I had the honor of convening a collaborative close reading with students at Ibn Zohr University in Morocco yesterday. Their teacher, Professor El Habib Louai, is a friend of contemporary poets and poetry teachers and critics—of PoemTalk and ModPo. He has been interested in the collaborative close reading method. Yesterday,...
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.
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...
New to ModPo for fall ’17—a video discussion of Tracie Morris’s “Enclosed,” one of her poems in response to Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.” Tracie Morris herself joined us for this discussion. Here’s the link to the video inside the ModPo site: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/resources/vmyjg — For access to this & all ModPo...
Tracie Morris reads her poem “Enclosed,” written in response to Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” at an event in celebration of poet Billy Joe Harris’s 75th birthday in Brooklyn, NY on March 11, 2017. We are adding this poem to the ModPoPLUS syllabus in the Stein section of chapter 2.3 (week...
ModPo fans and friends will perhaps be happy to know that we have now added Tracie Morris’s response to Stein’s Tender Buttons to the Stein chapter of ModPoPLUS: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/resources/vizXG Click the image for a larger view.
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, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60; 1960: When Art & Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II & Remade the Modern (2021); and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems. His new book is The Classroom & the Crowd: Poetry & the Promise of Digital Community (2025). He has taught a massive open online course, "ModPo," to 315,000 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.