Once a radical voice on the rotary dial, American artist and poet John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem is now just a click away. First introduced in 1969, the project invited callers to dial a phone number and hear recorded readings of poems. Now, the phone line has gone global: Audiences can find the project on a newly launched website and localized phone numbers worldwide.
Giorno, who died at 82 in 2019, was a poet and artist who bridged the literary and visual art worlds. Working from downtown New York, he collaborated with artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg while building Giorno Poetry Systems, a foundation committed to expanding the reach of poetry.
Dial-A-Poem premiered at Architectural League of New York in January 1969 and was presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) 1970 exhibition “Information.” Visitors could call a number (originally 212-628-0400) and hear Giorno—or popular figures such as novelist Kathy Acker and musician Patti Smith—recite a poem. That initial version drew FBI attention for its inclusion of politically radical ideas. It received more than 1.1 million calls in four-and-a-half months. Now, the renewed version combines early recordings with contributions from international poets and performers, creating an archive accessible to a global audience.
“When John Giorno first conceived of Dial-A-Poem, he envisioned a new venue for poetry beyond books and magazines, and leveraged emerging answering-machine technology,” Bonnie Whitehouse, archivist for Giorno Poetry Systems, told Artsy. “The Dial-A-Poem website faithfully builds on Giorno’s original concept of encountering randomly selected recorded poems to maintain the spontaneity and serendipity of Dial-A-Poem. By harnessing web-based technology instead of phone lines, Dial-A-Poem can transcend geographical boundaries and increase access.”
In recent years, the project has been reactivated in different forms. In 2012, Giorno recorded new material and created stand-alone rotary telephone sculptures programmed with poems for a MoMA exhibition, “Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language.” However, these were not connected to live numbers. In 2021, Giorno Poetry Systems restored the project’s dial-in service, bringing back the phone-based element for the first time in decades. The number was turned off in 1971, but reactivated several times for various exhibitions.
The current iteration includes five existing live phone lines, including the original and an updated U.S.–based line, as well as numbers in Brazil, Mexico, and France. Giorno Poetry Systems expects numbers to go live in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Italy, and Thailand in 2026.
