Al Filreis | Jacket2

Four recordings of William Carlos Williams performing "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Al Filreis

Read January 9, 1942 (0:11): MP3
Read for the Library of Congress, May 5, 1945 (0:15): MP3
Read on an interview for the Mary Margaret McBride Show, December 4, 1950 (0:08): MP3
Read at Princeton University, March 19, 1952 (1:42): MP3

May 1, 2012

Five recordings of William Carlos Williams performing "This Is Just to Say"

Al Filreis

Read in Rutherford, NJ, June 1950 MP3 (1:18)
Read in Rutherford, NJ, August 1950 MP3 (0:17)
Read in Van Nuys, Calif., November 16, 1950 MP3 (0:23)
Read at Harvard University, December 4, 1951 MP3 (1:14)
Read at Princeton University, March 19, 1952 MP3 (0:41)

May 1, 2012

Stefan Sagmeister seeks happiness

Al Filreis

Stefan Sagmeister (1962-) is among today's most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and the musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed.

April 29, 2012

Patti Smith in honor of William Blake

Al Filreis

Toward the end of our interview-discussion with Patti Smith on December 9, 2010 — moderated by Anthony DeCurtis — Smith introduced and played a version of “My Blakean Year.” Here is the first stanza of the song:

In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed* a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road

* In the performance this word is apparently “Obeyed.”

April 28, 2012

Wallace Stevens of the New York School

Al Filreis

At a conference entitled "Wallace Stevens, New York, & Modernism," hosted by NYU, I gave a paper in which I somewhat puckishly imagined Stevens as a New York School poet.

April 27, 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.