ModPo enrollment surpasses 97,000
At ModPo we have surpassed 97,000 people enrolled in our free, open, non-credit poetry course. Yes, it’s free. No charge or fee, explicit or hidden. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo
Category: ModPo
My book featured on “The Page 99 Test”
My new book is featured by “The Page 99 Test.” They ask authors to re-read page 99 of their books and write a short piece about how and why what appears on page 99 represents the whole book and the whole argument. HERE is my effort at fulfilling this interesting...
On “opinionated software”: 3 pages from my new book
Click HERE to read three pages from the final chapter of my new book, The Classroom at the Crowd. In this passage I do some complaining about the way in which AI applied to a humanities online course prejudicially enforces the very sort of language and meaning-making that a course...
Teaching poetry to 150 people “by computer” in 1996
From 1996 through 1998 or so I taught poetry to 150 people, for free, “by computer,” as the phrasing was then. They took the name “Alumverse,” since almost all of them were alumni of the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t my first experience teaching online, but it was my initial...
“The Classroom & the Crowd” is now available for pre-ordering
My new book, The Classroom and the Crowd: Poetry and the Promise of Digital Community, will be published by Columbia University Press just after Thanksgiving 2025. You can pre-order a copy (e-book, hardcover or paperback) HERE. A description: For more than a decade, Al Filreis has taught a free online...
Citizen poetics, the book (in a 15-minute podcast)
I gavethe introductory chapter of my forthcoming book to a machine that makes podcasts from text. The result is not perfectly accurate but does give you a fair, informal sense of what I’m saying in the book. Listen here: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/Crowdsourcing-Poetry-in-online-learning.mp3 Thanks to Charles Bernstein for tipping me off about this...
Gertrude Stein in Morocco
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,...
“Notes toward a pedagogy of ModPo”
Published in the June 2023 issue of Marsh Hawk Press Review — my speculative essay, “Notes toward a Pedagogy of ModPo,” in which I attempt to understand what has been happening in ModPo in the last decade in relation to the idea of learner-centered learning and third spaces. HERE is...
Interview published in ‘Fast Flesh Literary Journal’
A new interview with me about ModPo (conducted by Ann Cefola) has now been published in Fast Flesh Literary Journal, issue #4 (“Conscious”). The interview can be found here: https://www.fastflesh.net/modpo
New essay: “Collaborative Close Reading & Global Conversation”
HERE is a link to a new essay co-written by Anna Strong Safford, Davy Knittle, and me, published in a book of essays, Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom, eds. John Miller and Julie Wilhelm. Our article is titled “Collaborative Close Reading and Global Conversation in the Co-Constitutive Online Classroom.”
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; 
Founder/Faculty Director, 