Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More (1968)

in Poetry, Technology | January 4th, 2021

Thanks for allow­ing me to be a poet. A noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. —John Giorno, Thanx for Noth­ing

Dial­ing a poem today, I’m con­nect­ed to Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-relat­ed pneu­mo­nia in 1994, read­ing an excerpt of “I Remem­ber.” He stum­bles over some words. It’s excit­ing. There’s a feel­ing of imme­di­a­cy. When the read­ing ends in an old-fash­ioned dial tone, I imme­di­ate­ly think of a half-dozen friends I’d like to call (assum­ing they respond to some­thing that’s not a tag or text).

“Take down this num­ber,” I’d say. “641–793-8122. Don’t ask ques­tions. Just call it. You’ll love it.”

And they prob­a­bly would, though they wouldn’t hear the same record­ing I did.

As Dial-A-Poem’s founder, the late John Giorno, remarked in a 2012 inter­view:

 A per­son asked me the oth­er day: “What hap­pens if I lis­ten to a poem and I want to tell a friend to lis­ten to it?” I told him: “Well, she can’t.” [laughs] That’s the point. What hap­pens is, when things are real­ly suc­cess­ful, you cre­ate desire that is unful­fil­l­able. That’s what makes some­thing work.

Giorno estab­lished Dial-A-Poem in 1968, plac­ing ten land­lines con­nect­ed to reel-to-reel answer­ing machines in a room in New York City’s Archi­tec­tur­al League:

I sort of stum­bled on [the con­cept] by chance… I was talk­ing to some­one on the tele­phone one morn­ing, and it was so bor­ing. I prob­a­bly had a hang­over and was prob­a­bly crash­ing, and I got irri­ta­ble and said to myself at that moment, “Why can’t this be a poem?” That’s how the idea came to me. And we got a quar­ter of a page in The New York Times with the tele­phone num­ber you could dial. 

In its first four-and-a-half months of oper­a­tion, Dial-A-Poem logged 1,112,237 incom­ing calls, includ­ing some from lis­ten­ers over­seas. (The orig­i­nal phone num­ber was 212–628-0400.) The hours of heav­i­est traf­fic sug­gest­ed that a lot of bored office work­ers were sneak­ing a lit­tle poet­ry into their 9‑to‑5 day.

Dial-A-Poem recon­ceived of the tele­phone as a new media device:

Before Dial-A-Poem, the tele­phone was used one-to-one. Dial-A-Poem’s suc­cess gave rise to a Dial-A-Some­thing indus­try: from Dial-A-Joke, Dial-A-Horo­scope, Dial-A-Stock Quo­ta­tion, Dial Sports, to the 900 num­ber pay­ing for a call, to phone sex, and ever more extra­or­di­nary tech­nol­o­gy. Dial-A-Poem, by chance, ush­ered in a new era in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Fea­tured poets includ­ed such heavy hit­ters as William S. Bur­roughs, Pat­ti Smith, Allen Gins­berg, Ted Berri­g­an, Robert Cree­ley, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, and Frank O’Hara (who “only liked you if you wrote like him”).

The con­tent was risqué, polit­i­cal, a direct response to the Viet­nam War, the polit­i­cal cli­mate, and social con­ser­vatism. No one both­ered with rhymes, and inspi­ra­tion was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the goal.

Unlike Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and oth­er career-mind­ed artists who he hung out with (and bed­ded), Giorno nev­er made a secret of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Sex­u­al­ly explic­it and queer con­tent had a home at Dial-a-Poem.

Mean­while, Dial-a-Poem was fea­tured in Junior Scholas­tic Mag­a­zine, and dial­ing in became a home­work assign­ment for many New York City Pub­lic School stu­dents.

Two twelve-year-old boys near­ly scup­pered the project when one of their moth­ers caught them gig­gling over the Jim Car­roll poem, above, and raised a ruckus with the Board of Ed, who in turn put pres­sure on the tele­phone com­pa­ny to dis­con­tin­ue ser­vice. The New York State Coun­cil on the Arts’ lawyers inter­vened, a win for horny mid­dle school­ers… and poet­ry!

For any­one inter­est­ed, an album called You’re A Hook: The 15 Year Anniver­sary Of Dial-A-Poem (1968–1983) was released in 1983. Vinyl copies are still float­ing around.

If you dial 641.793.8122, you can still access record­ings from an archive of poet­ry, notes SFMo­MA.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stream Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Reveals the Best Way to Mem­o­rize Poet­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Did Beethoven Use a Broken Metronome When Composing His String Quartets? Scientists & Musicians Try to Solve the Centuries-Old Mystery

in Music | January 4th, 2021

When it comes to clas­si­cal com­posers, Beethoven was pret­ty met­al. But was he writ­ing some kind of clas­si­cal thrash? Hard­core orches­tra­tions too fast for the aver­age musi­cian to play? 66 out of 135 of Beethoven’s tem­po mark­ings made with his new metronome in the ear­ly 1800s seem “absurd­ly fast and thus pos­si­bly wrong,” researchers write in a recent Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety arti­cle titled “Was Some­thing Wrong with Beethoven’s Metronome?” Indeed, the authors go on, “many if not most of Beethoven’s mark­ings have been ignored by lat­ter day con­duc­tors and record­ing artists” because of their incred­i­ble speed.

Since the late 19th cen­tu­ry and into the age of record­ed music, con­duc­tors have slowed Beethoven’s quar­tets down, so that we have all inter­nal­ized them at a slow­er pace than he pre­sum­ably meant them to be played. “These pieces have through­out the years entered the sub­con­scious of pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians, ama­teurs and audi­ences, and the tra­di­tion,” writes the Beethoven Project, “hand­ed down by the great quar­tets of yes­ter­year.” Slow­er tem­pos have “become a norm against which all sub­se­quent per­for­mances are judged.”

Eybler Quar­tet vio­list Patrick Jor­dan found out just how deeply musi­cians and audi­ences have inter­nal­ized slow­er tem­pi when he became inter­est­ed in play­ing and record­ing at Beethoven’s indi­cat­ed speeds in the mid-80s. “Find­ing a group of peo­ple who were pre­pared to actu­al­ly take [Beethoven’s metronome marks] seriously—that was a 30-year wait,” he tells CBC. “A huge amount of our labour required that we un-learn those things; that we get notions of what we’ve heard record­ed and played in con­certs many times out of our heads and try to put in what Beethoven, at least at some point in his life, believed and thought high­ly enough to make a note of and pub­lish.”

But did he? The sub­ject of Beethoven’s metronome has been a source of con­tro­ver­sy for some time. A few his­to­ri­ans have the­o­rized that the inven­tor of the metronome, Johann Nepo­muk Mälzel, “some­thing of a mechan­i­cal wiz­ard,” Smith­son­ian writes, and also some­thing of a dis­rep­utable char­ac­ter, sab­o­taged the device he pre­sent­ed to the com­pos­er in 1815 as a peace offer­ing after he sued Beethoven for the rights to a com­po­si­tion. (Mälzel actu­al­ly stole the metronome’s design from a Dutch mechan­ic named Diet­rich Winkel.) But most musi­col­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans have dis­missed the the­o­ry of delib­er­ate trick­ery.

Still, the prob­lem of too-fast tem­pi per­sists. “The lit­er­a­ture on the sub­ject is enor­mous,” admit the authors of the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety study. Their research sug­gests that Beethoven’s metronome was sim­ply bro­ken and he didn’t notice. Like­wise data sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­dad Car­los III de Madrid have the­o­rized that the com­pos­er, one of the very first to use the device, mis­read the machine, a case of musi­cal mis­pri­sion in his reac­tion against what he called in 1817 “these non­sen­si­cal terms alle­gro, andante, ada­gio, presto….”

The­o­rists may find the tem­pi hard to believe, but the Toron­to-based Eybler Quar­tet was unde­terred by their skep­ti­cism. “I don’t think there’s any evi­dence to sug­gest that the mech­a­nism itself was [faulty],” says Jor­dan, “and we know from [Beethoven’s] cor­re­spon­dence and con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous accounts that he was very con­cerned that his metronome stay in good work­ing order and he had it recal­i­brat­ed fre­quent­ly so it was accu­rate.” Jor­dan instead cred­its the pun­ish­ing speeds to Romanticism’s pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­al­ism, and to the fact that “Beethoven was not always so very nice.” Maybe, instead of sooth­ing his audi­ences, he want­ed to shock them and set their hearts rac­ing.

Who are we to believe? Ques­tions of tem­po can be fraught in clas­si­cal cir­cles (wit­ness the reac­tions to Glenn Gould’s absurd­ly slow ver­sions of Bach.) The metronome was sup­posed to solve prob­lems of rhyth­mic impre­ci­sion. Instead, at least in Beethoven’s case, it rein­scribed them in com­po­si­tions that bold­ly chal­lenge ideas of what a clas­si­cal quar­tet is sup­posed to sound like, which makes me think he knew exact­ly what he was doing.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores of Beethoven’s 16 String Quar­tets: An Ear­ly Cel­e­bra­tion of the 250th Anniver­sary of His Birth

How Did Beethoven Com­pose His 9th Sym­pho­ny After He Went Com­plete­ly Deaf?

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2021: The Great Gatsby & Mrs. Dalloway, Music by Irving Berlin & Duke Ellington, Comedies by Buster Keaton, and More

in Film, Literature, Music | January 1st, 2021

“The year 1925 was a gold­en moment in lit­er­ary his­to­ry,” writes the BBC’s Jane Cia­bat­tari. “Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by were all pub­lished that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans, John Dos Pas­sos’ Man­hat­tan Trans­fer, Theodore Dreiser’s An Amer­i­can Tragedy and Sin­clair Lewis’s Arrow­smith, among oth­ers.” In that year, adds Direc­tor of Duke’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, “the styl­is­tic inno­va­tions pro­duced by books such as Gats­by, or The Tri­al, or Mrs. Dal­loway marked a change in both the tone and the sub­stance of our lit­er­ary cul­ture, a broad­en­ing of the range of pos­si­bil­i­ties avail­able to writ­ers.”

In the year 2021, no mat­ter what area of cul­ture we inhab­it, we now find our own range of pos­si­bil­i­ties broad­ened. Works from 1925 have entered the pub­lic domain in the Unit­ed States, and Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s post rounds up more than a few notable exam­ples. These include, in addi­tion to the afore­men­tioned titles, books like W. Som­er­set Maugh­am’s The Paint­ed Veil and Etsu Ina­ga­ki Sug­i­mo­to’s A Daugh­ter of the Samu­rai; films like The Fresh­man and Go West, by silent-com­e­dy mas­ters Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton; and music like Irv­ing Berlin’s “Always” and sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Duke Elling­ton, includ­ing “Jig Walk” and “With You.”

These works’ pub­lic-domain sta­tus means that, among many oth­er ben­e­fits to all of us, the Inter­net Archive can eas­i­ly add them to its online library. In addi­tion, writes Jenk­ins, “HathiTrust will make tens of thou­sands of titles from 1925 avail­able in its dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ry. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of show­ing only snip­pet views or autho­rized pre­views. Com­mu­ni­ty the­aters can screen the films. Youth orches­tras can afford to pub­licly per­form, or rearrange, the music.” And the cre­ators of today “can legal­ly build on the past — reimag­in­ing the books, mak­ing them into films, adapt­ing the songs.”

Does any new­ly pub­lic-domained work of 2021 hold out as obvi­ous a promise in that regard as Fitzger­ald’s great Amer­i­can nov­el? Any of us can now make The Great Gats­by “into a film, or opera, or musi­cal,” retell it “from the per­spec­tive of Myr­tle or Jor­dan, or make pre­quels and sequels,” writes Jenk­ins. “In fact, nov­el­ist Michael Far­ris Smith is slat­ed to release Nick, a Gats­by pre­quel telling the sto­ry of Nick Carraway’s life before he moves to West Egg, on Jan­u­ary 5, 2021.” What­ev­er results, it will fur­ther prove what Cia­bat­tari calls the “con­tin­u­ing res­o­nance” of not just Jay Gats­by but all the oth­er major char­ac­ters cre­at­ed by the nov­el­ists of 1925, inhab­i­tants as well as embod­i­ments of a “trans­for­ma­tive time” who are “still enthralling gen­er­a­tions of new read­ers” — and writ­ers, or for that mat­ter, cre­ators of all kinds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (Which F. Scott Fitzger­ald Hat­ed)

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

31 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Antonio Gramsci Writes a Column, “I Hate New Year’s Day” (January 1, 1916)

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | January 1st, 2021

I want every morn­ing to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reck­on with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my paus­es myself, when I feel drunk with the inten­si­ty of life and I want to plunge into ani­mal­i­ty to draw from it new vigour.

“Every­day is like Sun­day,” sang the singer of our mopey ado­les­cence, “In the sea­side town that they for­got to bomb.” Some­how I could feel the grey malaise of post-indus­tri­al Britain waft across the ocean when I heard these words… the drea­ry same­ness of the days, the desire for a con­fla­gra­tion to wipe it all away….

The call for total anni­hi­la­tion is not the sole province of supervil­lains and heads of state. It is the same desire Andrew Mar­vell wrote of cen­turies ear­li­er in “The Gar­den.” The mind, he observed, “with­draws into its hap­pi­ness” and cre­ates “Far oth­er worlds, and oth­er seas; Anni­hi­lat­ing all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.”

Is not anni­hi­la­tion what we seek each year on New Year’s Eve? To col­lec­tive­ly wipe away the bad past by fiat, with fire­works? To wel­come a bet­ter future in the morn­ing, because an arbi­trary record keep­ing sys­tem put in place before Mar­vell was born tells us we can? The prob­lem with this, argued Ital­ian Marx­ist par­ty poop­er and the­o­rist Anto­nio Gram­sci, is the prob­lem with dates in gen­er­al. We don’t get to sched­ule our apoc­a­lypses.

On Jan­u­ary 1st, 1916, Gram­sci pub­lished a col­umn titled “I Hate New Year’s Day” in the Ital­ian Social­ist Party’s offi­cial paper Avan­ti!, which he began co-edit­ing that year.

Every morn­ing, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s day.

That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed matu­ri­ties, which turn life and human spir­it into a com­mer­cial con­cern with its neat final bal­ance, its out­stand­ing amounts, its bud­get for the new man­age­ment. They make us lose the con­ti­nu­ity of life and spir­it. You end up seri­ous­ly think­ing that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new his­to­ry is begin­ning; you make res­o­lu­tions, and you regret your irres­o­lu­tion, and so on, and so forth. This is gen­er­al­ly what’s wrong with dates.

The dates we keep, he says, are forms of “spir­i­tu­al time-serv­ing” imposed on us from with­out by “our sil­ly ances­tors.” They have become “inva­sive and fos­siliz­ing,” forc­ing life into repeat­ing series of “manda­to­ry col­lec­tive rhythms” and forced vaca­tions. But that is not how life should work, accord­ing to Gram­sci.

Whether or not we find mer­it in his cranky pro­nounce­ments, or in his desire for social­ism to “hurl into the trash all of these dates with have no res­o­nance in our spir­it,” we can all take one thing away from Gram­sci’s cri­tique of dates, and maybe make anoth­er res­o­lu­tion today: to make every morn­ing New Year’s, to reck­on with and renew our­selves dai­ly, no mat­ter what the cal­en­dar tells us to do. Read a full trans­la­tion of Gram­sci’s col­umn at View­point Mag­a­zine.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Woody Guthrie’s Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions From 1943

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Go-Get­ter List of New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1955)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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