It’s that time of year. For counting blessings & discerning why we’re grateful. The ModPo team, based here at the Kelly Writers House, makes ModPo (ever expanding, ever further elaborating) available to you as truly a labor of love. Can you tell? We just love doing this, and reaching out...
There are currently FIVE SloPo (or off-season) mini-courses organized and scheduled. Below is a list. The discussions will all, of course, taken place in the ModPo discussion forums. Look under the forum called “SloPo” and then look to the right at the list of subforums there. If you want to see what this...
The annual “symposium mode” of ModPo ends on November 20th (this coming Monday) with our “Final Words” webcast starting at 10:30 AM Philadelphia time. ModPo is unusual among MOOCs* for many reasons. One is that we are always open. All the poems and videos and other materials are available all...
This week in ModPo hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people are trying their hand at making poems by using our Mesostomatic. You take a poem or any text (e.g. a newspaper article) and “write through” it via the Mesostomatic by providing a spine word or phrase. Zlil used “DREAM” as...
On Wednesday (November 8th) the artist and photographer-poet Erica Baum—whose work we encounter in week 10 of our course, next week—will be spending the day visiting us at the Kelly Writers House. We are all very excited about Erica’s visit. Anyone ModPo’er anywhere in the world can join us for...
Here, below, are a number of poems and videos recently added to the ModPoPLUS syllabus for week 5: watch teachers discuss Lechlitner’s “Lines for an Abortionist’s Office”: LINK TO TRC VIDEO watch discussion of institutional religion & abortion rights in Lechlitner’s “Lines”: LINK TO VIDEO [OFFSITE COPY] read Naomi Replansky’s...
Some members of the ModPo team spent nearly a week in London. We hosted a live webcast at Queen Mary University of London on Thursday, October 5th, and a meet-up on Saturday, October 7th at Birkbeck University of London, where with a group of 35 ModPo people who came from...
Tonight we hosted a ModPo live webcast at Kelly Writers House — on the week 3 syllabus: a selection of imagist poems and a few imagist-ish poems by William Carlos Williams. Here are some photos.
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...
Recently we have added to ModPo (the free open course on modern poetry) materials pertaining to Caroline Bergvall’s “Say Parsley.” Here are the links: read Caroline Bergvall’s “Say Parsley” from her book Fig: LINK TO TEXT & IMAGES watch Bergvall’s video of “Say Parsley”: LINK TO VIDEO (9 mins.) read...
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.