As poets and publishers have taken advantage of technological advances to present poetry in a variety of new media, from podcasts to video poetry produced for the small screen, one writers organization is looking back to the telephone to spread the word. Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia recently launched 6-POEM, which offers callers a reading of a poem by a celebrated writer from the PennSound archives. The phone number is 215-746-POEM (7636).
Today's callers can hear a recording, from April 10, 2000, of Robert Creeley, once a Kelly Writers House fellow, reading his poem "Thinking." A poem by a student reader affiliated with the Writers House is also featured. The recordings will be updated frequently, according to the organization's Web site.
The dial-a-poem concept dates back to 1969, when poet and performance artist John Giorno and his organization Giorno Poetry Systems set up a call-in recorded poetry project with ten phone lines in New York City. "Using an existing communications system," Giorno wrote in an introduction to a collection of featured dial-a-poem recordings, now available online, "we established a new poet-audience relationship."
According to Al Filreis, one of the Kelly Writers House founders and the director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at Penn, comments on 6-POEM have been positive. "The responses I've received so far typically say, 'Geez, this is so retro it's cool,'" Filreis wrote on his blog, "and 'Everything seems to be converging on the phone,' and 'Telephony rocks.'"
For those looking for a higher-tech poetry experience, the Kelly Writers House also posts podcasts of readings and PennSound houses its extensive archives online.
