Is Ginsberg out? Is Giorno in? We’ll see.

Final Chapter 3 narrative drop coming. Either way. With a poem that was never meant to live quietly on a page. (22/22)

#BerkeleyTapes

My Chapter 3 posts are drawn from Bay Area Prophets, writers who shaped that place and era. I had Ginsberg queued up.

But I went looking for a line I half-remembered, climbed a shelf to prove it existed, and found a different poem waiting on the other side of that search. (21/22)

#BerkeleyTapes

Chapter 3 ends with Damir leading activists through Berkeley's secret tunnels where protesters hid from police during FSM. Narrated in Veda's voice. Reaching back to that exact moment.

Ginsberg belongs to Berkeley, but there at the Marciano, Giorno bore witness to it. (20/22)

#BerkeleyTapes

Then I saw a print I hadn't noticed before. A poem about the Berkeley riot. A youth. Wincing. In pain. After being struck by birdshot pellets. From a policeman's gun. The repetition doubling back the way pain does, the way the mind keeps returning to the moment of impact. (19/22)

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I'd been weighing him against Ginsberg for my final Chapter 3 drop.

Both loud, both captivating. Howl even has it in the name.

But Ginsberg mourns. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

Giorno sings. Still alive in the room. (18/22)

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On another wall, projected: Giorno performing Thanx 4 Nothing, written on his 70th birthday. His own epitaph, essentially, delivered with the timing of a comedian and the authority of someone who earned every word.

“May every drug I ever took, come back to get you high.” (17/22)

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Under glass: Pornographic Poem. 1964. Explicit, queer, unapologetic. Gay imagery in art was the "kiss of death" then. Giorno published it anyway. Read it aloud. On vinyl. How he avoided prosecution nobody is sure. Apparently the DA never heard the record. (16/22)

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"Hit My Nose With the Stem of a Rose." Stenciled from Welcoming the Flowers. It sounds like waking up, something alive brushing your face at the start of a day. It is also a poem about welcoming death. With Giorno those two things were never far apart. (15/22)

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Rainbow silkscreens. Bold capitalized text. Matchbook poems. Vinyl LPs from Giorno Poetry Systems, his own label, pressing spoken word over drums and synthesizers. This was not a man who believed poetry belonged in a quiet room. He treated it like punk rock. (14/22)

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Push-button phone on a coffee table before a wall stenciled with Dial-A-Poem and 1-917-994-8949. You could pick it up and hear a poem. Thousands called that number at its peak. Poetry as telecommunications infrastructure. The number has been reactivated. Try it. (13/22)

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Second chance. We went.

The Marciano is a former Masonic temple in Mid-Wilshire. The space has the bones of something that once asked people to take oaths in it. It suits Giorno perfectly. (12/22)

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Finding it made me even more excited for Friday. Then my wife woke up flattened from her vaccination. We stayed home. I was quietly devastated.

A week later she checked her calendar and realized she'd had the wrong date entirely. (11/22)

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A page from a Norton anthology of postmodern poetry. The title "Life Is a Killer" appears at the top. The opening stanza is circled in ink, a circle drawn there roughly thirty years ago.

I had been right all along. Thirty years ago, a younger version of me had stopped at exactly this spot, drawn a circle, and moved on. I just needed to find him again. (10/22)

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In the morning I pulled them down. Three anthologies. Four. Wrong decades, wrong coasts. Then a Norton. An Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. The spine cracked like it hadn't been opened since the nineties.

There it was. And the lines were circled in my own hand. (9/22)

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It was past midnight. My anthologies were stacked in the high corners of the house the way books pile up when you've run out of shelves and started using architecture. Top of the wardrobe. Above the linen closet.

My wife was asleep. I waited. (8/22)

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Here is what I didn't know yet: Giorno never really lived on a page. He pressed his poems onto vinyl. Routed them through telephone lines. Performed them live at CBGBs. I was searching for poems when I should have been searching for songs. (7/22)

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I went looking for it online. Typed the lines every way I could think of. Asked the AI assistants. Google came up empty. The AIs either apologized or handed me Ginsberg instead.

I started to doubt myself. Maybe it was Sanders. Maybe Spicer. Maybe I'd imagined it entirely. (6/22)

#BerkeleyTapes

And somewhere in all those anthologies, I had read a John Giorno poem. I knew it the way you know a song from the first two notes. A line surfaced:

“Everyone says what they do is right, and money is a good thing, it can be wonderful.” (5/22)

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Eventually I put it down. You do. But you don't unhear what you heard during those years. Poetry read obsessively leaves traces behind, not the words exactly, but the sound of them. The way a melody outlasts the lyrics. (4/22)

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In my twenties I wanted to be a poet. It was a bug that bit me senior year of high school and didn't let go until my mid-twenties. I haunted Moe's and Green Apple. I bought every anthology I could carry. I read at cafes. I sent poems to magazines. They came back. All of them. (3/22)

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While I had the phone out, I checked what was showing. That's when I saw ‘Life is a Killer’. A John Giorno exhibit. The name alone did something to me. It pulled a thread I hadn't touched in a long time. (2/22)

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[From the Writer's Desk]

My wife said she had reservations at the Marciano Art Foundation. Art, food, drinks on the patio. My first move, because this is Los Angeles, was to pull it up on a map and figure out where I could park. (1/22)

#BerkeleyTapes #AmWriting #ShortRead 🧵

He reached past the shadow's edge and clicked on the small warm-toned lamp. He did not explain where he was going.

He simply moved, and they followed. (12/12)
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They looked at each other across the dark.

Tell them, he thought. You should tell them.

He watched her decide not to. He understood that too. (11/12)
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He did not feel pity. What he felt was something older, something without a clean name, the recognition of one corner-presser by another. And then she looked up. (10/12)
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The girl with the camera was holding it against her sternum, her grip perfect and her hands shaking. The way he had held his racket in the corner of the court. As the last familiar thing. (9/12)
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You are in Bancroft. It is 10:14 p.m. You are the archivist.

He breathed out.

The clay court receded. The smell of Splitska Street dissolved back into acid-free folders and floor wax. (8/12)
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The shot was not loud. That was the thing people didn't understand. A sound like a book dropped on a hard floor. Flat. Businesslike. Then a girl made a sound that was not a word, and then they all understood at once. (7/12)
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Splitska Street, 1993. The instructor was Hasan. He had decided, in the particular delusional heroism of a man who refused to accept that normalcy was over, that the children would continue to have tennis lessons. (6/12)
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They were making themselves small. Making themselves into nothing, into architecture, into the kind of thing a room contained but didn't count.

I know this, Damir thought. (5/12)
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