The New York Times Book Review - Michael Hainey
…[Giorno's] hypnotic memoir, 25 years in the making and completed a week before he died, at 82…should introduce him to a new and wider audience. Not just for his influence on poetry and New York's downtown art scene from the 1950s into the 21st century, but also because his artistic life was nothing short of Zelig-esque from the get-go…Like Just Kids, Great Demon Kings captures the energy of those heady and seminal downtown years, when new art forms were born.
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/09/2020
The creativity and debauchery of gay artists and writers blooms in this exuberant memoir of avant-garde New York from the 1950s through the 1990s. Giorno (Subduing Demons in America), a poet and artist who died last year, recounts his relationships with a countercultural pantheon including Allen Ginsburg, whom he considered a “living god” before meeting him and who proved to be a “disappointment”; Andy Warhol, who filmed Giorno sleeping in the six-hour film Sleep; artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, with whom he carried on tempestuous affairs; and Beat deity William S. Burroughs, with whom he had an intense, mainly platonic friendship for decades. Giorno also discusses his conversion to Tibetan Buddhism and his technology-driven poetry innovations, including tape-recorded poetry “sound poems,” multimedia readings, and a “Dial-a-Poem” service offering callers recorded poems. The narrative is a whirl of parties, art openings, colorful personalities, and lots of graphic sex, written in prose that twines earthiness with Buddhist austerity. (“Pale light from a streetlamp streamed through the window mixed with the humid air and gave William a rat-gray fungus-like complexion,” he writes of having sex with Burroughs. “Our minds mingled in one taste, in the vast, empty expanse of primordially pure, Wisdom Mind.”) The result is an engrossing, passionate ode to a revolution in art and sensuality. Photos. (June)
From the Publisher
2021 American Book Award Winner
"The sexiest and most graphic history of a love life I’ve ever read." —Laurie Anderson, The New York Times
"Essential, joyous reading . . . Giorno’s influence on poetry, art, and performance culture continues to be great. Now, thanks to his diligence in documenting so many personal details — and floridly annotating so many behind-the-scenes affairs — he has a chance to be reconsidered and credited with being one of the great gay sex-positive pioneers of the late 20th century." —Jerry Portwood, Rolling Stone
"Long before Patti Smith came to New York City to seek the artist’s life, there was Giorno. He’s lesser known these days (that’s what happens to poets who don’t put music to their words), but his hypnotic memoir, 25 years in the making and completed a week before he died, at 82, last year, should introduce him to a new and wider audience. Not just for his influence on poetry and New York’s downtown art scene from the 1950s into the 21st century, but also because his artistic life was nothing short of Zelig-esque from the get-go." —Michael Hainey, The New York Times Book Review
"The creativity and debauchery of gay artists and writers blooms in this exuberant memoir of avant-garde New York from the 1950s through the 1990s . . . An engrossing, passionate ode to a revolution in art and sensuality." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The ultimate scenester of midcentury Manhattan, lover to a who's who of gay artists and writers, tells all in a posthumous memoir . . . Upbeat, funny, unsparing, and way over the top . . . probably a lot like the man himself." —Kirkus Reviews
"Great Demon Kings is an indispensably intimate account of the queer lives of Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns and Burroughs. Even more significantly, Giorno’s memoir is haunted by the knowledge that great art requires a betrayal of the romantic vision of love, equality and the community of strangers." —Michael Millner, The Spectator
"Great Demon Kings is unlike anything you have ever read or imagined. John Giorno built a life that was shocking, joyous, and raw. His lifelong search for inspiration and love created one of the greatest voices of poetry and beauty, forgiveness and truth." —Michael Stipe
"If you want to know every scandalous detail about everyone who was anyone in the brilliant creative whirlwind that was 1960s and '70s downtown Manhattan (and believe me, you do) you must read this memoir.” —Edmund White
"Carrying on a wisdom tradition in American letters—striking, most recently, in the works of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs—John Giorno is a cosmic treasure. His Great Demon Kings is valiant, hysterical, unpretentious, sexy, gossipy, wise, and true." —Brad Gooch
"Giorno—openly gay at a time when many remained closeted—had relationships with titans of the art world, like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. But he was also a legend in his own right, and Giorno's sensual, visceral account of his own life reveals much about his own work." —Adam Rathe and Liz Cantrell, Town and Country
“John told jokes that he laughed at. His poetry had no rules but it respected the discipline that sound requires. I knew he practiced Nyingma meditation and loved lots of people, and he once told me he could fly across oceans and mountains without losing the mind he so cherished, the one without boundaries where wisdom and humor emerged as one. I wish he had been beside me on the airplane." —Fanny Howe
Kirkus Reviews
2020-02-17
The ultimate scenester of midcentury Manhattan, lover to a who’s who of gay artists and writers, tells all in a posthumous memoir.
Giorno (1936-2019) made his first major appearance on the American cultural landscape in Andy Warhol’s 320-minute movie of Giorno’s slumbering face, Sleep (1964). This memoir is also overlong, but the author has plenty of interesting stories to tell. He quickly dispenses with his privileged childhood, though we do hear about his first poem, written during his sophomore year in high school: “I was like a baby Olympic athlete going over the high bar for the first time.” Giorno graduated from Columbia in 1958, bursting with self-confidence. “I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex,” he writes, and proceeds to share an abundance of graphic detail. Andy Warhol never really enjoyed it, and his wig got in the way at key points, but Giorno found his toe-sucking “deeply moving.” A multiyear affair with Robert Rauschenberg was filled with bliss and joy and mind-blowing sex. (Rauschenberg was not looking forward to being memorialized by Giorno, but his threat to sue expired with his death.) Jasper Johns was the author’s lover during the exciting period when his Dial-A-Poem project was the hottest thing in New York City. William Burroughs was Giorno’s next great passion despite Burroughs’ small penis and his instigating a threesome with Giorno’s “nemesis,” Allen Ginsberg—and Ginsberg was everywhere. Even when the author went to India to seek enlightenment, there he was, “fat and full of ego, an embarrassing uncool dad.” After Ginsberg’s death, the author admits the two of them “did not do such a good job in this life…we will, sure as hell, continue in future lives.” If reincarnation exists, Giorno will surely document it for us.
Upbeat, funny, unsparing, and way over the top…probably a lot like the man himself.
