It’s an annual thing with us—a long Xmas day and evening walk around Manhattan. These time we specialized in the Lower East Side, Chinatown and the East Village. Here is a selection of photos from the day. Click on any image for a larger view.
Took a dawn walk this Sunday morning to see what the snow that fell all day yesterday—10 hours or so of flurries—would look like from behind the camera’s lens. Here are a few of the dawn shots. One is indoors, as you can see: our miraculous “Christmas” cactus, which came...
My dad—Sam Filreis—passed away suddenly on Thanksgiving a year ago. In 2007 he and I went on a river cruise up the Rhone in southern France, and brought back 4 bottles of a perfect Beaujolais, purchased after spending a happy afternoon drinking with the proprietors of a backcountry vineyard. When...
It was a cold, cold weekend. But lovely in Greenwich Village just the same. Took a few pix. Click on any image for a larger view and a permanent URL.
On Wednesday (November 8th) the artist and photographer-poet Erica Baum—whose work we encounter in week 10 of our course, next week—will be spending the day visiting us at the Kelly Writers House. We are all very excited about Erica’s visit. Anyone ModPo’er anywhere in the world can join us for...
A family wedding in Gloucester, Mass. — perfect early-November weather and lots of occasions for running along the seawalls. We also drove up to Rockport and hiked out to the quarry in Halibut State Park. Click on any photo for a larger view and a permanent URL.
Some late-August photos of my favorite place in the world: a Catskills mountain valley formed by the Neversink River and two streams (Biscuit Creek and Pigeon Brook)—Frost Valley, whose lowest elevation is 1,900 feet above sea level. Click on any image for a larger view.
I had a half hour to kill while waiting for Jane to arrive on the 6:11 PM Amtrak coming from Penn Station to Rhinecliff Station along the Hudson, so I walked around and took in the scenes. I love the Hudson Valley and this odd old riverside station is one...
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.
