The brainchild of the late, great John Giorno, ‘Dial-A-Poem’ was a public poetry service that circulated countercultural, streetwise, and pioneering poetry to a mass audience in the late 1960s. All the public had to do was pick up the telephone. Then listen – and decide if they were into it. Fifty years after the original service was shut down in 1970, Dial-A-Poem is back in the form of a mobile app, launched by Crossed Lines. Since 2020 also sees the publication of John Giorno’s memoir Great Demon Kings, it seemed there was nothing left for me to do, but get reading and reach out to Dr. Sarah Jackson, who is leading the Crossed Lines project. I wanted to find out why I find the idea of poetry on the telephone so compelling, all these years on.
John Giorno
WRONG NUMBER
JUST NOW, sitting down to write this, I got a WhatsApp message from a stranger: ‘How’s the wrist’, the message read, then: ‘What time wd u like a game of scrabble this afternoon?? X’
O, the beauty of telephony! All this poor woman wanted was a harmless game of Scrabble. She never could have guessed her voice would end up in my article.
DIAL-A-POEM
THE POET, performance artist and activist John Giorno recognised the telephone as an open line of possibility, just waiting to ring.
Following a 1968 phone conversation with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, Giorno established Dial-A-Poem, a public poetry service. Members of the public simply called the number for Giorno Poetry Systems and listened to one of a dozen recorded poems selected at random, by the likes of Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Patti Smith, and Anne Waldman.
Some of the recordings weren’t really poems at all, but rants, Black Panther speeches, Buddhist mantras or songs in praise of queer love. In 1969, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Dial-A-Poem was first installed in a gallery setting. At the Architectural League of New York, you picked up one of ten black landlines and listened. Undoubtedly, you looked around as you did so, checking that nobody else could hear what was pouring into your ear.
Or Diana di Prima instructing on the proper use of knives and Molotov cocktails
Maybe you’d get Frank Zappa reading from Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch (‘Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?’) Or Diana di Prima instructing on the proper use of knives and Molotov cocktails.
Or you might hear John Giorno himself, reading something like ‘Grasping at Emptiness’: visually, this poem looks like two columns separated by a margin running down the centre of each page, marked by unstable reflection and repetition; on the recording, however, Giorno’s voice has been multitracked, such that both columns arrive simultaneously: looping, you are so fucking uptight, chanting, blind ignorance, competing, no matter how much I totally love fucking you I can’t stand being here another moment, multiplying, if I wasn’t a fucking Buddhist I’d love to put a gun in my mouth. Surely one of the most deranged incantations you’ll ever hear.
ArrayDISCONNECTED
DIAL-A-POEM SKIPPED around for a time, showing in Chicago, and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. What had been slow-going at first began to make waves. Millions called in. Listening to Dial-A-Poem was even set as homework by New York City Public Schools.
In response, some of the parents got quite steamed up – particularly given the erotic content of some of the poems (bear in mind the prudish and deeply homophobic culture that these radical texts were entering). Following countless complaints, and an investigation by the FBI, Dial-A-Poem was shut down in 1970.
A K8 phone booth
GREAT DEMON KINGS
FIFTY YEARS ON, 2020 sees the release of Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death and Enlightenment (released 4th August). Twenty-five years in the making, John Giorno completed the book a week before his death in 2019.
Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, the list goes on – these are the ‘demon kings’ and were all once John Giorno’s lovers. Name a queer revolutionary American artist working in the 60s, and there’s a decent chance Giorno slept with him: from artist Brion Gysin to a somewhat baffling threesome with Burroughs and ‘nemesis’ Allen Ginsberg.
Brion Gysin in Tangier, Morocco, Apr 1966.
Giorno might have thought that these men were ego-driven and self-obsessive, yet, at the same time, he admired the way they were altering our understanding of art and of the world. In turn, the ‘demon kings’ were quite taken with Giorno’s Greco-Roman good-looks.
Giorno writes quite plainly, ‘I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted and all I wanted was sex’. He’s ablaze with queer sex-positive energy long before the 1969 Stonewall uprising, which was so pivotal for the LGBTQ community. As such, Great Demon Kings reads as a paean to a life in pursuit of love and sexual liberation.
ArrayPOP
IN THE BOOK, Giorno writes of being at a Ronettes and Shirelles concert with Andy Warhol at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre in 1963, ‘By chance, I was smack in the middle of something extraordinary.’ Charming and upbeat as Giorno’s prose style is, the more you read, the more it seems like he was never not at the centre of something extraordinary.
With Andy Warhol, it’s all oral sex and hand jobs, party hopping and poppers, until:
We pressed our faces together and kissed. It was the first time we had ever properly kissed, sober and intentional. It had the sweet taste of kissing death. It was exhilarating, like when you get kicked in the head and see stars.
It was Warhol who put Giorno on the map. Some might recall Giorno’s naked sleeping body in Warhol’s anti-film ‘Sleep’ (1964) and consider the idea of a memoir something of a tautology; how much more intimate with the man can you get than after nearly six hours of watching him sleep?
Beginning with a close-up — too close for public eyes — of Giorno’s nipple, the silent black-and-white film stitches together footage shot over the course of weeks. Warhol’s film is tender — watching someone sleep perhaps the ultimate maternal act. Certainly, one of the most private.
Then again, ‘Sleep’ is an experience of both intimacy and detachment, in which it is difficult to decide which is the more passive: Giorno’s mostly unmoving body or Warhol’s camera, slow in-out breaths or flickering slowed-down frames. In any case, the only thing cooler than a film star is an anti-film star.
ArrayThe art world, especially the recent developments in Pop Art – which lifted the rope barrier to the cloistered art gallery, letting mass culture pile in – had an influence on Giorno’s poetics. He appropriated lines and fragments from popular culture, often mashing them up in the ‘cut-up’ style that Burroughs was famous for.
Beyond his own work, Giorno saw poetry as ‘75 years behind painting and sculpture and dance and music’, and Giorno Poetry Systems was one of the ways he intended to play catch up. This non-profit collective and record label effectively transformed poetry into soundscapes: loops, delays, intermingled voices.
Until this point, there hadn’t been much multimedia or performance in poetry circles. Its availability and progression were limited to books and magazines. But Giorno intended to make it open to anyone with a landline.
HANG UP
AMONG MY MANY HANG UPS, there’s this one: the way most of us first encounter poems is sitting in a row of plastic chairs in a classroom. Here we are taught to interpret it, which requires ‘close reading’, meaning breaking it down into parts to discover what a poem is ‘about’, an activity akin to taking a magnifying glass to an ant and expecting it, at some point, to combust.
We’re taught there aren’t any wrong answers. But there are, aren’t there? Because there are marks and grades at stake. The pedagogical paradigm seems to be in the business of backing poetry into an even tighter corner, shrinking its possible worlds. It’s no wonder people think capital P Poetry is a practice for elitist coteries. No wonder people feel alienated by it. No wonder they hate it!
‘Always the telephone linked to all the hearts of the world beating at once’
The poet Ben Lerner says, in The Hatred of Poetry that whatever ‘we think of particular poems, “poetry” is a word for the meeting place of the private and the public, the internal and external’. And here’s the rub: so is the telephone.
As such, it strikes me as a very apt space to experiment with poetry’s circulation and political potential. Poetry’s link with telephony, for me at least, makes it seem more open, more accessible, more pick-up-and-put-down-able, more private, yet more communal: ‘Always the telephone linked to all the hearts of the world beating at once’ – that one’s from Ginsberg.
REDIAL
RANT OVER. AND over to the far better versed Dr. Sarah Jackson, who is leading Crossed Lines, which explores ‘the impact of the telephone’s complex, multiple and mutating functions in transnational literatures from its invention in 1876 to the present day.’ Central to Crossed Lines is a new Dial-A-Poem mobile app, launched this year to mark fifty years since John Giorno’s original service was shut down.
‘The Dial-a-Poem app,’ Jackson explains, ‘gives users free access to over sixty new poems on the theme of calling by contemporary award-winning writers from Africa, America, Asia and Europe.’ You can hear these poems read aloud by the authors and translators, as well as read them on the page – or, well, screen.
After Giorno, ‘the app is designed to utilise new teletechnologies in order to bring poetry to a wider audience,’ says Jackson, but ‘the project is also interested in addressing the changing ways in which we make and receive calls.’
Giorno at work
If the goal is to bring poetry to a wider audience, I ask, ‘Is the telephone still a valid – perhaps democratic? – means of transmission?’ On the one hand, yes. Jackson says that ‘today’s smartphone has the capacity to connect people separated by conflict, poverty, disease and natural disaster’. She also remarks on how the Crossed Lines project has ‘taken on a new resonance in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, where people have turned to calling in all its manifestations not only to keep in touch, but also to engage with new modes of artistic and cultural production.’
On the other hand, Jackson suggests, although the telephone is ‘sometimes described as a “leveller”, communications infrastructure means that there are significant differences in telephoning practices: not everyone has access to the right number or can reach the person they want to call. Nation states and global conglomerates can facilitate but also restrict people’s access to network coverage; they can also hack into phones, read personal messages, and store private data.’
She points me towards Ather Zia’s ‘in Kashmir all phones are dead’, one of the poems chosen for the commission, and like the dilettante I am, I look Zia up in the online ‘directory’ (5916), dial in the numbers (the app has a fun retro rotary phone User Interface) and read: ‘the cold gag is strong in the air’, and at the end of the first stanza: ‘your Britain is cold too / but your phones always work’.
Crossed Lines
‘A VOICE FROM AFAR’
FUNNY TO READ those lines. Especially that first line, with its monosyllables and jarring vowel sounds, the way the long O in ‘cold’ is suddenly ‘gag[ged]’ by that short A, before the voice seems to settle into a cadence, indeed flows ‘in the air’. The stilted rhythm reminds me a little of bad signal – or at least sonic interference. For some, the telephone can be a ‘site of disconnections and silences’, Jackson suggests. But it also ‘offers us a voice from afar inside our own ear, the telephone disrupts all the divisions that we so often take for granted – divisions between proximity and distance, between public and private, and between the human and the technological.’
the telephone disrupts all the divisions that we so often take for granted
To further explore these divisions that we take for granted, Crossed Lines are renovating an old K8 box, which will be installed in the city of Nottingham. Jackson’s hope is that members of the public will be able to ‘reflect on the poetry of the telephone’ and explore ‘the phone booth as a space that is simultaneously public and private, intimate and anonymous, open and closed.’
For me, poetry is that space, too, intimate and anonymous, open and closed, and you don’t have to be a Great Demon King to sometimes wonder how our mediums might affect our messages. In that spirit, a skinny sonnet found on WhatsApp:
WRONG NUMBER
messages to
this afternoon
tap chat for how’s
the wrist secured
with end-to-end
encryption
like a game
of scrabble
and calls
are now
wd u X??
more info
John Giorno by Maru Teppei
Dr Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary Writing at Nottingham Trent University. An AHRC Leadership Fellow and BBC New Generation Thinker, her publications include Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012) which won the Seamus Heaney Prize, Tactile Poetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Ten Poems on the Telephone (Candlestick Press, 2017). www.crossedlines.co.uk
The Dial-A-Poem app is suitable for both iOS and Android devices, and can be downloaded for free from Google Play and the App Store. In keeping with Giorno’s original service and enabling users to discover new work by poets with whom they are not familiar, poems can be accessed at random by dialling ‘0’. But users can also visit our Phone Book for the full directory of poems, each with its unique four-digit number.
Mid-September sees the launch of a new Crossed Lines project called ‘The Exchange’. Working in collaboration with the Science Museum, a number of musicians, artists and writers – including Will Self, Aura Satz and Maya Chowdhry – explore the culture of telephony in order to provoke new ways of talking and listening across borders. These works will be available at the project website from mid-September, along with a crowd-sourced exhibition of literary telephones.
