In Praise of Difficult Language: Poetry’s Art-World Revival

In 1969, inspired by the spirit of the age, poet and artist John Giorno rigged together six rotary phones and a bank of answering machines to launch Dial-A-Poem. Anyone could call the free 212 number and hear not a sales pitch or political spiel, but a poem by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara or Anne Waldman, among others. The project – equal parts conceptual art and consciousness-raising campaign – positioned poetry as an antidote to the nullifying effects of mass media. Within five months and after more than a million calls, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) included Dial-A-Poem in its landmark 1970 conceptual art survey, ‘Information’.

Half a century later, a Dial-A-Poem website and a series of international museum partnerships – from M+ in Hong Kong to Coleção Moraes-Barbosa in Brazil – are reviving the visionary project, making the now 282 recorded poems accessible to listeners everywhere. Call or visit the website today, and you too can hear Diane di Prima read ‘Revolutionary Letter 7’ (1968), decrying gun violence, or Helen Adams’s raucous recital of ‘Cheerless Junkie Song’ (1977). The project’s bid to liberate artistic expression and decouple it from corporate patronage networks reveals a tension that has marked artistic production for centuries.

This revival joins a broader resurgence of poetry within contemporary art. At MoMA, Sasha Stiles’s installation, ‘Living Poem’ (2025–26), a collaboration between the poet and her bespoke language model, extends the dialogue into the algorithmic era. At the Los Angeles County Museum, ‘Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics’ (2024–25) foregrounded original works by poets writing in the Pan-African tradition alongside visual artists. Recent years have seen a number of prominent artist-poet collaborations, too. Some are between contemporaries: Jeffrey Gibson borrowed both language and geometric forms from Layli Long Soldier’s poems for his Venice Biennale pavilion (2024) and subsequent exhibition at the Broad (2025), while at 52 Walker, Lotus L. Kang describes her greenhouse sculptures in ‘Already’ (2025) as ‘material translations’ of poems by Kim Hyesoon.

Others bridge eras, as in Rashid Johnson’s engagement with Amiri Baraka’s writings in ‘A Poem for Deep Thinkers’ (2025–26) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where poetry is both a conceptual underpinning and material object: volumes by Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks and Claudia Rankine, among others, fill the shelves of his hybrid paintings and installations. Poetry, he explained, is a ‘vehicle for the exploration of critical concerns’ and ‘a mode that acts as a mirror for all other mediums’.

Poetry is reappearing not as mere metaphor or ornament; in form and practice, it opposes means of resistance against the corruption of language, the commodification of culture and the erosion of shared belief. ‘If prose is a house,’ said poet and classicist Anne Carson in a 2016 interview with The Guardian, ‘Then poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.’ That poetry can still burn down the house is no small part of its appeal.

The monopolization of communication confronted by Giorno in the original Dial-A-Poem has only intensified. Public discourse is now largely mediated by corporations, politicians and algorithms selling products and propaganda. Memes and viral posts overwhelm us in what T.S. Eliot described in ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936) as being ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’; apathy takes the place of political engagement. Optimized for mass consumption, much of this language lacks nuance and complexity, favouring absolutes that reduce human experience to sound bites and data sets.      

Poetry, by contrast, slows down our metabolization of language, reintroducing ambiguity and contradiction. Who has not had to read a Bernadette Mayer poem twice, only to have its meaning shift each time? Poetry estranges the familiar and revitalizes language’s capacity to reorient us – part of its allure for Rashid Johnson. In a Vanity Fair interview, he described being drawn to Amiri Baraka’s ‘A Poem for Deep Thinkers’ (1977) for its ‘challenge to our times’ in which the ‘Sky People’, artists and intellectuals, are called to eschew mindless consumption and use ‘all the skills all the spills and thrills that we conjure … to create life as beautiful as we thought it could be.’

Where prose has been hollowed out by the systems that exploit it, so too has culture. In an art world increasingly structured by the speculative logic of fairs, biennials and attention engineering, artists are acutely aware of how their practices – from process to presentation – are mediated by market forces. Poetry, within this landscape, offers an alternative model. Unlike a painting or sculpture, a poem costs almost nothing to write or read – remaining the most democratic of art forms. In Solange Pessoa’s Bags – Aspen Version (2023–25) her poems are displayed in plain burlap sacks, along with humble materials such as soil, dried plants, seeds and animal bones. Viewers are invited to dig through the bags, finding beauty and meaning in contents untethered from explicit exchange value.

Beneath these linguistic and economic upsets lies a yet deeper one: the erosion of shared beliefs, spurred by waning trust in organized religion and public institutions. Artists, like the rest of us, are searching for ways of relating to the self and the world without depending on the structures that drive social and ecological degradation. Poetry admits readers and writers into a tradition that dates back millennia. The use of mellifluous verse to thin the partition separating us from that which is not us transcends geography and creed. Kang, when reflecting on Hyesoon’s lyrical memorialization of national tragedies and intimate traumas alike, contends that ‘poetry feels like a more accurate historical document in the way that it embodies.’ Her decision to integrate contemporary and historical Korean verse into her work was ‘a way of understanding my own origins’.

In these sustained encounters between the imagined and the real, poetry renews art’s spiritual function. In Giorno’s elaborately re-wired phone bank, he reimagined an archetypal appliance of mid-century as something playfully, irreducibly human. As artists again take up poetry – drawn to its friction, intimacy and ineffability – they remind us that language itself can still be a site of agency. If the last century made art in the image of capital, perhaps this one will again make it a language – not to sell, but to make anew.

_{Main image: Solange Pesso, Bags – Aspen Version (detail), 1994–2025, installation view. Courtesy: Aspen Art Museum; photograph: Paul Salveson}