From 1969 until 1971, you could pickup your phone and “hear one of a dozen recorded poems by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard, Anne Waldman, John Cage or who knows who. The next day there’s a fresh dozen. Some are dirty. Some are radical. A lot are about guns. Some really aren’t poems at all but songs or rants or sermons.” Now, as Sarah Boxer explains in a New York Times story, Dial-A-Poem is back — sort of. Founder John Giorno has placed the recordings from the project—along with considerable supplemental material—on the web at the UbuWeb site. Asks Boxer, “Was this what Mr. Giorno intended when he created Dial-A-Poem? He would like to think so. He credits Dial-A-Poem with inspiring “dial-for-stock-market-info and dial-for-sports-info services, the explosion of 1-900 telephone promotions, not to mention the delivery of the Internet over phone lines.”