John Giorno, Poet and Buddhist

Poet and Buddhist, that's how John Giorno liked to call himself. Son of that America that came into contact with Buddhist preachers for the first time in the 1950s, Giorno is part of the group of artists and poets who have integrated Buddhism into their vision of the world. When he was a student at Columbia University he approached preachers like D.T. Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa. Later he made repeated trips to India where he met his guru, Dudjom Rinpoche, whom he later invited to the United States and helped establish the Yeshe Dorje Temple in Greenwich Village, New York City. Since the mid-1960s, Giorno was committed to spreading poetry through the renewal of this genre. At the time, he printed newspaper headline-style lines of poetry on flyers, T-shirts, and other everyday items. In the late 1980s, the artist began experimenting with screen printing on canvas, as we can admire today on the gallery walls. The idea of democratizing the distribution of poetry culminates in the work Dial a Poem. Aware that it is a form of artistic expression with a vague tinge of elitism, the artist used the daily action to connect the poem subtly with everyone.