This spring (along with Lily Applebaum & Anna Strong Safford) I have taught a seminar in which the participants are Philadelphia public school teachers. The students of one teacher are grade schoolers who are multi-lingual (mostly from immigrant families). The curriculum unit she is drafting—to use in her class next...
In a 1960 issue of Kenyon Review I came across a transcript of a conversation moderated by the literary historian of modernism, Jackson Mathews, with Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the famous Parisian modernist bookstore, Shakespeare & Company—haven for expatriate and local avant-gardists. She’s remembering what happened when a Nazi soldier...
Charles Bernstein is back from a trip to Israel & Palestine and we are chatting by email this afternoon (typical of us) and I realized that this overview I did of why I like his “Pitch of Poetry” so much adequately gets to what I love about his anti-anti-intellectual Euromodernist...
On December 5, 2016, Jed Rasula visited the Kelly Writers House to talk about Dada — and in particular about his recent book on the subject. Here, below, is a 6-minute excerpt from that discussion, in which Al Filreis attempts to get Rasula to talk about how anyone could teach...
In this video, Alan Bernheimer responds to questions about his translation of Philippe Soupault’s Lost Profiles: A Memoir of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, which was published in November by City Lights. The book is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by a co-founder of the Surrealist movement. The...
I’m pleased to announce that a Wallace Stevens discussion group has just formed in ModPo—moderated by Sanjeev Naik. Click HERE to go directly to the discussion. If you are not enrolled in ModPo yet (it’s free), click HERE to enroll.
The first time I visited the new Barnes Museum building along Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, I was struck by the strong influence of Louis Kahn on the design, despite the opposite aesthetic entailed in the old Albert Barnes collection itself.
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.