My dad, the late & much-missed Sam Filreis, was young & not world-savvy at the time of WW2 but he enlisted. He absolutely had the temperament of a pacifist (disliked fighting and disagreement, very placid in style, avoided conflict) but he enlisted nevertheless. I honor him for that decision. (In...
“Celebrating poetry and literature at Penn since 1985, Al Filreis, Kelly Family Professor of English, continues to create community at the home for writers he founded in a Locust Walk house a quarter-century ago.” The opening of a profile about me written by Louisa Shepard. HERE is your link to...
On and off for years (early 1970s until mid-80s) I had occasion to pick up various supplies (kitchen paper products, boxes of candles, arts & crafts materials) from the legendary Izzy Zakarin who starting in 1945 ran a huge jumble of a warehouse store called “I. Zakarin & Sons” in...
Paris today (June 2): did much, but two highlights—a long intense visit to the powerful & in some ways heartening “Young Artists of Europe” show at the amazing Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; and a briefer but pleasurable visit to the Picasso Museum, which featured a Picasso/Calder show. Nika Kutateladze...
Monmartre, on a perfectly sunny warm day. (Included a visit to the Salvador Dali Museum where my favorite piece was the chess set Dali made for Duchamp.)
Paris today (June 1), part 2 of 2: an astonishing show at the Musée du quai Branly about Félix Fénéon who was an anarchist and art critic (first identified the neo-Impressionists as such and supported them intellectually, critically & as himself a collector) and also strongly advocated for the inclusion...
Visits to the Shoah Memorial, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Place des Vosges—and, later, with Spanish-Parisian poet Irene Torra Mohendano, to the Le104 public/open art center, Canal de l’Ourcq, and a squatter-style poets’ pop-up where we hung out with Colombia poet Jorge Torres Medina.
Yes, we spent a long day at Versailles. Crazy gilded excess in combo neo-classical and baroque. I took a hundred photos, most of them awful. Here are a few that pretty well convey my overwhelmed response to the experience.
Today in Paris: sunny cool day and a Metro ride to the Musée d’art Moderne da la Ville de Paris, where we were stunned by the beauty of the courtyard, notwithstanding some construction underway in the building. We saw a number of works of Etienne-Martin including a fabulous wire drawing...
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.