Ambiguously Explicit: Material Encounters with John Giorno’s “Pornographic Poem”

Recent trends in literary criticism have been keen to interrogate how the reader’s physical body materially interacts with literary media and how those interactions shape the meanings and uses of literary works. Surprisingly, little scholarship of this kind has been devoted to pornographic literature, despite the genre’s obvious connection to issues of use and embodiment. This article investigates the potential of pornography to shift critical paradigms away from an abstract hermeneutics and toward material interpretations of the text-media-body nexus through a discussion of “Pornographic Poem,” an aptly-named found poem by the New York-born poet John Giorno. After first describing the form and tracing the genesis of the poem—which at first glance amounts to little more than smut with line breaks—, this article examines its paradoxical ambition to be read as both a pornographic piece and a poem. It then analyzes the specific ways in which commentators have sought to make sense of Giorno’s poem, either by relying on a “hermeneutics of suspicion” or by using comparative reading modes. Finally, since those reading strategies seem unable to fully account for the poem’s troubling yet constitutive conjoining of pornography and poetry, this article offers material, in-context perspectives on “Pornographic Poem” and thereby conceives of meaning as an emergent property of the overall affective and material situation in which the text is encountered by a reading body.