A note for poets & teachers about ModPo 2017

The free, open, non-credit course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry hosted by the Kelly Writers House—known as “ModPo”—will begin its sixth year on Saturday, September 9.

ModPo is designed as a 10-week course, but it also serves (all year, always open) resource site and also as a community for discussion. We would be delighted and honored to have you join us. To be part of ModPo you need not “take” the course per se, nor read more than a selection of the poems. The discussion forums are open to anyone, regardless of whether they are moving through the course in sequence.

For more information, and for the link to enroll:  http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/modpo/#listserv

The ModPo site includes its Teachers’ Resource Center (TRC)—a syllabus parallel to the main syllabus featuring resources and also video discussions on how one might teach the poems, one by one. ModPo’s TRC is a collaboration of Kelly Writers House and Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking and is coordinated by erica kaufman (and has been co-created by Jake Marmer, Julia Bloch, Kristen Gallagher and Max McKenna).

ModPo’s main syllabus is designed to be managed by reader-participants in 5 to 10 hours per week. But there is another parallel syllabus—called ModPoPLUS—which follows the main syllabus but adds many related poems and an abundance of videos featuring discussions of those poems. Many poets join ModPo to move through ModPoPLUS.

People from 190 countries worldwide have enrolled in ModPo. Some poets and teachers have joined for the purpose of being in contact with the extraordinary linguistic and cultural range of people discussing the poems in the forums.

ModPo hosts weekly live interactive webcasts at various times each Wednesday. These originate from the Kelly Writers House, except for one we’ll host live from London in early October.

Please contact us at modpo@writing.upenn.edu if you have questions about participating. If you enroll now, you will have access to the ModPo site continously; even beyond the 10 weeks between September and mid-November when we are in our “symposium” (quasi-synchronous) mode.