Dial-A-Poem Radio Marathon

About

Celebrating Giorno’s pioneering career and the continued vitality of American poetry, the marathon will be recorded for later broadcast.

Created by John Giorno and active from 1969 to 1971, Dial-A-Poem was a series of phone lines that connected callers to answering machines with recordings of poetry, speeches, words, rants, mantras, and sounds left by a number of poets, musicians, artists and other cultural figures including Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, Patti Smith, and others. It was first set up at the Architectural League of New York and later at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. Dial-A-Poem had a life beyond the telephone, too, in a series of albums released by Giorno Poetry Systems, Giorno’s record label and publishing arm, that included the works on the phone lineup as well as dozens of new texts.

The Dial-A-Poem Radio Marathon revisits and updates Giorno’s historic project, presenting poetry, lyrics, and texts from initial participants as well as a new generation of authors.

In the spirit of the original project, poets will read alongside musicians, visual artists, and other cultural figures, generating a new body of text. These 28 readings will be added to the growing catalog of Dial-A-Poem, now spanning 1968-2017.

Participants include 
Penny Arcade, Janani Balasubramanian, Anselm Berrigan, Alexis Bhagat, Billy Cancel, Todd Colby, Steve Dalachinsky, Helga Davis, Chris Funkhouser, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, David Henderson, Shelley Hirsch, Bob Holman, Christopher Knowles, Julie Martin, E.J. McAdams, Jonas Mekas, Tracie Morris, David Moscovich, Tommy Pico, Nicole Sealey, Edwin Torres, Greg Tate and more!

Special recordings by
Christian Bök, Lee Ann Brown, Joan La Barbara, Ron Padgett, Michael Peters, Aram Saroyan, Anne Waldman, Gregory Whitehead, and Matthew Zapruder.

This public program was organized by Lauren Rosati on the occasion of I <3 John Giorno .