Rolf Potts returned to the Writers House recently and, after leading a public program he and I went into the Wexler Studio to record an episode of his fine podcast series, “Deviate.” It was a long interview. Even after some editing, it’s still 93 minutes long. You can listen to...
Below is the text of a message I have sent to all ModPo people through the ModPo site. If you don’t currently have access to the site, please simply enroll or re-enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo Greetings from Philadelphia, and from the quaint 1851 cottage called “the Kelly Writers House”! Spring has finally...
English 589 – Modern & Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Poetics & Pedagogy Fall 2018 — Mondays 3-6 PM Arts Café, Kelly Writers House This survey of experimental modern and contemporary U.S. poetry will be taught collaboratively,* and its primary mode will be interactive and iterative. This will be simultaneously a course...
Jake Marmer’s mini-course on Anne Waldman One of our “SloPo”-season discussion sessions continues and today enters its final week. This is the mini-course on the poetry of Anne Waldman led by Jake Marmer. Join Jake and the group by going HERE! If you want to see all the SloPo (our nickname...
On Friday, March 2, starting at 6 PM, Al Filreis will be hosting a ModPo meet-up at Openhouse in San Francisco (located at 55 Laguna Street). We will do collaborative close readings of two short poems. If you would like to join Al and others at this gathering—and possibly for a SF outing afterwards—please...
This morning we filmed a new ModPo video at the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California—on a poem by Whitman about walking along the beach. (Of course Whitman’s stroll was at night, and it was the Atlantic rather than the Pacific, but oh well.) Zach Carduner did the filming. Molly...
It’s that time of year. For counting blessings & discerning why we’re grateful. The ModPo team, based here at the Kelly Writers House, makes ModPo (ever expanding, ever further elaborating) available to you as truly a labor of love. Can you tell? We just love doing this, and reaching out...
There are currently FIVE SloPo (or off-season) mini-courses organized and scheduled. Below is a list. The discussions will all, of course, taken place in the ModPo discussion forums. Look under the forum called “SloPo” and then look to the right at the list of subforums there. If you want to see what this...
The annual “symposium mode” of ModPo ends on November 20th (this coming Monday) with our “Final Words” webcast starting at 10:30 AM Philadelphia time. ModPo is unusual among MOOCs* for many reasons. One is that we are always open. All the poems and videos and other materials are available all...
This week in ModPo hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people are trying their hand at making poems by using our Mesostomatic. You take a poem or any text (e.g. a newspaper article) and “write through” it via the Mesostomatic by providing a spine word or phrase. Zlil used “DREAM” as...
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
Click on the image for information about the book.