Al Filreis | Jacket2

John Yau writes through Jackson Pollock

Al Filreis

I introduce and then perform John Yau's “830 Fireplace Road,” a poem based on a sentence uttered by Jackson Pollock to explain his relationship to his painting. http://bit.ly/1EPseRc (audio: 2:39)

January 28, 2015

31-minute video of collaborative close reading of "The Snow Man"

Al Filreis

screenshot of video - for link, see text below

Click here to watch me lead a collaborative close reading of Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man" at the annual "Mind of Winter" event at the Kelly Writers House.

January 26, 2015

M.C. Richards celebrates John Cage's 75th

Al Filreis

Mary Caroline Richards spent time at Black Mountain College, formed and lived on a Long Island commume from 1954-1964, wrote poems about pottery and published a book about centering in the 1960s that received a lot of attention, was a long-time friend of John Cage. When Cage did an academic year at Wesleyan University in 1960-61, he used his leverage there to arrange a poetry reading for Richards. PennSound has only one recording of M.C. Richards — made at Indre Studios in Philadelphia on May 5, 1997.

One of the poems she performed on that occasion was "For John Cage on His 75th Birthday": MP3.

January 24, 2015

Three meta-poems: Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Harryette Mullen

Al Filreis

We’ve created a three-part mini-course/sampler of metapoems — one proto-modern, one modern, one postmodern. Listen to a brief audio introduction and then watch three video recordings of several of us working through close readings. The readings are meant to be suggestive rather than complete or definitive. Our concern was to teach ourselves something about the metapoem. The metapoem of course is a poem about poetry, a poem that is somehow aware of itself as a thing made of letters and words. We wanted to choose three poems — otherwise different in so many ways — that are each about reading and/or writing. Poems about the reading of poems. Poems about poets reading. Poems about their own inscribing. Poems that use reading as an allegory for loving, and loving as an allegory of understanding. Poems that cannot be understood topically (thematically) unless first one understands the ways in which they are about themselves — about the words they deploy, about the love or loving of words felt as they are being written.

January 23, 2015

Robert Creeley interviews Kathy Acker

Al Filreis

On December 12 and 13, 1979, Robert Creeley hosted Kathy Acker at SUNY-Buffalo. He introduced her and in two sessions she read from her work and engaged with Creeley on conversation. PennSound now offers, in addition to the whole recording, segments by topic and work:

introduction by Creeley (4:25): MP3
on Erica Jong material (1:15): MP3
on forthcoming work and French novelists (3:02): MP3
introduction to translations (8:41): MP3
Acker reads from Eden, Eden, Eden (5:23): MP3
Acker reads from Laure (10:48): MP3
Acker lectures on Guyotat and Laure (31:15): MP3
on self-expression (16:37): MP3
on self-reflection (4:18): MP3
on subjectivity and perception (12:37): MP3
on the writer's perspective (5:04): MP3
on the divided self (8:14): MP3

Many thanks for Hannah Judd, who did the editorial and segmenting work.

January 22, 2015

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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.