We rarely use our phones as actual telephones these days—depending on your source, the average American spends somewhere between four and five hours a day looking at their phone, but only a few minutes using it to speak to someone. So if you find yourself with a hankering to stop doomscrolling and hear an actual human voice, then why not dial a poem?
The idea of playing poetry down the phone was the brainchild of the late poet John Giorno, who founded a service he called Dial-a-Poem in 1968 as an attempt to remedy poetry being “75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music” when it comes to its use of technology, multiple media, and performance. For the next two years, it broadcast poems by Giorno himself, along with like-minded contemporaries including Burroughs, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and various others.
As per Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem website, the original project was shut down in 1971 after the FCC and FBI “investigated complaints of indecency and claims that the poems, many of which were explicitly sexual and political in nature, would incite violence”—a fear that, if we’re being charitable, feels charmingly naïve in the year of our lord 2026.
Anyway, FBI or no FBI, Dial-a-Poem wasn’t to remain dormant for long. It re-emerged in various forms over the decades to come, most recently as part of the “I ❤️ John Giorno” retrospective in 2017. Giorno himself died in 2019, but the latest incarnation of Dial-a-Poem means that his idea lives on. Today’s Dial-a-Poem service is a collaboration between Giorno’s non-profit, Giorno Poetry Systems, and The Poetry Project; it features work from 30 contemporary poets, and promises that “new recordings are added regularly”.
The new service makes some concessions to the 21st century, most notably that you can simply visit the Dial-a-Poem website and have your computer play you a random poem from the service’s archives. But that’s no fun! To replicate the original Dial-a-Poem experience, you really should just pick up the phone and call the number.
If you’re like me, this requires a) finding your phone; b) charging your phone; c) being scolded by your phone for not exercising in several days; d) realizing your phone is out of credit; e) buying credit; and f) remembering that there is basically no service in your apartment anyway… and it’s below freezing outside. But! In the service of journalistic rigor, I did indeed call Dial-a-Poem.
After a moment, I was greeted by Queens-based Chilean poet Samuel Espíndola Hernández, reading a fragment of a poem whose name I didn’t catch, but which was rich with imagery of volcanoes and flowing lava—a subject that clearly interests the poet, given that a couple of years ago he presented a fascinating-sounding lecture entitled “Poetics of Ash: Smoke, Furnaces, Volcanoes” as part of the Universidad de Chile’s Eschatology 101 course “The Apocalyptic Tradition in Literature and Other Arts: Comparative Perspectives”. Anyway, I had never encountered his work before—and now I have! If you’re up for making a similar discovery, Dial-a-Poem is at (718) 957-2379.
English (US) ·