It’s 1969; the phone is the medium and the poem is the message. Dial-A-Poem is brand-new. You pick up your phone, dial (212) 628-0400 and hear one of a dozen recorded poems by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, John Cage or who knows who. The next day there’s a fresh dozen. Some are dirty. Some are radical. A lot are about guns. Some really aren’t poems at all but songs or rants or sermons.
Millions called. “The busiest time was 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone,” wrote John Giorno, the founder of Dial-A-Poem. “The second busiest time was 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. … then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn’t sleep, 2 a.m. to 6 a.m.”
The phones are now long gone, but Dial-A-Poem is still out there waiting for you day and night on the Web. Though it isn’t exactly what it used to be, it is as close as you can get.
Dial-A-Poem was first set up at the Architectural League on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “It was one room and 10 phone lines,” said Bill Berkson, one of the Dial-A-Poem poets who occasionally minded the store, noting that “the will to subversion was intense.”
What callers got was not just three-minute hits of poetry. They got Black Panther speeches, and they got Buddhist mantras. Dial-A-Poem was part of the downtown scene, the antiwar movement and the sexual revolution. “It was agitprop,” Ms. Waldman said.
In its brief existence, the phones moved from place to place, off again, on again. By 1971 they were gone.
Now you get Dial-A-Poem by clicking on www.ubu.com/sound/dial_index.html, one of the subdivisions of UbuWeb, a huge online archive of avant-garde poetry. There you’ll see a menu of a dozen Dial-A-Poem albums put out by Giorno Poetry Systems.
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