Three generations of poets participate in a daylong poetry reading on the New Museum’s seventh floor. Invited are poets that knew Gysin personally, and who participated in the community surrounding concrete and sound poetry; poets that have acknowledged Gysin’s influence; and those who engage in his life’s work of pushing the boundaries of writing, with the goal of tangling and overlapping these three groups to create a dynamic tribute to Gysin. Invited poets include John Giorno, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tim Griffin, Mónica de la Torre, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, Aaron Dilloway, and Christian Bok.

Christian Bök
The experimental poet Christian Bök has contributed to the advancement of written poetry, sound poetry, and poetry criticism. His most famous work, Eunoia (2002), winner of the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize, is comprised of five chapters, each of which uses just a single vowel. Bök took seven years to write Eunoia, during which time he read the dictionary five times. Bök is renowned for his sound poetry, which includes both his own written work and an adapted version of Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate.” Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. His Conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik cubes and Lego bricks) have been exhibited at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York.

Mónica de la Torre
Born in Mexico and reared equally on the high and pop culture of Latin America and the US, de la Torre is especially indebted to the Language poets and the New York contemporary art scene. Her poetry co-opts various forms of discourse—the list, the sales presentation, email—to show how these forms can be recontextualized to make new meaning in an age when language has been deeply debased. The senior editor of Bomb Magazine, de la Torre co-edited the anthology Reversible Monuments: Mexican Contemporary Poetry, and is author of the poetry books Talk Shows (2006) and Public Domain (2008), which prompted Bob Holman to declare: “I cannot imagine poetry without her.”

Aaron Dilloway
A founding member of Michigan noise outfit Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway is one of the key figures in contemporary American experimental music. Throughout the controlled electronic violence of Wolf Eyes, Dilloway, in the words of the New York Times, “courted the void.” Through tape manipulation, homemade electronics, and Henri Chopin-inspired mic swallowing, Dilloway helped inspire a generation of artists. As a member of Wolf Eyes, Dilloway has released over 100 CDs and LPs and collaborated with members of Sonic Youth and Black Dice. Recent performances have seen Dilloway traversing further along this sound poetry exploration, inserting the microphone in his throat to investigate the relations between body, sound, and space.

John Giorno
An innovator in poetry and performance, John Giorno has stood at the heart of New York’s experimental writing community for nearly half a century. His use of found materials, montage techniques, and careful direct exploration of the nature of mind through mediation has produced a vast body of work, executed as written poems, performances, and audio recordings. He helped pioneer the open exploration and celebration of queer sexuality in poetry in the 1960s, his anti-war work with Abbie Hoffman resulted in Spiro Agnew labeling him one of the “Hanoi Hannahs” in the 1970s, and his AIDS Treatment Project, begun in 1984, set the bar for direct, compassionate action in the AIDS crisis.

Giorno and Gysin first met in 1965, at a party honoring William S. Burroughs. They soon began a mutually-influential, often collaborative relationship, sharing and refining ideas like the Cut-Up and tape recording experiments together.

Kenneth Goldsmith
With influences ranging from John Cage and Andy Warhol to contemporary hip-hop and internet artists, Kenneth Goldsmith has pushed the limits of late twentieth-century poetics to both reinvigorate and pioneer aspects of visual poetry, sound poetry, the list poem, and digital poetics. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. As a collector, compiler, composer, and arranger of everyday speech and the discourse of common culture, Goldsmith makes readers aware of the linguistic matter all around us, and the potential for it to be materialized.

Goldsmith’s UbuWeb is one of the primary resources for Gysin’s work, particularly audio recordings. Gysin’s infamous remark that “writing is fifty years behind painting” is an often-referenced call to arms for Goldsmith.

Tim Griffin
Tim Griffin is a poet and writer, and served as editor-in-chief of Artforum International from 2003–10. Like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Griffin has leveraged this midpoint between creative writing and critical dialogue to benefit both gestures. His poetry has recently appeared in such publication as Fence and The Hat; his poem “Stereo in July” was exhibited at the gallery White Columns; and he was included in the collection Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Book (2004). His multimedia plays in verse (Fingerprints and The Various Theories of Rain) have been performed in New York at P.S.122 and London at the Cochrane Theater.

Bernadette Mayer
Called “a consummate poet” by Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer is a prolific poet, her first book published at the age of twenty-three. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she and Vito Acconci edited the journal 0 to 9 from 1972–74 and where she served as the director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1980–84. Mayer mixes prose poems, pastorals, sonnets, epigrams, and dream catalogues to create an unruly but joyous oeuvre—in her words: “I write unbalanced poetry.” She is the author of numerous books and has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets.

Anne Waldman with Ambrose Bye
Since the 1960s, Anne Waldman is an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. Waldman is particularly interested in the performance of her poetry, having described such performance as “a ritualized event in time” and she expresses the energy of her poetry through exuberant breathing, chanting, singing, and movement. She has published more than forty books of poetry, and is the editor of several volumes relating to modern, postmodern, and contemporary poetry. Since 2006, she has performed in collaboration with her son, musician Ambrose Bye, who will accompany her for Gysin’s Ghost.

Waldman described herself as a student of Burroughs and Gysin in a 1978 New York Times article, specifically stating: “In my work, it’s been the Cut-Up technique and his use of dreams that I’ve found most useful.” Upon Gysin’s death in 1986, Waldman wrote a poem, “Panrion Gysin,” which began “His voice:/knowledgeable, hip,/caustic/’behind the scenes’/Internationally elegant/with an edge/& his always/’avant’ eye/”