I had the honor of convening a collaborative close reading with students at Ibn Zohr University in Morocco yesterday. Their teacher, Professor El Habib Louai, is a friend of contemporary poets and poetry teachers and critics—of PoemTalk and ModPo. He has been interested in the collaborative close reading method. Yesterday,...
I’m thrilled to have received my copy of Karren Alenier’s new collection of poets’ responses to Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” I was excited by the project when I read it in manuscript (thus my ecstatic blurb). I send out congratulations to Karren—a long-time citizen of ModPo—and all the contributors.
Review of 1960 by Rob Baxter: Al Filreis’s 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, is a compendium of the belated responses of fiction, poetry, history, painting, sculpture, film television and every medium of art and communication to the language defying...
It was an honor to be asked to be part of this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest (which I have listened to since it started in something like 2005). I talked with Steve Metcalf and Dana Stevens about Lawrence Ferlinghetti and we listened to a performance of “Baseball Canto”: https://slate.com/podcasts/culture-gabfest/2021/03/the-woody-allen-scandal-reviewing-allen-v-farrow Enjoy the...
In September 2019 I returned to the Huntington Library, in San Marino, CA, to participate in a conference on the correspondence of Wallace Stevens. I had begun to work in the Stevens archive in 1982. My visits — several extended — to this magnificent archive (with its library, its botanical...
The students of Kenneth Goldsmith’s year-long seminar, “Writing about Contemporary Art,” have made an exact replica of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — well, exact except that their book is titled The Autobiography of Gertrude Stein and all references to Gertrude in the third person have been first...
This is David Slarskey, tweeting all these years later about his experience in English 88, the course on modern and contemporary experimental poetry I’ve been teaching now for 34 years. David took the experimentalism seriously, as you’ll see. This being twitter, you’ll need, of course, to read from bottom to...
This spring (along with Lily Applebaum & Anna Strong Safford) I have taught a seminar in which the participants are Philadelphia public school teachers. The students of one teacher are grade schoolers who are multi-lingual (mostly from immigrant families). The curriculum unit she is drafting—to use in her class next...
I was pleased to publish an essay-review of Joan Richardson’s book How to Live. What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press, 2018), in the January 22, 2019 winter issue of American Literary History. He is a PDF copy of the review.
Students in Kenneth Goldsmith’s yearlong seminar on Duchamp in this video perform their own Infrathins while circled around M.D.’s Glass at the PMA. Here’s the video: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=220704
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, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (2021); and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. His new book is The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community (2025). He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 315,000 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.