DOROTHY IANNONE

“John Giorno once wove my life into the history of poetry. He wrote Rose, one of his ‘found poems,’ I think they are called, using, among other materials, a letter I had written my husband. This poem was published in the Paris Review, in 1968.  Shortly after I had left my husband to be with Dieter, I received a letter from him asking if there had been other men in my life during our seven-year marriage. He particularly named two of our friends with whom I often lunched alone in New York. In response to his concern, I wrote him this letter.  When my husband showed our mutual friend, John, this letter, John asked if he could borrow it. In his poem Rose, John interspersed lines from my letter with excerpts from, among other things, personals columns advertising for sexual partners, articles about bird flu, about prostitutes and descriptions of fashion. My entire letter is embedded in Rose. When Emmett showed me this issue of The Paris Review, I was definitely not pleased. But when John visited me in Berlin twenty years later, it was no longer necessary to mention Rose. And now, I must say, it even pleases me to have provided the poetry for Rose.”

Dorothy Iannone, from Maurizio Cattelan, Dorothy lannone. A Revolutionary Life. Flash Art International, n° 247, March-April 2006, pp. 79-81

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