Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing Nate Silver before an audience of several hundred people. Mostly we discussed Silver’s 2024 book, On the Edge: the Arts of Risking Everything. HERE is a link to an article written about the event. The concluding paragraph: ‘Silver’s openness to randomness was later...
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,...
Family Weekend. Another moment for realizing how long I’ve been doing this work and how deep & sustained many of my relationships are. Here I am yesterday with Rachel, who was my student and advisee in the early 1990s, and Josh, her son, who is currently my student and my...
I was honored, on the occasion of my 50th birthday, to hear—and then later to read in print, in Jubilat—a poem by Tom Devaney dedicated to me. I like to think that it’s a wonderful poem regardless of my grateful feelings about its dedication and fine memories of the party...
Simone White, whose work as poet, teacher, art critic, theorist, and performer has achieved international recognition, has been named Associate Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House. She has been closely affiliated with the Writers House since she jo ined the Penn faculty in 2018 and now joins Faculty Director...
June Jordan was a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2001. She was battling through hard treatment for cancer and her usual great strength was diminished, and when toward the end of her public reading a student asked for a reprise of “Poem for a Young Poet” I could tell that...
In 2009 Robert Coover spent some days with us as a Kelly Writers House Fellow—thus I had the great great pleasure of reading & teaching most of his stunningly fabulous books. His visit was unforgettable. My interview/conversation with him is available here: https://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/coover.html along with links to other aspects of...
As the economic depression deepens in 1930, Horace Gregory publishes this poem in Poetry magazine:
Bret stopped by to say hi at our open house yesterday. It was the 20th reunion of his graduating class (2004). As a sophomore, 3 years earlier, he was in my course on the holocaust (co-taught then with the great Penny Marcus of our Italian department). That was the fall...
I talked with Lisa New about two poems by Stevens — “The Empreror of Ice Cream” and “The Motive for Metaphor.” This discussion is featured with others’ responses to these poems in a new episode of Lisa’s Poetry of America series. HERE is a link to the video recording of...
New—an interview/conversation with poet Larry Price, moderated by me and Bill Fuller: https://jacket2.org/podcasts/larry-price ‘In this episode, poet Larry Price joins Al Filreis and William Fuller for an interview in the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House to discuss his new book 1/0 (“one over zero”), as well as some...
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.
Cecilia Vicuna gets ready to perform at the Kelly Writers House, February 2017. Click on the image for a larger view.
PoemTalk’s crew took to the road, wandering pretty much as far west as one can go on this continent, to a place Philip Whalen called, in a poem’s subtitle, “the last of California” — Bolinas, coastal spot famous as A congenial writer’s retreat. Stephen Ratcliffe, Joanne Kyger, and Julia Bloch gathered there with Al Filreis to talk about Whalen. Our poem was indeed written in Bolinas, in 1968, and finished in Kyoto in 1969. It’s called “Life at Bolinas: The Last of California.” Whalen’s PennSound page includes a recording of his performance of this poem, the final poem he read at an event in Albuquerque in 1987. Click HERE to read program notes and LISTEN TO THE SHOW.
ModPo is a fast-paced introduction to modern and contemporary U.S. poetry, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to the present. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read poems that are supposedly "difficult." We encounter and discuss the poems one at a time. It's much easier than it seems!
Click HERE to enroll.
Even though we are currently in our offseason ("SloPo"), you are welcome to enroll now. You will have access to the entire ModPo site. Explore; meet some ModPo'ers who are conversing in the site year-round; read poems and watch videos. Then join us again when the intense "symposium mode" starts up again in September.
Yes, the next live, interactive 10-week session of ModPo will begin on September 9, 2017, and will conclude on November 20, 2017. Al Filreis will be in touch with you by email before the September 9 start of the course with all the information you'll need to participate. If you have questions, you can email the ModPo team at modpo@writing.upenn.edu.
During the 10 weeks of the course, you will be guided through poems, video discussions of each poem, and community discussions of each poem. And (unique among open online courses) we offer weekly, interactive live webcasts. Our famed TAs also offer office hours throughout the week. We help arrange meet-ups and in-site study groups.
If you are curious about the ModPo team, type "ModPo YouTube introduction" into Google or your favorite search engine, and watch the 20-minute introductory video. You will get an overview of the course and will meet the brilliant TAs, who will be encountering the poems with you all the way to the end.
ModPo LINKS:
enroll [free]: LINK
Facebook group: LINK
Twitter feed: LINK
intro video: LINK
YouTube videos: LINK