-Poem" record albums—this one a two lp set called BIG EGO—that caused him some flack from some other stars of the downtown scene for including my piece they misinterpreted in ways that made it seem I was what I was writing against. After that I didn't see him much, but he went on to have an even bigger impact on the world, and rightfully so. Here's the group photo of some of those on that recording:

As far as I can tell from the viewer's left to right, that's the late great poet Ted Greenwald, Laurie Anderson, me, John Giorno, Jackie Curtis, Harris Schiff, Eileen Myles, Robert (I can't think of his last name), and Steve Hamilton.