The kind of Charles Bernstein I want
I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection of responses to Bernstein’s new book, The Kind of Poetry I Want. And here is the essay as now published: HERE in Boundary2 magazine.
Al Filreis Blog
Three cheers for wide learning, non-disciplinary focus, creative experimentation
I couldn’t resist sharing the results, published in Science, of a recent study that shows that in adults “world-class performance” is associated with limited discipline-specific practice, with increased multidiscilplinary practice, and with “gradual” progress when people are students. The study is a boost for those of us who believe in wide rather than...
My book featured on “The Page 99 Test”
My new book is featured by “The Page 99 Test.” They ask authors to re-read page 99 of their books and write a short piece about how and why what appears on page 99 represents the whole book and the whole argument. HERE is my effort at fulfilling this interesting...
Audiobook: listen to the introductory chapter of “The Classroom & the Crowd”
I have made an audio recording of the introductory chapter of my new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community (Columbia University Press, 2025). Listen to the audio HERE.
Terrence Des Pres, “Lessons of the Holocaust” (1976)
After teaching his then-new course on “Literature of the Holocaust” at Colgate University, Terrence Des Pres published an op-ed essay in the New York Times. It is reproduced below here but also is viewable online HERE.
On “opinionated software”: 3 pages from my new book
Click HERE to read three pages from the final chapter of my new book, The Classroom at the Crowd. In this passage I do some complaining about the way in which AI applied to a humanities online course prejudicially enforces the very sort of language and meaning-making that a course...
Teaching poetry to 150 people “by computer” in 1996
From 1996 through 1998 or so I taught poetry to 150 people, for free, “by computer,” as the phrasing was then. They took the name “Alumverse,” since almost all of them were alumni of the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t my first experience teaching online, but it was my initial...
“The Classroom & the Crowd” is now available for pre-ordering
My new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, will be published by Columbia University Press just after Thanksgiving 2025. You can pre-order a copy (e-book, hardcover or paperback) HERE. A description: For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online...
Poem about the Writers House
Bob Perelman is soon sending his new manuscript of poems to Roof Books and shared with me this poem, to be included in the new book, about the Writers House in response to WCW’s “Spring and All.” *** AL AND ALL for Al Filreis By the path to the...
Citizen poetics, the book (in a 15-minute podcast)
I gavethe introductory chapter of my forthcoming book to a machine that makes podcasts from text. The result is not perfectly accurate but does give you a fair, informal sense of what I’m saying in the book. Listen here: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/Crowdsourcing-Poetry-in-online-learning.mp3 Thanks to Charles Bernstein for tipping me off about this...
KWH/CPCW win “Draw Down the Lightning” grant
Here is an article about a new grant. At an energizing reception held at the University Meeting and Guest House, members of the 12 winning teams of the inaugural Draw Down the Lightning grants broke bread while sharing ideas, celebrating successes, and thinking about the challenges ahead—literally embodying the collaborative...
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 
Founder/Faculty Director, 
PoemTalk’s crew took to the road, wandering pretty much as far west as one can go on this continent, to a place Philip Whalen called, in a poem’s subtitle, “the last of California” — Bolinas, coastal spot famous as A congenial writer’s retreat. Stephen Ratcliffe, Joanne Kyger, and Julia Bloch gathered there with Al Filreis to talk about Whalen. Our poem was indeed written in Bolinas, in 1968, and finished in Kyoto in 1969. It’s called “Life at Bolinas: The Last of California.” Whalen’s PennSound page includes a recording of his performance of this poem, the final poem he read at an event in Albuquerque in 1987. Click 