Nine Poets Read Themselves through Modernism - Digital recordings of this three-night event, part of the Modernist Studies Association Conference, "New Modernisms II," in which nine contemporary poets read their work through the influence of modernist writers. Each recording contains a brief introduction by Al Filreis, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. Thursday, October 12, 9:30 PM Lyn Hejinian / Gertrude Stein Ron Silliman / William Carlos Williams Joan Retallack / Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cage Friday, October 13, 9:30 PM Charles Bernstein / Walter Benjamin Rachel Blau DuPlessis / Virginia Woolf Erica Hunt / Samuel Beckett & James Baldwin Saturday, October 14, 9:30 PM Jena Osman / Charles Reznikoff Bob Perelman / Louis Zukofsky Rae Armantrout / Emily Dickinson

Each night featured three contemporary poets reading their own and a modernist's writings, thirty-minute selections chosen to express a relationship to the work of modernism. "I really do want to keep intoning a sound byte to a future that somehow modernism as I...want to understand it...is really an ongoing project in the contemporary writing scene, scenes, many scenes. And so the way that postmodern can dismiss amibitions in writing and dissolve them all into a mere kind of unmotivated paratactic difference is pretty boring, and I don't find the practice of writing boring at all." --Bob Perelman, on his own work in relation to Louis Zukofsky, October, 2000 (availble as an audio excerpt ) The conference, "New Modernisms II" was cosponsored by Penn's Department of English, Kelly Writers House, Penn Humanities Forum, School of Arts and Sciences, and Office of the Vice-Provost. The "Nine Poets" program was cosponsored by The Writers House, Creative Writing Program, and Modernist Studies Association. The "nine poets" program was conceived by Bob Perelman and Al Filreis, organized and convened by Al Filreis, Class of 1942 Professor of English & Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and was introduced by Al Filreis and Kerry Sherin, Director of the Kelly Writers House. For more information about the Modernist Studies Association, visit the MSA web site. Writers House Webcast Archive