Various Artists: The Dial-a-Poem Poets - Biting Off the Tongue of a Corpse

 

The third in the Dial-a-Poem Poets LP series. Features many of the same artists included on previous volumes plus, for the first time, Kenneth Koch and Gary Snyder.

Gary Snyder - Anasazi
Gary Snyder - The Wild Mushroom
Gary Snyder - Avocado
Gary Snyder - One Should Not Speak to a Skilled Hunter
Gary Snyder - No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service
John Giorno - Subduing Demons in America
William S. Burroughs - A Top Level Conference Is in Progress
Charles Olson - Maximus of Gloucester
Ted Berrigan - Excerpts from Memorial Day
Ed Sanders - The Struggle
Edwin Denby - The Shoulder
Edwin Denby - The Subway
Edwin Denby - Over Manhattan Island
Edwin Denby - Disorder Mental Strikes Me
Edwin Denby - Suppose There's a Cranky Woman Inside Me
Helen Adam - Cheerless Junkie Song
Diane Di Prima - Ave
John Wieners - In Public
Robert Duncan - To Speak My Mind
Robert Duncan - We Convivial in What Is Ours
John Cage - Mureau
Denise Levertov - Life at War
Frank O'Hara - Having a Coke with You
Kenneth Koch - Spring
John Ashbery - A Blessing in Disguise
Charles Stein - Seed Poem

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.

Various Artists: The Dial-a-Poem Poets - Disconnected

 

Volume two of the series, again a double-LP, with many of the same participants as the first volume plus the likes of Greg Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Paul Blackburn, John Ashbery, and Charles Amirkhanian.

Allen Ginsberg - I'm a Victim of Telephones
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche - Cynical Letter
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche - Letter to Marpa
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche - Sound Cycle (Aham)
John Giorno - Suicide Sutra
William Burroughs - What Washington, What Orders
Charles Plymell - 100 Flies on an Airplane Flying Around the World
Michael Brownstein - Monologue from the Top
John Cage - Excerpt from Silence
Anne Waldman - Fast Speaking Woman
Diane Di Prima - Excerpt from Loba
Bernadette Mayer - Excerpt from Studying Hunger
Robert Creeley - The Name
Diane Wakoski - Exorcism
Lorenzo Thomas - High Heel Jesus
Gregory Corso - Marriage
Maureen Owen - Body Rush
Ed Sanders - Stand By My Side, Oh Lord
Charles Olson - The Ridge
Allen Ginsberg - Jimmy Berman
Joe Brainard - More I Remember More
John Wieners - Memories in a Small Apartment
Gerard Malanga - A Last Poem (Tentative Title)
John Perreault - Nude Death
Jack Spicer - Excerpt from Billy the Kid
Jim Carroll - From the Basketball Diaries, Age 13, Spring 1965
Peter Orlovsky - All Around the Garden
Imamu Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) - Our Nation Is Like Ourselves
Michael McClure - Lion Poem
Ed Dorn - Recollections of Grande Apaharia
Frank Lima - The Hunter
Frank O'Hara - Adieu Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean Paul
Bill Berkson - Stanky
Larry Fagin - A Play
Tom Clark - Little Aria
Paul Blackburn - The Once-Over
Philip Whelan - If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich
Ron Padgett - June 17, 1942
John Ashbery - The Tennis Court Oath
Clark Coolidge - Excerpt from Dews (8 Channel)
Charles Amirkhanian - Radii

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.

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.

Tom Stoppard: New-Found-Land & (The 15 minute) Dogg's Troupe Hamlet

 

Two short, sweet, and typically surreal plays by Tom Stoppard, originally produced in 1976 for Inter-Action, a theatre collective founded by Ed Berman. "New-Found-Land", a paean to Berman's birth country of the U.S., opens as a two-hander about civil servants deciding on the naturalization of an American as a British citizen and suddenly swerves off-road to become a travelogue visiting every American cultural cliche and celebrating it in demented, rhapsodic joy. The two hands are Richard Goolden and Stephen Moore, both voices you'll know if you consumed the original "Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" radio series from the late 1970s. Side two is an adaptation of "Hamlet" for Inter-Action's own Dogg's Troupe, wherein the Bard's masterwork is reduced to thirteen minutes, and then two minutes. (America's Reduced Shakespeare Company ran with this idea in their first 25-minute rendition of "Hamlet" in 1981, and then took it to its logical conclusion; in the live show I saw, the evening ended with "Hamlet" reduced to one second.)

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.

Alastair Reid: Oddments Inklings Omens Moments

 

Alastair Reid (1926-2014) was a Scottish poet, journalist, and teacher. I first read his poems in the 1957 "New Poets of England and America" anthology from Meridian Books, and found him sweet and surreal. I was delighted to find out he'd recorded this album of his own work for the American spoken word label CMS in 1967. Reid's poems will shoot little pleasure bullets at you from a number of directions but the grenade for me is "In Memory of My Uncle Timothy", a nutty miniature that I'll say nothing more about and leave for you to discover. To read more about Reid and his life/lives and work please check out Julie Larios' appreciation from 2014, "Alastair Reid: A Sunstruck Madman".

Ghosts' Stories
Calenture
Oddments, Inklings, Omens, Moments
Cat-Faith
Who Am I?
A Note from the Coast
What's What
The Syntax of Seasons
For Her Sake
The O-Filler
Speaking a Foreign Language
Was, Is, Will Be
Spain, Morning
A Game of Glass
Growing, Flying, Happening
In Memory of My Uncle Timothy
For Ring-Givers
Pigeons
Ghosts
Disguises
A Lesson for Beautiful Women
Small Sad Song
The Tale the Hermit Told
Old Painter to Young Model
Casa d'Amunt
Outlook, Uncertain
A Homecoming
What Bones Say
Curiosity
The Figures on the Frieze
Me to You
The Spiral
Frog Dream

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.

Paul Winter: A Winter's Tale

 

Saul Wineman was born in Los Angeles in 1923, grew up in Detroit, and went to University of Michigan where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy, and was also introduced to student radio. His first pro job in radio was DJ at WXYZ 1270-AM in Detroit in 1952, where he started using the show biz name Paul Winter. He played records and wrote and recorded his own skits, and held the job straight through 1964. This, Paul's only LP, was recorded for Washington, D.C. label Offbeat Records in 1957. For the next twenty years, as his daughter Lisa Friedman said in his obituary, he had one foot in academia and one foot in broadcasting: "When he was solely a performer, he was an adjunct professor, and when he was solely a professor he was an adjunct performer." Between stints teaching humanities at Detroit's Wayne State University, he hosted the talk show "The Paul Winter Show" on WEEI 590-AM Boston from June 1964 to May 1965; he hosted the same show on both WTAK 1090-AM Detroit and WKBD-TV Detroit Channel 50 from May to November 1966; he did it again on WTAK from May to June 1969; and he did it one more time on WJR 760-AM Detroit from May 1972 to November 1973.

The songs on this album riff on much the same topics you'll see in early Feiffer cartoons, so prepare to be rocketed back into the Eisenhower administration and its fixations on vitamins, the computer threat, Tennessee Williams, the Commies, and the Bomb. There are good tunes and good satire, and maybe it isn't as funny/sick as Tom Lehrer, but then again the song "Ballad of Orval Faubus (Little Orvy)" sounds like it was recorded in response to some news item from 2020. Among the songs guaranteed to turn your head is "Stalin Met Trotsky in Hell" which contains a line so good it needs to be sample yesterday if not sooner: "Hoy boy, diddle diddle doy / Who's got time for hoi polloi? / When in doubt, don't refute him / Simply aim, simply shoot him".

Tired Blood
Automation Blues
Film Clip
Stalin Met Trotsky in Hell
Good Bishop Berkely
Toptoon (The D.J.)
Actor's Studio (Tempo di Tennessee)
Ballad of Orval Faubus (Little Orvy)
Team Man
Hollywood Hot Stuff
All Hail
Sing a Song of Schopenhauer
Had It
Fallout

Album audio & artwork

 

Press clippings:

1957-10-20 Detroit Free Press pg2TV
1958-06-01 Detroit Free Press pg06TV
1964-08-19 Boston Globe pg10
1964-10-27 Boston Globe pg12
1966-05-12 Detroit Free Press pg6B
1967-01-04 Detroit Free Press pg4C
1968-09-05 Detroit Free Press pg12D
1968-09-13 Detroit Free Press pg5C
2000-09-23 Detroit Free Press pg17C

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.

Scoop Nisker: If You Don't Like The News, Go Out And Make Some Of Your Own

 

Scoop Nisker was a DJ at San Francisco's KSAN, known for his comic/Buddhist approach to news reporting (Traffic report: "People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you"), when he compiled this album of razor-tape assemblages built out of old records, speeches by public figures, new voiceovers, and man-on-the-street interviews. The result is more or less what you'd expect if Buchanan and Goodman had been working in radio news when Johnson was president instead of Eisenhower. Other artists cut tape before Nisker, but this is one of the earliest pioneering efforts in turning collage into culture jamming.

White Lightning
A Modern American Orgasm
My Fellow Americans
Conspiracy
Creeps
Seven Days in May

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.