In 1995 the local news station decided that the way I was teaching modern poetry was innovative. So they researched and then filmed a story about it all. This was and is English 88, now also known as ModPo. Here is the LINK to the old video (with thanks to...
This is David Slarskey, tweeting all these years later about his experience in English 88, the course on modern and contemporary experimental poetry I’ve been teaching now for 34 years. David took the experimentalism seriously, as you’ll see. This being twitter, you’ll need, of course, to read from bottom to...
We received hundreds of applications again this year’s RealArts@Penn paid summer internships and the RealArts@Penn prize. Below is a list of the students who have been appointed as RealArts@Penn interns for 2019.For more about RealArts@Penn: http://writing.upenn.edu/realartsI want to thank Mingo Reynolds and R.J. Bernocco, Director and Associate Director of RealArts@Penn; and Anthony DeCurtis,...
Chris Mustazza, Orchid Tierney, and Ariel Resnikoff assembled a textual “mixtape” for Charles Bernstein to mark the occasion of retirement from teaching. My contribution is titled “Twenty-Two Bernsteinian Sentences for Charles.” A scan of this piece is here:
Construction has begun on the Arts Cafe here at the Kelly Writers House. The architects are DIGSAU, a team led by Jeff Goldstein and Aaron Jezzi. The contractor is Murphy, Quigley, led by Nick Holz. Acoustics are being handled by Metropolitan Acoustics, led by Seth Harrison. At Penn our project...
In the current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, there’s a good article about ModPo — conveying well, I think, the unusual pedagogy and communal sensibility of our version of the MOOC mode. HERE‘s your link.
A new article in the Omnia features our RealArts internships program. In part because students who cannot otherwise afford to accept unpaid internships (alas, that’s now the norm) are generally shut out from such opportunities, RealArts’ paid internships have been mainly about enabling equal access for talented students who want to explore careers in arts...
The amazing group of people who formed the KWH Fellows Seminar for spring 2017 met for a final time last night—our “final words” session. Here are some photos I took of the gang. Click on any image for a larger view.
I’m grateful to Huda Fakhreddine the gift she made of “Lighthouse for the Drowning,” poems by Jawdat Fakhreddine (her father) as translated by herself and Jayson Iwen. “Now when I meet [this poem] in a book / from time to time, / it beckons to me like a prisoner, /...
Mentor and mentee after mentee’s concert. This sort of creative, generative mutuality has just got to be my favorite part of university life. Congratulations to Hannah Judd as she nears the end of a spectacular undergraduate career & to Max Apple, now amazingly 75, for loving teaching so much still...
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center
for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, and Publisher of Jacket2—all at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Secretaries of the Moon,
Wallace Stevens & the Actual World, Modernism from Left to Right, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. His new book is 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (Columbia University Press, 2021). He is currently writing a book about online pedagogy. He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 265,000 participants in 192 countries since 2012.
Founder/Faculty Director, Kelly Writers House—intro video ][ events calendar
Convener/teacher, “ModPo.” an open online course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry—overview of the course ][ intro video
Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—my Jacket2 commentary series ][ "First Readings"
Producer/host, PoemTalk podcast series—co-sponsored by Kelly Writers House & the Poetry Foundation
Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing—Creative Writing ][ RealArts internships ]
Co-founder & co-director of PennSound—50,000 files ][ 15 million downloads annually
Teacher & host, "Kelly Writers House Fellows"—since 1999 ][ Susan Sontag, John Ashbery, Jamaica Kincaid, Laurie Anderson, Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion, John Edgar Wideman & more
Teacher, "Representations of the Holocaust"—a course on survivor testimony ][ my holocaust site
Click on the image for information about the book.