Al Filreis
Room in a mind-saving farmhouse @ $32.50/month
After a just-okay first year at college—Colgate University in Hamilton NY—I felt complexly disaffected from on-campus/near-campus social and intellectual life. I found some friends who felt similarly and a group of us went to see a farmhouse seven miles off campus (near the tiny village of Lebanon). A summer-only house,...
New article in “Tablet” about Charles Bernstein
An article published in Tablet magazine about Charles Bernstein mentions PennSound, Jacket2, and the Kelly Writers House—and Penn: But my bond with Charles also formed around the University of Pennsylvania. I told him I had graduated from Penn in 1991, where I’d studied early American lit with Dr. Elisa New, which was...
“Writing a Life” with cancer patients—a collaboration since 2014
I am honored to be part of our collaboration with Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center—founded in 2014, it’s called “Writing a Life”—through which oncology patients are encouraged to write about their lives of health and illness. Here is a short history of the program: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/writershouse/Writing-a-Life-History-April-2021%20.pdf
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. He is currently writing a book on the art & avant-garde of 1960. He has taught a massive open online course, "
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 