Al Filreis | Jacket2

Writing through wikileaks

Al Filreis

Using Matthew McCabe's Mesostomatic, I made a mesostic poem using "Julian Assange" as the spinetext and the wikipedia entry on wikileaks as the sourctext.

June 4, 2012

Writing the way Christian Marclay deals with sound: "Cover without a record"

Kenneth Goldsmith's seminar on writing about contemporary art

Al Filreis

A 2008 publication, Cover without a Record, was created by students and faculty who were part of an experimental year-long seminar co-sponsored by the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) here at Penn. Cover without a Record works with — plays off, as it were — the then-current Christian Marclay exhibit at the ICA.

May 28, 2012

Five recordings of Creeley performing "I Know a Man"

Al Filreis

PennSound’s Creeley collection includes five recordings of the poet performing “I Know a Man,” as follows:

(1) read at San Francisco State University, May 20, 1956 (0:28): MP3
(2) at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, August 12, 1963 (1:27): MP3
(3) read at Harvard University, October 27, 1966 (0:35): MP3
(4) read in Bolinas, CA, July 1971 (0:26): MP3
(5) read in Bolinas, CA, c. 1965-1970 (0:25): MP3

Episode 16 of PoemTalk is a 30-minute discussion of this poem with Bob Perelman, Jessica Lowenthal, and Randall Couch.

May 22, 2012

Hadley Guest and Kathleen Fraser talk about Barbara Guest

Al Filreis

Barbara Guest (left) with Hadley Guest (right)

Kathleen Fraser interviewed Hadley Guest about Barbara Guest in Berkeley on July 17, 2007. The complete recording lasts two hours and 31 minutes and is available on PennSound’s Barbara Guest author page.

introduction (0:23): MP3
Hadley Guest reading "The Next Floor" by Barbara Guest (0:51): MP3
Kathleen Fraser on being introduced to Barbara Guest and her work (13:46): MP3
Barbara Guest’s friendship with painters (9:33): MP3
Hadley Guest on growing up around poets and painters (5:15): MP3
the division between uptown and downtown in the New York art world in the 60s (12:31): MP3
Barbara Guest's refusal to be pigeon-holed (2:23): MP3
the cruelty of the downtown scene and Barbara Guest’s erasure (18:31): MP3
Hadley Guest on living with Barbara during the last few years of her life and hearing about her first marriage to John Dudley (7:18): MP3
Trumbull Higgins and social position in relation to money (11:33): MP3
Barbara’s uptown studio and her strong family feelings (16:55): MP3

May 20, 2012

RSS feed | subscribe by email

ELECTRONIC PEDAGOGY: Magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. "Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis' teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content."

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, "To be modern you don't have to be nuts."

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called "The Creative Campus." To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg's Schindler's List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brings together all of the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, the Chinese/American Poetry Association, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.