Poem mentions me as “interlocutor-host”
Ian Morrisson sent me a chapbook of poems. It is in part a response to my essay on paraphonotextuality published a few years ago in AModern. Among Ian’s poems I found this one!
Category: poetics
Video: discussion with Matvei Yankelevich about his new book “Dead Winter”
Matvei Yankelevich, Ahmad Almallah, Kevin Platt & I discussed Matvei’s marvelous new book of poems, “Dead Winter.” Ahmad’s students joined us and toward the end got wonderfully involved in the conversation.
A computer-generated Dickinson poem about war
A generous colleague in computer science engineering is letting me play with a program he’s building that has absorbed 5,000 poems and is learning how to make poetry based on prompts. I put in the title “The Machine,” the poet “Emily Dickinson,” the theme “war,” and this is the poem...
Grzegorz Wroblewski: new translations from Polish
From a new selection of English translations of Grzegorz Wroblewski’s poems (originally of course written in Polish): https://www.mercurius.one/home/ticks-from-hareskov-a-selection-of-grzegorz-wrblewskis-poetry
Essay-memoir on the archive as a “fate of re-reading”
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...
My publisher’s note to the student-made “Autobiography of Gertrude Stein”
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...
Al Filreis, “Citizen Poetics”
I have published an essay titled “Citizen Poetics” in a special issue (on poetry networks) of College Literature, volume 47, number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 259-281. Click HERE to read a PDF copy of the essay.
My four favorite PennSound poem recordings for January 2020
My favorite recordings of poems for January 2020 — from the PennSound archive: Claudia Rankine, “A Thing” Charles Olson, “Letter 14” Ted Pearson, “Hard Science” Wallace Stevens, “The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain”
1995 local news story on my modern poetry course
In 1995 the local news station decided that the way I was teaching modern poetry was innovative. So they researched and then filmed a story about it all. This was and is English 88, now also known as ModPo. Here is the LINK to the old video (with thanks to...
Nelly Sachs: three poems
I’m including a sampling of three poems by Nelly Sachs in my course on representations of the holocaust. Here is a link to a PDF copy of these three: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/holocaust/Sachs-Nelly_selected-poems.pdf
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 
Founder/Faculty Director, 