This segment of Dial-A-Poem features American poet and performance artist John Giorno musing with co-producers and interviewers Charles Ruas and Linda Perry over the pragmatic-yet-existential dilemmas faced by poets (a poem just doesn’t sell like a painting), and also tells why he hasn’t read any poetry lately and why he’s friends more with artists than with poets.

Giorno has compiled a playlist of poems from a varied and radical group of poets: Edwin Denby (reading The Shoulder, Over Manhattan Island, Disorder Mental Strikes Me, and Suppose There's a Cranky Woman Inside Me), Helen Adam (reading Cheerless Junky Song), Diane DiPrima (reading Ave), John Cage (reading Moreau), Denise Levertov (reading Life at War), Kenneth Koch (reading Spring), John Ashbery (reading A Blessing in Disguise), and Charles Stein reading one of his Seed Poems. This program is courtesy of thePacifica Radio Archives.

Historic Audio from the Archives of Charles Ruas is produced by Clocktower Radio and broadcast in partnership with Wave Farm's WGXC 90.7-FM. Writes Clocktower Radio, "A unparalleled collection of recovered and restored programs from the seventies produced by Charles Ruas for WBAI-FM, New York's Pacifica station. It features reading, lectures, and performances by such cultural and literary icons as Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Anaïs Nin, William Boroughs, Buckminster Fuller, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Luis Borges, among numerous others.

Ruas is the author of Conversations with American Writers, a Fulbright scholar, and a distinguished French translator. He is also a contributor to ARTNews and Art in America. This series is produced in partnership with Charles Ruas, The Pacifica Radio Archives, The Yale Beinecke Library, The Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, and numerous restorers, archivists and collectors."