Al Filreis Blog

A computer-generated Dickinson poem about war

A generous colleague in computer science engineering is letting me play with a program he’s building that has absorbed 5,000 poems and is learning how to make poetry based on prompts. I put in the title “The Machine,” the poet “Emily Dickinson,” the theme “war,” and this is the poem...

The last bottle

When my parents moved from New Jersey to Florida, after many decades living in their modest NJ split-level, I spent a weekend at the old house helping with junk, boxes of giveaways, sorting tools, rare and otherwise old books, and many cases of wine that were being stored in the...

Larry Eigner writes through survivor of the death camp at Chelmno

Larry Eigner’s “Dance.” He’s made a poem that uses language spoken by Simon Srebnik as he revisits Chelmno with Claude Lanzmann (decades after having barely survived that death camp). The Eigner poem is discussed by Michael Davidson in this essay: http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/davidson.html .

Life sentences

Recently the son of a long-time friend of writer Jerre Mangione sent me a typescript he found among his mother’s papers—an unpublished version of Jerre’s “Life Sentences” series. These were single-sentence poem-like things, satires all. Here’s one of them.

Representations of the Holocaust — fall 2021 course

I have taught “Representations of the Holocaust” now for 36 years. This time we gathered together “in the room,” as we like to put it. Yes, in the room, having been kept from such human spaces for nearly three semesters. How could this course have been taught in any other...

Life partners

My mom, the indefatigable Lois Filreis, 91 y.o. & plucky as ever, made the trip on her own from Florida to spend Thanksgiving with us here in Philadelphia. Thanksgiving Day marked five years exactly since my dad, Sam Filreis, died—yes, with us all here that day in my house. Thanksgiving...