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Oregon’s poetry hotline is back in service.
Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani has relaunched the Tele-Poem Telephone Line for National Poetry Month. Now through the end of April, you can call 503-928-7008 and hear Mojgani and other Oregon poets reading their work. There will be a different poem featured each day.
The Tele-Poem line debuted in 2022, also in April, two years after Mojgani came up with the idea while on a stroll. It was the early, grim days of the pandemic, and Mojgani was trying to think of ways to connect the community with his art form during a time of isolation. He ended up envisioning a phone booth, where anyone could pick up the receiver and listen to a poem.
That concept morphed into the hotline, which ended up becoming a hit. In the first week alone, it racked up about 1,000 calls from 12 different states, Canada and Mexico.
“When we did the poetry telephone line last year, there was such a delight in people’s response to it that I was really excited to hopefully bring it back around this year too,” Mojgani stated in a press release. “What I love about the project is that it supplies to us something uncertain and unknown—we don’t know what we will receive when we call this number—but in this case the uncertainty is not anything that we have to fear, which I think is lovely and needed, to be reminded that the unknown can also be a deliverer of goodness in our lives.”
Mojgani, the state’s 10th poet laureate, has invited several poets from around Oregon to contribute recordings, including Paulann Petersen, Stephanie Adams-Santos and Kim Stafford. And if you’d like to experience even more of Mojgani’s work, his sixth book, The Tigers, They Let Me, should be hitting store shelves this June.
Related: There’s a Poetry Hotline You Can Call at Any Time of Day to Hear Beautiful Words Recited