ModPo starts 9/7/17 – an invitation and introduction

I’m writing you briefly this morning from the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia, PA, USA, to say hello, and welcome you (or welcome you back) to ModPo, our course on—and community gathered around—modern and contemporary U.S. poetry.

I will be writing again in the coming days. Please forgive the flurry of pre-course messages!

If you are receiving this message, you are properly enrolled in our course. Even though our discussions, and our movement through the nine “chapters” (sections) of the course won’t officially begin until Saturday, September 9, you now have complete access to everything in the ModPo site. Please explore. Just go here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/home/welcome

—and have a look around.

Be sure to click on “Resources” in the left-side menu. Click on all the links there, and you’ll learn a lot about what ModPo is and what ModPo people do.

If you have questions, you can contact us at modpo@writing.upenn.edu.

For those of you who are returning to ModPo—and/or who have been enrolled since at least a year ago—I urge you to consider “doing” the 10-week course again with us during the September-through-November 2017 intensive mode. You will find that there are new poems and new video discussions added to our supplemental/parallel syllabus, ModPoPLUS.

If you are doing ModPo for a second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth (!) time, I invite you to take the course through ModPoPLUS, through the TRC (Teacher Resource Center) and/or through CCCR (our crowdsourced close readings syllabus). There’s PLENTY for you to do that will be new and fresh for you. Not to mention: you’ll be able to talk with a new community of first-time ModPo’ers.

More from me again later. Meantime, once again, I want to say hello and welcome to a poetic community that has made my intellectual, aesthetic and personal life (yes) better and deeper these past six years.

Yours poetically,

—Al

P.S. Please, please tell your friends, colleagues, family, students and co-workers about ModPo. Forward this message to them. Give them this web address

https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo

—where they can enroll. ModPo is free (no cost whatever, no hidden costs, no pricetag at all) and open to all and a very friendly place for people who know poetry but also those who are true novices.