Addictive. No sooner have we hung up on us than we want more. Like those hundreds of thousands of Americans who were passionate about poet John Giorno’s cult play at the time, have we become addicted to the hotline that whispers the sweet refrain of the contemporary in our ears? Replayed on the sly and in VF fifty years after its creation in 1968, Dial-a-Poem hands out the microphone to around thirty French artists, poets and authors, young and old. Try it out, dial 09 87 67 54 92 and you will receive a “100 bullet poem” by Sabrina Soyer right in the face; the endless quatrains of Clément Rodzielski; the International chopped fine by Jean-Jacques Lebel or a “basta poem” by the young Mia Brion who, with Tarek Lakhrissi, Claire Finch, Elodie Petit or Josèfa Ntjam, also in the panel of guests, is part of a young scene from the admiring performance poetry of John Giorno, hero of the American counter-culture and inventor of the “sound poems”, which many discovered during the exhibition that his spouse, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, dedicated to him at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015 .
“Nails that scrape a blackboard”
“Alongside Olivier Cadiot or Julien Blaine, natural companions, there was a certain heritage to look for in queer poetry”, assumes the publisher and bookseller Benjamin Thorel who was entrusted by the John Giorno Foundation (created at his death, in 2019) with the delicate operation of reviving this mythical piece, “there exists today in France a confidential but very active scene which works between poetry and contemporary art, artists who support poetic writing in their work and are interested, for example, in the question of inclusivity to make a plastic material out of it.
In his very unbridled memoirs, finally translated into French, John Giorno goes back in detail to the birth of Dial-a-Poem. “Until then the telephone was used for two people to contact each other. From now on, I imagined, it could become a mass media”, Day écrit. “We never did that,” initially warns the New York telephone company. She will nevertheless manage to network ten telephone answering machines on which Giorno and his friends, from Burroughs to Ginsberg via Patti Smith or John Cage, record their moods, record their escapades and put the margins into prose. More than 200 invitations will follow, over the years and exhibitions. “William Burroughs was reading excerpts from Feast no : it was by far the best. John Cage read an excerpt from Silence, which was very entertaining. Allen Ginsberg sang a mantra […] and made artist Laura Benson cringe who thought it looked like “fingernails scraping a blackboard”,” if souvient John Day.
Peaks during coffee breaks
The New York Times is the first to publish an article and especially the phone number: “phenomenal success”, concludes Giorno. From 7 a.m. to 3 a.m. with notable peaks during coffee and lunch breaks, hundreds of thousands of calls are frantically linked and Dial-a-Poem gives reason to the visionary MacLuhan and his famous formula: “The medium is the message.” At a time of noisy virality, it is beautiful, today, to see this outdated and discreet device resurrected, amplifying the multiple voices that make the scrambled waves of the present time sizzle.