Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language

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  • Introduction
  • Contemporary Works
  • Historical Works
  • Selected Projects
    • Tauba Auerbach
    • Paulina Olowska
    • Nora Schultz
  • Dial-a-Poem
  • Sound Works
    • Henri Chopin
    • Paul Elliman
    • Karl Holmqvist
    • Kurt Schwitters
  • Other Resources
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  • Publication
    • This Language Is Ecstatic Because
    • Exhibition Catalogue Trailer
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    • The Serving Library
  • Exhibition Views
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Dial-a-Poem

John Giorno. Dial-a-Poem. 1970

John Giorno (American, b. 1936). Dial-a-Poem. 1970. Installation view in the exhibition Information, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July–September 1970. © MoMA, NY. Photo: James Mathews

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In 1969, in response to a request to participate in an exhibition at the Architectural League in New York, Giorno (a poet, artist, and activist) devised this work. Among the first telephonic artworks, Dial-a-Poem allowed the public to access an archive of recordings of work by contemporary poets; by calling a local telephone number, participants could hear a well-known poet like John Ashbery or Allen Ginsberg recite a short poem selected at random by a primitive answering machine system. A year later, Giorno created an expanded version of the work for Information, an exhibition of Conceptual art at The Museum of Modern Art. The Museum provided four phone lines through which to access the work, and it was estimated that, by the close of the show, a quarter of a million people had called in to hear a poem. Giorno extended Dial-a-Poem into the 1970s and 1980s, producing five LP records under the label John Giorno Poetry Systems that include works by established poets like Ashbery and young artists and musicians such as John Cage, Patti Smith, and David Byrne. This current version of Dial-a-Poem includes the 30 original poets featured in Information, plus 50 culled from Giorno’s subsequent recordings.