Telephone Poems, Now and Then

John Giorno was certainly not the first person to deliver poetry over a telephone. He was, however, the person who made it a really big cultural phenomenon. Just as the artists and writers making immersive language environments (see below) wanted to escape from the heavy legacy of books and pages and explore new spaces and new places for poetry, so too did they use sound itself--live, recorded, whatever.

DC-based poet Buck Downs (yes, that's his real name) is a prolific writer who uses every possible communication system to get his poetry out into the world. He has a long mailing list of people all over the world who receive a monthly poem-postcard. I have been on this list for almost 20 years. And, now he's resuscitating the Dial-a-Poem model of the 1970s. Every day he records one of his brief poems as a voice message (they're almost always under 30 seconds). Call this number and listen to a new poem every day: