Al Filreis | Jacket2

Bruce Andrews' 25-hour twitter project

Al Filreis

https://www.facebook.com/BruceAndrewsTwitterProject

I'm pleased to pass along information about Bruce Andrews's 25-hour twitter project, April 1, 2014.

Bruce Andrews// 25 Hour Twitter sculpture & performance
Curated by Maria Chavez

On April 1st, 2014, Bruce Andrews and Maria Chavez will collaborate on a 25 hour performance piece on the social media platform, Twitter.

March 10, 2014

'LunaLuna' on poetry hotlines

Al Filreis

'LunaLuna' post on 3/3/2014 about the dial-a-poem service provided by the Kelly Writers House [permalink: http://lunalunamag.com/2014/03/03/3-poetry-hotlines]

“Years ago," writes Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein at LunaLuna on March 3, 2014, "when I would get overwhelmed, I used to call the Kelly Writers House and listen to a poem wherever I happened to be. They feature poets who have read for them, as well as their own faculty and students (the latter at a different extension)." The number is 215-746-POEM (215-746-7636). She also provides information for two other dial-a-poem services.

March 10, 2014

Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Blake et alia now at PennSound

John Richetti's newest contribution to 'PennSound classics'

Al Filreis

John Richetti recently returned to PennSound’s studios and recorded a selection of poems by Keats, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge. Here is a link to the new page in the “PennSound classics” section of the archive.

March 7, 2014

Francie Shaw, artist's talk (podcast)

Al Filreis

A new Kelly Writers House podcast is now out (#36 in our ongoing series). In this podcast, we hear an excerpt from an artist's talk by Francie Shaw, whose show was exhibited in our Brodsky Gallery in the late autumn of 2013. For more about the event, click here. To listen to the podcast, introduced by Allison Harris, click here. For a video recording of the full event, click here.

March 7, 2014

Michael Palmer's 'Recursus to Porta' (performed 1990)

Al Filreis

We at PennSound are beginning to analyze quantities and types of downloads from our archive. From time to time we will have something to say about what we discern in such analysis. For now, this fascinating and not-quite-explainable factoid: since January 1, 2014, one of the five most-oft downloaded MP3 recording from PennSound has been a poem by Michael Palmer, performed at Buffalo in 1990: “Recursus to Porta” (3:34): MP3. And the poet whose PennSound recordings were most frequently downloaded during this time has been Norman Fischer.

March 7, 2014

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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.