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98.
Dial-A-Poem.
Original promotional card announcing the first installation of John Giorno’s multi-media poetry experiment Dial-A-Poem at the Architectural League of New York (January 1969). 12x16.2cm.
Design by Les Levine in fuschia and mauve to one side; verso prints information on the event (“6 Poets Simultaneously Over 6 Lines Changed Daily”), and a list of the 13 poets and writers who participated: Bill Berkson; William Burroughs; Allen Ginsberg; John Giorno; David Henderson; Taylor Mead; Ron Padgett; John Perreault; Ed Sanders; Peter Schjeldahl; Anne Waldman; Lewis Warsh; and Emmett Williams.
Giorno first conceptualised a free telephone hotline in New York City following a phone conversation with William Burroughs, envisioning it as a McLuhanesque ‘global village’ created by electronic systems of communication. Newsweek (March 3, 1969) reported that “more than 360,000 people called Dial-A-Poem in its first six weeks, thus satisfying Giorno’s desire to short-circuit the dreary routine of conventional poetry readings and use technology to make poetry universally available”. The project’s popularity quickly spawned imitators, among them Dial-A-Joke, Dial-A-Santa Claus, Dial-A-Horoscope and Dial-A-Stock Quotation, and within six months it had a section of its own in the New York telephone directory.
The installation moved to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in November 1969, and its third installation, at MoMA in July 1970, was investigated by the FBI and shut down following complaints over the involvement of countercultural radicals, among them Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman and Bernardine Dohrn, each of whom read statements (the press dubbed it “Dial-A-Revolutionary”).
Faint coffee ring stain to one side, o/w Very Good.
