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.”
HERE is a link to a new essay co-written by Anna Strong Safford, Davy Knittle, and me, published in a book of essays, Teaching Literature in the Online Classroom, eds. John Miller and Julie Wilhelm. Our article is titled “Collaborative Close Reading and Global Conversation in the Co-Constitutive Online Classroom.”
Lisa Yau was a participant in a seminar for Philadelphia teachers I taught a few years ago. I’m excited & proud of what she has done with the project she undertook in our poetry seminar. https://theteachersinstitute.org/2022/05/02/teacher-artist-and-students-convert-a-south-philly-wall-into-an-expression-of-culture-and-belonging/
I am thrilled to announce that the recipient of the Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching for 2020-21 is Ron Silliman, who has taught creative writing seminars brilliantly for many years by now. The award, endowed by the Beltran family, is given each year, through a process of student nominations,...
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...
In 1995 the local news station decided that the way I was teaching modern poetry was innovative. So they researched and then filmed a story about it all. This was and is English 88, now also known as ModPo. Here is the LINK to the old video (with thanks to...
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...
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...
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...
Tomorrow I’ll be watching Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah for the 22nd time. It’s 9.5 hours long. People sometimes watch the film in two sittings. In a way, we dont have time to schedule two different viewing days. But, more, the film’s power is one of a kind of mesmerization. Watching...
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.