Various Artists: The Dial-a-Poem Poets

 

I've been looking forward to posting this for a long time: this is the first volume in the Giorno Poetry Systems label's various artists compilation series Dial-a-Poem Poets. Dial-a-Poem was an art installation with a simple premise: call a number, hear a random poem. New York artist/poet John Giorno first curated it for the Architectural League of New York in January 1969; a lot of the poems were erotic to the point of being straight-up porn, and the Board of Education pressured the Telephone Company, who cut them off, although the New York State Council of the Arts proceeded to threaten the phone company with a lawsuit and they were reinstated. It played at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art for six weeks starting in November 1969. Next it played at the Museum of Modern Art starting in July 1970, and a great many of the poems this time were politically radical; again, there was pressure to shut it down, this time from inside MOMA, and it was cut off after only two months.

Giorno's poetry selection contained 700 poems from 55 poets, mostly American, all post-WWII, out of every school from East to West coast and all across the cultural and sexual spectrum. Typically the museums that installed it dedicated ten to a dozen phone lines to Dial-a-Poem which directed callers at random to an answering machine with a recording of a poem, all the recordings being refreshed regularly. This 1972 LP contains 37 pieces by 27 speakers, all recorded between 1958 and 1972, and it's a juicy melange of poems, short stories, and political exhortations from the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Creeley, Gysin, Di Prima, O'Hara, Saroyan, Cage, and Bobby Seale.

This LP and others from the Giorno Poetry Systems label are available on UBU.com, but in versions of very poor transfer quality, so I've set my mind to buying as many of the original GPS LPs that I can and posting fresh transfers here (look at that list of contributors and I think you'll agree the chances of this collection ever seeing a legitimate reissue are almost zero!)

Allen Ginsberg - Vajra Mantra
Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters No. 7
Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters No. 13
Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters No. 16
Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters No. 49
William Burroughs - Excerpts from The Wild Boys
Anne Waldman - Pressure
John Giorno - Vajra Kisses
Emmett Williams - Duet
Ed Sanders - Cemetery Hill
Taylor Mead - Motorcycles
Allen Ginsberg - Green Automobile 1953
Robert Creeley - The Messenger for Allen Ginsberg
Robert Creeley - I Know a Man
Harris Schiff - Poems
Lenore Kandel - Kali
Aram Saroyan - Not a Cricket
Philip Whalen - Excerpts from Scenes of Life at the Capitol
Ted Berrigan - Excerpts from The Sonnets
Frank O'Hara - Ode to Joy
Frank O'Hara - To Hell with It
Joe Brainard - Excerpt from I Remember
Clark Coolidge - Small Inventions: Suite V (Plurals) Secante
Clark Coolidge - Small Inventions: Suite IV
Jim Carroll - Excerpts from The Basketball Diaries
John Cage - Mushroom Haiku
John Cage - Excerpt from Silence
Bernadette Mayer - These Stories about After the Revolution
Michael Brownstein - Geography
Brion Gysin - I Am That I Am
John Sinclair - The Destruction of America
Anne Waldman - Holy City
Heathcote Williams - I Will Not Pay Taxes Until
David Henderson - The Louisiana Weekly No. 1, Ruckus Poem Part 1
Bobby Seale - Excerpt from Fillmore East Speech
Kathleen Cleaver - Excerpt from Fillmore East Speech
Allen Ginsberg - Blake Song: Merrily We Welcome In the Year

Album audio & artwork

DISCLAIMER: To the best of my knowledge, this work is out of print and not available for purchase in any format. If you are the artist and are planning a reissue, please let me know and I’ll remove it from the blog. Also please get in touch if you’ve lost your art &/or sound masters and would like to talk with me about my restoration work.