Members of the Filreis family (all of them doomed to die later in the ghetto or to be gassed at Treblinka) gathered in a Warsaw graveyard, near family members’ plots, during my grandfather Ben’s brief visit back to Poland (in part to persuade family members to emigrate to Brooklyn—he did...
Soon after its release in 1985, Claude Lanzmann was asked by a film-world colleague about the title he had given his collage-like 9.5-hour modernist documentary. Here is what he said.
After a just-okay first year at college—Colgate University in Hamilton NY—I felt complexly disaffected from on-campus/near-campus social and intellectual life. I found some friends who felt similarly and a group of us went to see a farmhouse seven miles off campus (near the tiny village of Lebanon). A summer-only house,...
I sang this song as a kind of encore at the end of the summer of 1985 — accompanied by Ken Abbott on his fabulous loosely strung electric guitar and Mike McNamee, who usually sang a third above me but this time took his alto down low. It’s Dylan’s “I...
Leon Bass. I knew Leon a little bit (he lived in the Philly area) & he once came to speak to the students in my course on the holocaust & survivor testimony. He was a liberator of Buchenwald and the experience was both traumatic and charted a course through a...
I ask Hilton Als about his remarkable essay “It Will Soon Be Here,” a reflection on traumatic memory and the figure of the wall that keeps us from direct access to it. (This is a 9-minute clip from an hour-long conversation that took place on March 30, 2021.) LINK TO...
An article published in Tablet magazine about Charles Bernstein mentions PennSound, Jacket2, and the Kelly Writers House—and Penn: But my bond with Charles also formed around the University of Pennsylvania. I told him I had graduated from Penn in 1991, where I’d studied early American lit with Dr. Elisa New, which was...
I am honored to be part of our collaboration with Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center—founded in 2014, it’s called “Writing a Life”—through which oncology patients are encouraged to write about their lives of health and illness. Here is a short history of the program: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/writershouse/Writing-a-Life-History-April-2021%20.pdf
I published a memorial comment on Paul Kelly in the March 15, 2021, issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian. It has been issued as a guest column and can be found HERE.
I am often asked to recommend my five favorite episodes of PoemTalk. I mean, there have been 158 of them since 2007, so naming five is a tall order. I’ve loved many of them. Found dozens of them so powerful—such a moving experience, even in the middle of my scrambling...
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
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Cecilia Vicuna gets ready to perform at the Kelly Writers House, February 2017. Click on the image for a larger view.
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 HERE to read program notes and LISTEN TO THE SHOW.
ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems!
Click HERE to enroll.
Even though we are currently in our offseason ("SloPo"), you are welcome to enroll now. You will have access to the entire ModPo site. Explore; meet some ModPo'ers who are conversing in the site year-round; read poems and watch videos. Then join us again when the intense "symposium mode" starts up again in September.
Yes, the next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 9, 2017, and will conclude on November 20, 2017. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 9 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team at modpo@writing.upenn.edu.
During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups.
If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end.
ModPo LINKS:
enroll [free]: LINK
Facebook group: LINK
Twitter feed: LINK
intro video: LINK
YouTube videos: LINK
