Poetic greetings
There was a time when you could pick up the telephone, dial a number, and hear Allen Ginsberg reading one of his poems. Another day it might have been Denise Levertov, or Donald Hall, or James Tate. For 25 years, Cambridge-based “Phone-a-Poem” provided a vehicle for poetry through the telephone and answering machine, still a technological wonder when the service was started in 1976. An exhibition at Lamont Library’s Woodberry Poetry Room presents 20 recordings from the “Phone-a-Poem” archives, which are now digitized and housed at Harvard. The exhibition also includes 15 recently commissioned “answering machine poems” by such poets as Charles Bernstein, Forrest Gander, and Anne Waldman. Soundbytes: Phone-a-Poem “What interested me was the intersection of these two technologies: poetry and the telephone, both of which rely on the voice and on silence, on interpretation and timing, to get their messages across,” said Christina Davis, curator of the Woodberry Poetry...