492-POEM | Quotidian Poetry
Commentary for Boston Review on the 12th anniversary of Phone-A-Poem

Emily Hiestand, January 1998, slightly updated in 2024

Dial 492-POEM and a poet will speak into your ear — 24 hours a day. You may hear the voice of August Wilson reading his chilling poem about a modern highwayman, or Marge Piercy's buoyant voice wrapping around urgent syllables. You might encounter John Updike, Rosellen Brown, May Sarton, Mel King, or a schoolchild. Some 50,000 times a year, people dial Phone-A-Poem in Cambridge for the daily "dose of poetry" that founder Peter Payack had in mind in 1976 when he introduced the youthful telephone to its distinguished elder, poetry. 

Being able to call 492-POEM  for a dose of poetry puts poems on a footing with other information retrieved 24 hours a day from the phone — basic information like weather reports, the time, movie listings, arrivals of birds, and stock prices. The inherent claim of Phone-A-Poem, even before one hears a dactyl over deregulated wires, is that poetry is an essential part of daily life. To appreciate how startling a claim that is, consider the world into which this service arrived.

Despite a home and devoted practitioners in the academies, poetry has become somewhat marginal to daily American life, a curious circumstance for one of the most enduring arts. The usual explanation is that modernist poets wrote "difficult" poetry, poetry that departed from earlier conventions of rhyme, narrative logic, and familiar syntax, and moreover wrote it as a classical education was becoming less common. It was further said that the engagement between poet and audience has remained distant as fewer people are reading any kind of literature.  

These explanations are true enough as far as they go, but the troubled climate for poetry in America also reflects something about contemporary Western habits of mind. One of the main faculties needed to apprehend poetry is the imagination. Poets rely on reason, but also find the imagination to be a reliable probe for exploring the world, nature, and human nature. However, since the 17th century Cartesian revolution in thought, a shift has occurred in what is considered reliable knowledge. The kind of imagination that regularly informs poetry has become more and more suspect until "imagination" has almost come to mean “imaginary.” Although the remarkable ability to envision and embark on self-forgetful journeys allows artists and scientists alike to make meaningful discoveries, the analytical and quantifying capacities of reason have come to dominate ideas about the Western mind. 

In the Spring 1981 issue of The Georgia Review, Christopher Clausen writes: "We might make a rough and ready distinction between two kinds of knowing for which there are unfortunately no separate words in English and say that while science is "savoir" — factual and theoretical knowledge about the world, subject to the most formal kinds of verifications — poetry is "connaitre," simultaneously the most intimate acquaintance with human experience and its most acute interpretation. It would be rash for an individual or a civilization to dispense willingly with either. Not only are they complementary; at the fringes they become hard to distinguish."

A discussion of the conditions for poetry in America should be mindful of this workhorse definition of neurosis: in a given circumstance, the neurotic thing to do is to long for what is not, while the healthy thing is to gauge what advantages are presented by the present circumstance. Let us allow that the marginality of poetry in America offers benefits: benign neglect allows relative political safety, and one recalls that the price of relevance can be the very highest price in countries where poetry is recognized by governments as a powerful act.  The marginal status of poetry in America shields its practitioners equally from influence and from persecution. Additionally, an art form that offers little worldly success engenders a kind of purist guild ethic among its practitioners; few choose poetry as a road to riches. And, the craft creates a community, a microcosm with the pleasures of family that Ingemar Bergman meant in “Fanny and Alexander,” when he tenderly called the theatre, "the little world."   

And yet. We know that in other lands poets are so beloved that people flock to football stadium-size arenas to hear their readings. We hear that in the Caribbean nations, there are poets of the plazas — village poets who mingle politics, literature, news, song, and gossip. The plaza on St. Lucia was the first venue for the poems of Derek Walcott, who would receive the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1992. Nicaragua proudly continues the tradition of the statesman-poet; the current president is a poet, as are many members of his cabinet. The situation in the US is far different, which is one of the reasons it is a pleasure to salute Phone-A-Poem on its 12th anniversary of assuming poetry is a daily necessity in America.

Adventurous chemistry is also implicit in a medium that pairs poetry and telephones. If the word "poetry" activates in the mind's eye a contemplative afternoon, a riverbank, the pleasures of considered thought and distilled language, the word "telephone" is a symbol of a relentless flow of data in a hyperactive culture. But it is the very nature of poetry to create clearings for new language, and new thought. The work that poets perform with language is a generous labor, similar to research scientists who struggle to isolate an enzyme that, for the moment, has no application, but may eventually will enable a cure for progressive blindness. This characteristic of poetic language is well preserved by Phone-A-Poem; the poems have the effect of refreshing the telephone medium itself. The special-case quality of poetic language makes a modest oasis in the vast thicket that is our phone system, and our minds. In this, it is like a meditation that enables an different order of information to come along the "twisted pairs" still in use on most of our system.  (Co-axial is coming.)   

But if poetry alters the phone, the phone also colors poetry. So what you think of poetry on the telephone may depend on what you think of the telephone. For those who find the telephone an inviting format, the closeness of the poet's voice (right in your ear!) will be intimate. Those who like the telephone's distance and control will enjoy the ability to call and hang up at will. People who find the voice, when disembodied, less animated, will likely prefer live readings with flesh-and-blood poets. Others, who love the visual architecture of words on the page, will want the traditional presentation of poems in books.

Nevertheless, one plus for Phone-A-Poem is that in poetry the "voice" has special significance. We say, "finding one's voice" to mean becoming authentic, the liaison of linguistic and personal identity. It is so routine a phrase that poets are often referred to as voices — e.g. "a major new voice," "a voice of redemption." It’s only a light jump from this custom to imagine the poetry community as a flock of disembodied voices, hovering over earth.

Phone-A-Poem doesn't intend to be a literary magazine, or even a reading series. And, unpredictability and brevity can be virtues. But perhaps one minor suggestion from a longtime fan will be useful. Phone-A-Poem succeeds as a clearing in the world, but the recorded talk before and after each poem is often as long as the poem itself, and at the end has the effect of stepping on the ending of the poem itself. Perhaps the editors could find a way to let the poem itself have the last word. 

Warmest wishes for a Happy Anniversary!  

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Phone-A-Poem was a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based poetry hotline that ran for 25 years, from1976-2001. The popular service ended only when the internet made it redundant.