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 poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, i ...

after a phone conversation with

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

. 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 bo ...

, John Cage,

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 William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Genera ...

Bobby Seale Robert George Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", ...

Patti Smith Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album ''Horses''. Called the "punk poet ...

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, urbanism, and related disciplines". The league dates from 1881, when Cass Gilbert organized meetings at the Salmagundi Club for ...

(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 (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 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 rosettes are also present. They have been ...

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’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 Gaze ...

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 in Nottingham, England. It was founded as a new universities, new university in 1992, although its roots go back to 1843 with the establishment of the Nottingham School of Desi ...

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 Moma may refer to: People * Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist * Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician * Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher Places ; ...

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

UbuWeb UbuWeb is a web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives. Phil ...

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 an online radio station and media platform started in the Hackney area of London. The station was founded in April 2011 by Femi Adeyemi "for an international community of music lovers". NTS ...

Information by telephone History of poetry {{telephony-stub