As you might know, we at the Kelly Writers House at Penn, six years ago, created an open, free, online course on modern and contemporary U.S. poetry. The next 10-week session of ModPo begins on September 9, 2017. We hope you’ll join us (simply click HERE). We have greatly enjoyed working...
When the ModPo team visited the San Francisco area last fall, Kelly Liu, a local high-school senior, joined us for the webcast in Mountain View and the meet-up/collaborative close reading in San Francisco. Kelly was an avid, active participant/learner/“student” in ModPo. Well, Kelly became very interested in the arts & humanities at Penn,...
Recently we put out a call for ModPo people worldwide who might like to help us voluntarily to translate video subtitles in various languages. The first video in the course—on Emily Dickinson—is now available in French, Chinese, and Arabic. We will be adding Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian and several other...
ModPo people: please go to the ModPo site, click on any video, hover your cursor over the video screen and see options for subtitles in languages other than English. If you want to help us translate more of these into your language, please write us at modpo@writing.upenn.edu .
A few months ago I announced that the ModPo team would be taking our annual “on the road” webcast to London, England, this year. Today we are excited to share more details of this visit. We are very grateful to our London-based partners for providing us spaces to host our...
Here’s something you’ll find in ModPo’s collection of crowdsourced close readings: Raymond Maxwell, Colleen Knight, Anika Lani, and Mark Snyder meet by GoogleHangout to discuss Clark Coolidge’s “Blues for Alice” (in the context of Charlie Parker and more): link to YouTube. (Note that the discussion starts at 5:35.) If you...
Today we are adding new materials to ModPo—on Naomi Replansky’s “On Not Writing.” This, according to Replansky herself (who is 99 years old as of this posting), is the last poem she will ever write, and, as the title suggests, is about that very cessation. The links below will work...
Every once in a while I get the urge to resist some of the many vast generalizations about what “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) are and can be. Twitter is a place for this counterarguing. Search by #MOOCs and find a combination of profit-minded hucksterism, single-minded higher-ed utopianism, and critics...
Poet-performer-teacher Jake Marmer taught a course on modern poetry at a high school in Palo Alto in the fall of 2016. But this time he and his students joined ModPo—and so the poems they read, and also their discussions, were part of a huge interpretive community. He paid close attention...
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.