Alumni Day/DeCurtis celebration: photos
Here are a few photos taken today at our Alumni Day open house and our event celebrating Anthony DeCurtis’s 20 years of teaching.
Al Filreis Blog
Bob Lucid, mentor: photo & 5-minute audio clip
The late Bob Lucid (Bob hired me, mentored me & later secured 3805 Locust Walk as a site for what become the Writers House) spoke in stunning, seemingly aimless periodic sentences. This photo was taken just after I interviewed him as the Writers House turned 10 years old in 2006....
Open Access principles
Sent to me by an avid ModPo participant who cares a good deal about the underlying ideas of teaching and learning that create the collaborative ModPo vibe: from a now-defunct Canadian journal, these tenets. I especially resonate with the idea of a “temporary, collectively held space.”
Blurb for new edition of poets’ responses to Stein’s ‘Tender Buttons’
I’m thrilled to have received my copy of Karren Alenier’s new collection of poets’ responses to Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” I was excited by the project when I read it in manuscript (thus my ecstatic blurb). I send out congratulations to Karren—a long-time citizen of ModPo—and all the contributors.
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
You can be a cruel word: On Fred Wah’s ‘All Americans’
The essay was commissioned by Derek Beaulieu as he prepared to celebrate 25 years of No Press and housepress. I have now received a copy of a book, entitled Paper and Thread, edited by Derek, which includes my essay about Fred Wah along with contributions by Kyle Schlesinger, Charles Bernstein,...
Jeff Martinek (class of 1987)
My brilliant former student (class of 1987) Jeff Martinek has been a professor at Iowa Wesleyan for many years—and recently won a teacher-of-the-year award. A local newspaper covered the commencement speech he gave to the graduating class. He recalled his Penn graduation in Franklin Field. From his speech: “It was...
Al Filreis, “Backs of Quiet Houses: ‘The Fourteenth Confinement’ of Pattie McCarthy’s Sonnet Life” (2022)
I was invited by Rob McLennan to contribute an essay to a festschrift for Pattie McCarthy. I chose to write about her book Wifthing. Here is the essay:
Review of “1960”
Review of 1960 by Rob Baxter: Al Filreis’s 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern, is a compendium of the belated responses of fiction, poetry, history, painting, sculpture, film television and every medium of art and communication to the language defying...
Interview with Jennifer Egan about “The Candy House”
Recording of my interview with Jennifer Egan last night (November 15, 2022). We talked about her terrific new novel, The Candy House. I’m particularly interested (no surprise) in her narrative and formal experiments, beginning with (in the opening minutes) a chapter in which she creates a second-person narration in tweet-length...
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, 
PoemTalk’s crew took to the road, wandering pretty much as far west as one can go on this continent, to a place Philip Whalen called, in a poem’s subtitle, “the last of California” — Bolinas, coastal spot famous as A congenial writer’s retreat. Stephen Ratcliffe, Joanne Kyger, and Julia Bloch gathered there with Al Filreis to talk about Whalen. Our poem was indeed written in Bolinas, in 1968, and finished in Kyoto in 1969. It’s called “Life at Bolinas: The Last of California.” Whalen’s PennSound page includes a recording of his performance of this poem, the final poem he read at an event in Albuquerque in 1987. Click 