You Got to Burn to Shine: New and Selected Writings

``For me performing poetry is sustained sexual activity in a golden age of promiscuity,'' Giorno ( Cancer in My Left Ball ) says on the final page of this volume. Whether prose or poetry, his writing is accessible. Constantly aware of his audience, he goes so far as to invite participation in a tantric exercise to simulate suicide. In less ambitious poems, he makes use of repetition until the listener gets his message, varying the line breaks so the information is received differently each time. He adapts phrases from popular songs and commercials: ``your mommy's / rich / and your daddy's / good-looking.'' From his early associations with New York School poets such as Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman, Giorno learned to focus on inconsequential, everyday experience. Graphic homosexuality is present in almost everything Giorno writes: most memorable is his account of jerking off with a then unknown and unrecognized Keith Haring in the men's toilet of the Prince Street subway station. By the time we get to a longer memoir of his friendship with Andy Warhol, we realize that many pieces here are little more than exercises in name-dropping. The volume closes with a complete bibliography of Giorno's writings. (Jan.)