Press Release

The 7th annual Festival Voix d’Amériques (FVA) is shifting towards the international scene in 2008 with New York poet John Giorno as its Guest of Honour. It’s the FVA’s gift to Montreal audiences — a chance to discover one of the leading figures in performance poetry of the last 50 years.

It’s been in the news a lot recently, but performance poetry did not originate with the Festival Voix d’Amériques, slams, or the arrival in Quebec of the Grand Corps Malade! Poetry in performance has been around a long time and has a history all its own. Poet John Giorno is one of the last remaining sons of the Beat Generation whose powerful voices, those of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac among others, caused an upheaval in American culture.

John Giorno was born in 1935 in New York City. In 1965, he created Giorno Poetry Systems, a recording company that would release more than forty vinyl records and CDs of poets and musicians in performance including John Cage, William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Laurie Anderson. A few years later, he perfected a unique kind of telephone poetry called “Dial-A-Poem”, which he tried out in various locations. Thousands of people called in to listen to the poems. Giorno has been relentless in bringing poetry out of the intimist and elitist mode. Drawn into the orbit of Pop Art, Giorno applied its concepts to poetry. He was very close to William S Burroughs and still lives in that writer’s former New York loft. John Giorno was an integral part of the group comprising Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Susan Sontag that Burroughs brought together in his windowless, white-walled “Bunker”. Giorno was, in fact, the character sleeping and dreaming for eight hours in the Andy Warhol film Sleep.

Now 72 years old, John Giorno is busier than ever and continues to perform his poetry around the world. For the Festival Voix d’Amériques, he will present a solo show and take part in an evening of poetry with anglophone Canadian poets, along with an evening of poetry together with the best of Montreal’s francophone poets. It promises to be a historic and energizing encounter.

True to its mission, the FVA is innovating again! The 2008 program is full of risk and inspiration with a remount of the show we presented in Berlin — La Salle des pas perdus, and an even more biting Combat contre la langue de bois. Jérôme Minière will have carte blanche, and Body and Soul will shake things up with the strange music and performance of American Baby Dee. Not to mention a DADA Cabaret!!!

Founded in 2002 and produced and directed by D. Kimm and Les Filles électriques, the FVA is now the most important festival of spoken word and performance poetry in Canada. From February 1 to 8, more than one hundred performance poets will take the stage, accompanied by improv musicians, at the Sala Rossa and the Casa del Popolo. In the warm and welcoming atmosphere that has become so characteristic of the FVA, they will deliver their texts, express their emotions and make their claims in the festive atmosphere of a cabaret.

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Source: Karine Cousineau Communications
Telephone: 514-382-4844
Email: karinecousineau@bellnet.ca
High-resolution photos available on request.

For more information, go to www.fva.ca www.electriques.ca

[7519] News posted Thursday, December 13, 2007.