Dial-A-Poem, a Very Analog Project of the ’60s, Goes Global
by Ted Loos
In 1969, John Giorno got an idea: offer poetry via phone. Now, the quirky project is back, and it’s spreading to Brazil, Hong Kong and beyond.
Dial-A-Poem by John Giorno officially kicked off in early 1969, with six jury-rigged phones and answering machines housed at the Architectural League of New York, all connected to same phone number and each set up with an audiotape that would play once a call came in. Anyone could call the 212 number and hear a randomly assigned poem — though sometimes the recording was a piece of music, a song or a speech — usually introduced by Giorno himself and then read aloud by writers and other cultural luminaries. Giorno changed the audiotapes for each machine every day for variety’s sake and, over time, incorporated more voices.
Now, Dial-A-Poem is going international with seven museum partnerships and local phone numbers — in France, Mexico, Thailand, Italy, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Brazil so far, with more to come — and it is getting a technical upgrade with a new website launching this week.
The new Dial-A-Poem website has a simplicity Giorno might have appreciated. When a user clicks on the icon of a black handset, a poem is read. Clicked again, it hangs up. That’s all it does. The element of chance — a key part of the original artwork, and a quality prized by the Surrealists — is preserved in that the user cannot choose the material.
The website mixes the recordings from around the world, so you might hear Fabrício Corsaletti reading “Tacones lejanos,” courtesy of Dial-A-Poem Brazil, in Portuguese, whether or not you speak that language. Although the audio has subtitles, they are not translated.
Dial-A-Poem’s ongoing international expansion is essentially a franchise operation. Giorno Poetry Systems, which gets a licensing fee, asks that partners in other countries have at least 30 readings banked, and that these partner institutions have a permanent collection. G.P.S. makes three phone sculptures with the local recordings embedded for each museum, with one going to the nonprofit’s archives, one for the hosting institution’s permanent collection and one for the host to lend out. Each country has to have a live phone number, too.
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