On January 17, 2016, I met up with about 60 people at the Center for the Book in San Francisco to talk collaboratively about a poem by Joanne Kyger that goes by its first line, "When I used to focus on the worries." I had traveled with Zach Carduner and Chris Martin and they managed to bring along their recording equipment and have produced a video of high quality — notwithstanding the rather impromptu arrangement.
The poet and translator Yosuke Tanaka visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in late 2014. The purpose of his visit was threefold: to join a scientific conference on cell biology; to see the Writers House in person after spending much time there virtually as a participant in the open online course called “ModPo”; and to sit down in the Wexler Studio with Ariel Resnikoff to talk about contemporary Japanese poetry.
The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania invites applications to the ModPo Open Learning Teaching Fellowship, which will be offered for the first time in Fall 2015 and is designed to support teaching resources within the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry free open online non-credit 10-week course taught by Al Filreis and others. This Fellowship is sponsored by the Teacher Resource Center, an intrasite within ModPo.
Today I distributed the following announcement widely to 130,000 participants in "ModPo," the free, open-enrollment, noncredit 10-week course in modern and contemporary U.S. poetry:
I am very excited to announce a new aspect of ModPo that I hope will intrigue you and perhaps induce you to participate. We have created a new section of ModPo that parallels the main ModPo syllabus, "chapter" by "chapter" and week by week, and offers links to short video recordings of ModPo people around the world gathered in small groups conducting collaborative close readings of our poems — and related poems — themselves. Yes: we are now calling for crowdsourced collaborative close readings.
In this 5-minute video excerpt from the recording of a 90-minute live “ModPo” webcast on aleatory poetry, Amaris Cuchanski, Emily Harnett, Max McKenna, erica kaufman and Lily Applebaum each take a turn discussing the Whitmanian mode as it can be discerned in contemporary poetry. To view the entire video, click here.
I spoke today with Enea Parimbelli, who has fallen accidentally and headlong into contemporary U.S. poetry through the massive open online course called ModPo. I recorded our conversation. His favorite part of the syllabus is the week on the Language poets.
ModPo — a free, entirely open, non-credit, discussion-based 10-week course on modern & contemporary U.S. poetry — begins its 2014 session on September 6. Everyone is welcome to join us. Click here — https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry — to enroll.
ModPo 2014 includes several new features in addition to the 10-week survey of mod American poets & poems. New is an entire set of resources for teachers. (We encourage teachers at all levels to join us.) And new, too, is “ModPoPLUS,” a supplemental syllabus that parallels the main ModPo syllabus — additional poems, links to audio and video, and video-recorded close readings of the poems.
We are all looking forward to the start of ModPo 2014 on September 6. The site will open at 9 AM Philadelphia time. At that moment (and of course any time after) you’ll be able to go here
Meantime, I’m pleased to announce that I will be in Prague, Czech Republic, on Tuesday, October 14, to join a meet-up/gathering of any and all ModPo’ers in the area. We will gather at 7 PM Prague time. We are looking for a place to host the event. If you can help us, or know of a good place, please contact me.
Of course we encourage the formation of ModPo meet-ups – weekly, monthly, one-time, whatever. Once the course starts you can use the “Study Groups” discussion forum for organizing both virtual and face-to-face gatherings.
I’m writing today to announce that ModPo and the New York Public Library are collaborating to host a weekly meet-up every Thursday from 5:30-7 PM during ModPo’s 10-week session, starting on September 11. I myself will convene and moderate the first of the weekly NYC gatherings – September 11 at 5:30 PM. The group will meet every week at the Hudson Park Library located at 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY 10014. If you are in NYC or nearby, please plan to join us for each week or any week.
Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Above: illustration for chapter 9.3 (week 10) of ModPo. This goes with the new supplemental syllabus called “ModPoPLUS.” ModPo begins again on 9/6/14 and it’s (as always) free, open to all, non-credit. Runs 10 weeks until mid-November. The course typically requires between 4 and 10 hours per week — much more if you join the discussions and live webcasts. Enroll here: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
On Kyger's 'When I used to focus on the worries'
Video recording of a collaborative close reading
On January 17, 2016, I met up with about 60 people at the Center for the Book in San Francisco to talk collaboratively about a poem by Joanne Kyger that goes by its first line, "When I used to focus on the worries." I had traveled with Zach Carduner and Chris Martin and they managed to bring along their recording equipment and have produced a video of high quality — notwithstanding the rather impromptu arrangement.