Below is the text of a message I have sent to all ModPo people through the ModPo site. If you don’t currently have access to the site, please simply enroll or re-enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo Greetings from Philadelphia, and from the quaint 1851 cottage called “the Kelly Writers House”! Spring has finally...
English 589 – Modern & Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Poetics & Pedagogy Fall 2018 — Mondays 3-6 PM Arts Café, Kelly Writers House This survey of experimental modern and contemporary U.S. poetry will be taught collaboratively,* and its primary mode will be interactive and iterative. This will be simultaneously a course...
NEW IN THE WEEK 3 ModPoPLUS SYLLABUS: read Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife”: LINK TO TEXT watch discussion of Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife”: LINK TO VIDEO [OFFSITE COPY] read Joseph Massey’s “Polar Low”: LINK TO TEXT watch discussion with Joseph Massey about “Polar Low”: LINK TO VIDEO [OFFSITE COPY] read...
We are now in week 3 of ModPo ’17! We are now in week 3 of ModPo ’17. Here we turn to “chapter 2,” the rise of modernism. As usual, we strongly recommend the following process: (1) read a poem, (2) watch a video of us discussing the poem, (3)...
New to ModPo for fall ’17—a video discussion of Tracie Morris’s “Enclosed,” one of her poems in response to Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” Tracie Morris herself joined us for this discussion. Here’s the link to the video inside the ModPo site: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/resources/vmyjg — For access to this & all ModPo...
Excerpts from my interview with Jerome Rothenberg. (Thanks to Tyler Burke, who did the editing.) Jerome Rothenberg was selected as one of the Kelly Writers House’s 2008 Fellows. After meeting in class with students who had been studying his work for a third of their semester, he attended two programs...
In a 1960 issue of Kenyon Review I came across a transcript of a conversation moderated by the literary historian of modernism, Jackson Mathews, with Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the famous Parisian modernist bookstore, Shakespeare & Company—haven for expatriate and local avant-gardists. She’s remembering what happened when a Nazi soldier...
Charles Bernstein is back from a trip to Israel & Palestine and we are chatting by email this afternoon (typical of us) and I realized that this overview I did of why I like his “Pitch of Poetry” so much adequately gets to what I love about his anti-anti-intellectual Euromodernist...
We went to the Jewish Museum to see the marvelous exhibit of contemporary art & poetry made in response to — and/or influenced by — Walter Benjamin’s remarkable Arcades Project. The show was partly curated by Kenneth Goldsmith, who arranged collaged texts and quotations to accompany each element of the...
When I teach my course on representations of the holocaust, I don’t lecture (for what it’s worth, it’s an ethical stance for me—but that’s for another comment sometime) and I rarely if ever record our sessions. As can be imagined—since, as I say, these are discussions, not lectures—the sessions are intense...
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.