Poets and Telephones: A Love Story
And by that, I mean "telephones," not "phones."
If you want to pretend like you’re living in the 20th century, find a land line and call 817-844-6611. It’s one of few remaining time-weather-temperature telephone hotlines in existence. Yes, that’s how people used to find out whether they needed an umbrella before they left the house. It’ll only tell you the highs and lows forecast for the Fort Worth, Texas area, but jeez! It’s hard to resist calling, just for kicks. It launched in 1951. It nearly went offline in 2016, when the bank that’d sponsored it for nearly 70 years decided it was an obsolete service. Haltom’s Jewelers, in downtown Fort Worth, thought otherwise, and currently keeps it up and running. Even in the age of weather apps, people love it. Between 10,000 and 20,000 of them still call the time-weather-temperature line every day.
Time-weather-temperature hotlines are more than 100 years old — originally, you’d get the info from the switchboard operator. It’s curious that a poet didn’t consider using this technology until the late 1960s, when John Giorno launched Dial-a-Poem, a call-in, 24-hours-a-day recorded poetry reading. Many, many people have documented Dial-a-Poem (Giorno’s New York Times obit is a good place to start if you’re not familiar with it).
In its story about Dial-a-Poem’s debut in December of 1969, the Times described “a new service, yoking the genius of the telephone company to the genius of living poets, [which] now makes it possible for anyone with access to a dial to listen to ready-to-roll verse at any hour of the day or night.” Giorno oversaw a bank of six phones, each with a different recording of a different poet (all swapped out each day), inside the offices of the Architectural League of New York, who footed the phone bill. The original phone number, 212-623-0400, is still in use, though now it rings through to a city magazine publisher; you can still hear the poems Giorno curated through more modern means, like UbuWeb and YouTube. But why would you want to do that when the Giorno Foundation still allows you to old-school dial a poem? (The new number is 1-917-994-8949.)
Land-line telephones, because the technology is so simple and clunky, will always feel a bit magical and otherworldly. All we get a disembodied voice, like ghost’s voice. (In fact, a lot of people over the years have claimed they actually did get phone calls from dead people.) The simplicity of it all, and the accessiblity, is what makes it such a compelling platform for poetry, as Giorno discovered.
Not only is Dial-a-Poem still operating, but it’s inspired hundreds of other projects, from Harvard’s Phone-a-Poem (which operated from 1976 to 2001) to new poetry hotlines that now advertise themselves via Instagram stories:
The Bitter Southerner’s “TELE-POEM ☎️ LINE” was created by poet Anis Mojgani. You can dial 503-928-7008 all year, but new poems only get slotted in during April, AKA national poetry month (AKA right now!!). This year’s crop of poets include Maggie Smith, Aimee Nezhukumatathil and lots of other folks — like Giorno, they’re swapping out a new poet every day (which means you still have just shy of a week to call in and listen to new poems).
Poets love writing about telephones (see Francis Ponge’s “L'Appareil du Telephone,” Pedro Pieti’s “Telephone Booth [No. 93 1/2],” and Devin Johnston’s “The Telephone” just for starters). The master of the telephone poem might’ve been Sylvia Plath, whose images of heavy black Bakelite phones still have the power to shock, most memorably in “Words Heard, by Accident, over the Telephone,” her poem about hearing Assia Wevill’s voice for the first time, and realizing that her poet-husband Ted Hughes was cheating on her. That poem is partly what inspired poet David Trinidad to memorize Plath’s English phone numbers (North Tawton 370, North Tawton 447) and to scrub through auction sites looking for the black telephone of the poem.
“Certain that Plath would have appreciated my attention to detail, I had to find out the model of her telephone,” Trinidad writes on the Poetry Foundation website. “It would have been from the 700 series (706, to be exact), available in Britain from 1959 to 1967; ‘subscribers’ rented their phones from the General Post Office and had to wait several months to have them ‘fitted’ by a GPO engineer. Ironically, this interval during which Plath was cut off from the rest of the world helped facilitate her great poetic output: she was stuck in what she called a ‘sack of black,’ writing against ‘blackness and silence.’ Of course once I knew the model, obsessiveness (or should I say fetishism) led me to Ruby Tuesday, a store in Shropshire that sells vintage telephones on eBay. From them I bought (for £65, plus another £30 for postage) an example of the very phone Sylvia angrily ripped from the wall. It sits here on my desk, magical by association, and beautiful (to my mind) in its shiny black obsolescence.”
Technology evolves, but old-fashoned telephones will always stay in the poet’s arsenal as a way to jailbreak poems off the page, I think (though my friend Henry Goldkamp is trying to find every other way of doing that via his TILT project and if anyone can do it, it’s Henry).
Land line phones are more beautiful than cell phones, and more suited to a poet’s constitution. They don’t talk back, don’t spy on you, don’t give up your whereabouts with a tag or a blue dot. And when you want to hide at your desk with a book or a hard-copy poem draft, all you have to do is take the receiver off the cradle and tell the world to leave you alone with the obnoxious, off-putting buzzing of a busy signal.
314-321-2222! It’s not quite the same as it was 50 years ago, but it’s still kicking!
Also, this was an especially fascinating Substack entry! And I still have a landline as my main phone.