Dial-A-Poem is a public poetry service established in 1968 by the late poet, artist and activist

John Giorno John Giorno (December 4, 1936 – October 11, 2019) was an American performance poetry, poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experim ...

after a phone conversation with

William Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced popular culture and ...

. The service enabled members of the public to call Giorno Poetry Systems and to listen to a poem selected at random by writers including

Amiri Baraka Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous b ...

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of th ...

Bobby Seale Robert George Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an African American revolutionary, political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization the Black Panther Party (BPP) ...

Patti Smith Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author, and photographer. Her 1975 debut album '' Horses'' made her an influential member of the New York City-based punk rock movement. Smith has fu ...

and

Anne Waldman Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political acti ...

. Installed first at the

Architectural League of New York The Architectural League of New York is a non-profit organization "for creative and intellectual work in architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construct ...

(in January 1969) before moving to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago for six weeks (in November 1969) and then to the

Museum of Modern Art in New York The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, and includes over 200,000 works of arc ...

(in July 1970), the venture received widespread media attention. However, it was also known for its counter-cultural content – including polemics,

Black Panther A black panther is the Melanism, melanistic colour variant of the leopard (''Panthera pardus'') and the jaguar (''Panthera onca''). Black panthers of both species have excess black pigments, but their typical Rosette (zoology), rosettes are al ...

speeches, Buddhist mantras and queer love poetry – and following complaints and an investigation by the FBI, the service was shut down in 1970. Dial-a-Poem has had a number of iterations since Giorno’s original service, including the Museum of Modern Art's 'Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language' exhibition and

Ugo Rondinone Ugo Rondinone (born November 30, 1964) is a Swiss-born contemporary artist. Rondinone is known for his temporary, large-scale land art sculpture, '' Seven Magic Mountains'' (2016–2021), with its seven fluorescently-painted totems of large ...

’s 2017 ‘I ♥ John Giorno’ exhibition at the Red Bull Arts Gallery in New York.

Dial-A-Poem Montreal Dial-A-Poem Montreal was a phone-based service started in 1985 by Fortner Anderson, who was inspired by John Giorno's Dial-A-Poem and wanted to expand poetry beyond the limits of print.Michael Farber. "A line of poetry just a dial away." ''The Gaz ...

ran from 1985 to 1987, and recently resumed with a 2020-2021 edition. In 2020, a new version of the service was launched as a mobile app from

Nottingham Trent University Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is a public research university located in Nottingham, England. Its origins date back to 1843 with the establishment of the Nottingham School of Design, Nottingham Government School of Design, which still opera ...

and the

Arts and Humanities Research Council The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. History The Arts a ...

References

External links

John Giorno’s Archives - a selection curated by Marcia Bassett
in ''Bomb Magazine''
John Giorno Dial-A-Poem 1968/2012
at

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

The Dial-A-Poem Poets (July 18, 1973)
in

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a "a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts." It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. The site was created by ...

Dial-a-Poem app
via Crossed Lines
John Giorno: Dial-A-Poem episodes
from

NTS Radio NTS Radio (also known as NTS Live or simply NTS) is a music radio platform which was founded in 2011 in Hackney, East London by Femi Adeyemi "for an international community of music lovers". NTS was built as a platform to celebrate the eclec ...

Information by telephone History of poetry {{telephony-stub