Dial-a-Poem Documentary BBC4

Brian Patten, one of the original Liverpool poets, explores how radical, subversive and occasionally risqué poetry - rooted in the counter-culture of the late 1960s - became available to a mass audience at the end of a phone line for the first time. 

In this radio documentary I speak about the role Giorno Poetry Systems played in my formative years and how we can today critically relate Dial-a-Poem to so much of the media ecology we have around us. Right click on the image and save link to hear an archived version of the production.

Dial-a-Poem changed the public face of poetry for generations.

Producer: Llinos Jones
A Terrier production for BBC Radio 4.

Dial-A-Poem Poets: Radicalizing space with the telephone

John Giorno with the  Dial-a-Poem telephone set up in 1969

“One day a New York mother saw her 12-year-old son with two friends listening to the telephone and giggling. She grabbed the phone from them and what she heard freaked her out. This was when Dial-A-Poem was at The Architectural League of New York with worldwide media coverage, and Junior Scholastic Magazine had just done an article and listening to Dial-A-Poem was homework in New York City Public Schools.” - John Giorno, August 1972

“Every faggot hiding in bar/political prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner” - Diana De Prima, Revolutionary Letter No. 49

Dial a Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author.

Millions called. "The busiest time was 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone," wrote John Giorno, the founder of Dial-A-Poem. "The second busiest time was 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. ... then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep, 2 a.m. to 6 a.m" (New York Times).

Comparisons with current information systems are obvious. With Dial-a-Poem a network was established that created a space for experiencing language. Along with this experience of language came a lot of assumptions about culture, often related to gender, sexuality, class, generation and political affiliation. Giorno and his associates (William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsburg, Diana De Prima, Clark Coolidge, Taylor Mead, Bobby Seale, Anne Waldman and Jim Carroll) created a radical space that anyone with a telephone could access.

Burroughs in his dry cackle describes an old Mexican assassin "with eyes the color of a faded gray flannel suit." Diane di Prima talks calmly about the proper use of knives and Molotov cocktails. Clark Coolidge drags out every four-letter word he can think of: taps, buns, keys, cans, arms. Taylor Mead sputters like a motorcycle. Bobby Seale charismatically hates white people, while people cheer. Ms. Waldman singsongs about her sagging spirit at age 26. Jim Carroll coolly reports how he took off his shirt, then his pants, for his coach, when he was 12, to try on a new uniform. "He told me it fit perfectly over my body" (New York Times).

The space created by sound is a space of potential dissidence. This began a long time ago. The audio of song, music, poet breaks up official space, monumental space, and gives time to the carnival or the revolution. This is why we have noise ordinances in urban spaces. To break through the wall of an apartment building with music is to reclaim space for the purposes of joy. The experiments of William S Burroughs came to similar conclusions:

“Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble that to stop it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon. You'll observe that the operators are making a cutup as they go. They are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent Ohio with the present sound effects at random and that is a cutup.” - The Electronic Revolution (http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/burroughs.html)

Space is communicative in media according to how it can be “tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (Lefebvre 33). In the design of digital narrative works on the World Wide Web similar relationships between signifying elements in space, such as emphasized structures, repeated components and specific perspectives, make up this communication. In this sense the signs and codes that operate in space form a symbolic order in the digital works. The reading subject can only approach the works according to these codes, which compose “the locus of communication by means of signs, as the locus of separation and the milieu of prohibitions” (Lefebvre 134-135). The interpretive responses to these signs inevitably call upon a separation, an interpretive distance and as a result a set of prohibitions, between the reader and the work. With Dial-a-Poem the radical space of the poet has admitted you the listener for the duration of the telephone call. [1]

Prohibitions are encoded into representational space. Thomas Nolden clarifies this further:

For Lefebvre, ‘frontal relations’ of production codify power relations, for example, in the form of buildings or public monuments: ‘Such frontal (and hence brutal) expressions of these relations do not completely crowd out their more clandestine or underground aspects; all power must have its accomplices – and its police’ (33) (Nolden 128).

This is representational space, which Lefebvre defines “as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’. [...] Thus representational spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 39). Similar representational space exists in digitally mediated narrative as “non-verbal symbols and signs”, which evoke “not ‘stories’ but suggestive markings” and “trigger reactions in players in order to help them to create their own interpretations” (Nitsche 44). These ‘suggestive markings’ I equate with the dry rattle of Bill Burroughs' voice as he speaks of hipster junky life in Mexico in the 1950s, the excited chant of Ginsberg, and the echo of De Prima as she tells you where you are; “Every faggot hiding in bar/political prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner”. You are in the same prison she is in, and that which connects you both is the telephone and the voice you hear holding it to your ear. Like the visiting rooms in prison they show in the movies on TV, but only now you are there holding the phone and listening.

Works Cited

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 2007.

Nolden, Thomas. “On Colonial Spaces and Bodies: Hans Grimm’s Geschichten und Südwestafrika.” The Imperialist Imagination: German colonialism and its legacy. Ed. Sara Friedrichsmeyer. Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998. 125-141. Print.

NOTE: On Saturday 26 June 2013 at 20:00 GMT I speak in a BBC4 Radio documentary on the Dial a Poem poets along with,

Brian Patten, one of the original Liverpool poets, explores how radical, subversive and occasionally risqué poetry - rooted in the counter-culture of the late 1960s - became available to a mass audience at the end of a phone line for the first time.

I also understand the great biographer and friend of Burroughs and Gysin, Barry Miles is included in the program. You can tune in online here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ 

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[1] Interpretation, linguistic or spatial, always includes the possibility of misreading. Interpretation is structured toward multiplicity and the digital works are no different. I do not need to account for my readings as preeminently ‘correct’, merely demonstrate how narrative can be read and how the digital works attempt to guide this reading.

The Year of Internet Radio is Here

I love internet radio. Being an expatriot person I rely on global media for information and entertainment, art and education. So, I was pleased to see this article today;

After years of being out there and talked about, but not much more, internet radio may finally go from an interesting idea to a stand-alone commercial medium.

And that promise is pretty grand in the view of some analysts. "In 2009, internet radio may not just reinvigorate the medium of radio. It may reinvent it,” predicts Deloitte, the consulting outfit.

What will allow that to happen is what spawned internet radio in the first place: technology that untethers internet radio from the computer, making it far more portable. Enter the WiFi radio set, which uses wireless technology to access the internet and play internet radio stations and podcasts.

WiFi radio offers features not available through traditional radio, such as allowing users to search electronic programming guides, and in time the devices will offer DVR features as well. Media Life Magazine

To accompany the idea that 2009 is the year that Net Radio breaks out of the mass of stupid broadcatsing rules and local media monopolies that restrict it in some parts of the world, here are my six top Net Radio stations at the moment:

1. WFMU
Hard to choose the best, in my mind it is between WFMU and number two. WFMU is a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station based in Jersey City, New Jersey, broadcasting at 91.1 MHz FM using a freeform radio format (and on the net). It is currently the longest running free-form radio station in the United States

2. Resonance FM
Excellent broadcaster of arts, ideas, music, sound and opinions. Resonance 104.4 FM is a London based non-profit community radio station run by the London Musicians' Collective (LMC), with a licence to cover "practising artists and engaged consumers and persons standing outside mainstream media". The coverage area is designated as a 5km radius from the transmitter in London Bridge. The station is based on Borough High Street, having completed a move from Denmark Street in September 2007.

3. SR Radio Välrden
Swedish net radio playing global music; mostly African, Middle Eastern and South American with a little Asian sounds. It is the soundtrack to my thesis writing. Almost no chat so it speaks the langauge of the world; Music!

4. 2SER
The dark underbelly of Sydney when I lived there in the 1990s has become more mainstream, but still inovative and creative. 2SER (which stands for Sydney Educational Radio) had its origins in the burgeoning community broadcasting movement of the early 1970’s when it was proposed that an educational radio station be established based on a consortium of Sydney universities. 2SER made its broadcasting debut on October 1, 1979, with the support of many hundreds of groups and individuals.

Today, 2SER operates as a company limited by guarantee and is jointly owned by Macquarie University and the University of Technology, Sydney. Both institutions contribute an annual grant to 2SER, however the station is largely self-supporting, relying upon revenue raised through programming, sponsorship, fund-raising events and listener subscriptions.

2SER holds a community broadcasting license with a special interest defined as educational broadcasting. Through its programs, and the making of programs, 2SER aims to stimulate learning and educate its listeners and is committed to social change, access and diversity.

3RRR
3RRR (pronounced "Three Triple R", or simply "Triple R") is a popular Australian community radio station, based in Melbourne. It is the largest per capita subscribed radio station in the world.

3RRR first commenced broadcasting in 1976 from the studios of 3ST, the student radio station of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (now RMIT University), on an educational licence with the name 3RMT. In 1979 it relocated to Fitzroy, and adopted its present name. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, it became synonymous with the post punk and new wave subcultures. It has developed a devoted listener base, many of whom donate their time or money to keep the station going; either as volunteers or through the annual "Radiothon". In late 2004 supporters raised enough money for the station to purchase and move into new premises on the corner of Blyth and Nicholson Streets in Brunswick East after the 20 year lease on their previous studios, in Victoria St., Fitzroy, expired.

3RRR's mission statement was defined in 1990 as "To educate, inform and entertain by drawing upon appropriate community resources. To develop a critical approach to contemporary culture." Triple R's programming is split roughly 70% specialist music and 30% talk-based shows. Hosts have complete autonomy over content and the station does not have playlists. As such, the nature of 3RRR broadcasts vary wildly depending on time of week. 3RRR is funded entirely by community sponsorships and public subscribers (currently around 12,000), which, by removing standard commercial pressures, allows this diverse programming.

6. Radio Patapoe 88.3 FM Amsterdam
When I lived in the Dam it was Radio 100 that all the interesting people listened to. Alas Radio 100 went under in 2004. But Radio Patapoe lives on. At once stage the squat I lived in housed the transmitter for Patapoe but one day the police came and took it away, so we built another :-)

I wish Radio 4ZZZ in Brisbane had a Net broadcast, truly a great station but one I have not listened to for years.

The Free University of the Airwaves

Online and On Resonance FM:

Monday 18 August to Friday 22 August 2008, daily from 10am to 3pm (GMT), repeated nightly 7pm to midnight.

Resonance FM announces a “summer school on the radio” for a week during the holidays. Designed to appeal to the general listener, this series of lectures ranges restlessly across many subjects. The Free University allows listeners to dip into a vast range of material, a snapshot of contemporary thought and provocative and intriguing subject matter.

The Free University is certainly that. Historian Ariel Hessayon (Goldsmiths) speaks on two subjects: about Jews in England from their expulsion in 1290 to their readmission in 1659; and “Restoring the Garden of Eden in England’s Green and Pleasant Land,” which takes a new view of the seventeenth century Diggers. There is more visionary stuff from Plymouth’s Professor Malcolm Miles, who specialises in concepts of Utopia, while at the other end of the scale Mark Miodownik of King’s College’s Materials Library takes us through an elemental reading of the making of a cup of coffee – illustrated in robust fashion in the station’s kitchen. Oneupmanship not intended, Professor Steven Connor (Birkbeck) talks about The History of Air; and, refreshing beverages sorted, ethnographer Caroline Osella asks, How do you make a man?

There is a strong anthropological strand, with contributions from Monica Janowski (Potency, Hierarchy and Food in Borneo), Magnus Marsden (Muslim village intellectuals) and Edward Simpson (Remembering natural disasters and memorials in Gujurat); while Alpa Shah asks, Would Yosemite be a better place for the Elephants of Eastern India? Only Resonance FM can provide the answer.

Influential professor of design Peter Rea offers various insights into Visual Literacy, illustrated with audio from Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and the rural blues of the 1930s; Dr.Julian Stallabrass talks about visual representations of war; Professor Jean Seaton has recourse to George Orwell’s enduring relevance; and Roberta Mock asks what constitutes avant-garde performance.

Philosophers AC Grayling and Jonathan Wolff, cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, “new complexity” composer Richard Barrett, folk music specialist Professor Reg Hall and Christine Kinnon, Professor of Molecular Immunology at UCL, are among others of the two dozen contributors to this extraordinary project.

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