Al Filreis

Recasting poetry

'The long biography of a poem'

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Kaia Sand

In Distant Reading, Peter Middleton describes reading a poem as though it has a “long biography.” This approach involves “mining what is available of the aggregative textual archive that composes the textual memory of the poem, its showing in magazines, performance, anthologies, its construal in reviews and commentaries and other treatments” (23).

Consider the long life of Claude McKay’s "If We Must Die."

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Introduction to the poetry and poetics of 1960

Al Filreis

Two months before 1960 commenced, Stanley Kunitz in Harper’s Magazine redefined the word “experimental” to mean the inevitable resistance to any prevailing style for the sake of “keep[ing] it supple.” Yet at the time of his writing, the turn of this new decade, “the nature of that resistance is in effect a backward look.” The recent Pulitzer Prize winner added: “This happens not to be a time of great innovation in poetic technique: it is rather a period in which the technical gains of past decades, particularly the twenties, are being tested and consolidated.”

May 9, 2011

Poetry in 1960, a symposium: Question and answer session

Al Filreis
Danny Snelson
erica kaufman
Bob Perelman
Ron Silliman
Mel Nichols
Chris Funkhouser
Kristen Gallagher
Michael S. Hennessey
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Charles Bernstein

Editors’ note: This is a transcription of the discussion that immediately following the short presentations on December 6, 2010, at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. If you check these words against the video or audio recordings, you will notice that the participants have slightly corrected or otherwise revised their comments — for style and clarity, we would say on the whole, rather than substance.

May 4, 2011

J2 launches

A preface from the publisher

Jacket2

Happily, we inaugurate Jacket2. For all the complexity of the work in poetry and poetics you’ll read on these screens, what we’re doing here is I think explained rather simply. We want to preserve what John Tranter has done with Jacket in its first forty issues, and to a significant extent — although in a somewhat new mode and a somewhat different context — continue and extend it. The new mode? A site pushing technically past what’s been called 2.0, with all the vaunted interoperabilities: collaborative editing and rostering of new articles; a rotation of three-months-each guest commentators, able themselves to post contemporaneous responses to various poetics scenes they “cover”; a means of laying out features that enables readers to see at once all diverse elements of materials and responses to a single poet or topic as gathered by a guest editor; an image gallery for uncluttered viewing of many images associated with an article or feature; podcast series (such as PoemTalk and Into the Field) both streamable right on the page and downloadable for free; video players both inline and linked; a Reissues department for making otherwise inaccessible archival material available in full digital facsimile; advanced searching through both new Jacket2 pieces and every single article, review, and announcement ever published in old Jacket; and seamless server-side linked cross-relations between critical responses written for J2 about readings and recordings on one hand and, on the other, all the digital audio (and video) stored in the vast archive known as PennSound. Even as we just get started, dig around and you’ll find a great deal here — and tons of potential.

Kelly Writers House on TV

Featured on WHYY's "Creative Campus," winter 2010-11

Al Filreis

Daughter is to dad as beach is to mountains

Al Filreis

Each May, as the families of undergrad seniors come to Philly for their kids’ commencement, we hold a celebration to honor a group of students who have been closely — sometimes very closely — affiliated with the Writers House. This year’s “senior capstone event” honored twelve seniors.

Three young fiction writers

Al Filreis

Michael Hyde, Courtney Zoffness, and Laura Dave each read from their fiction on Alumni Day at the Writers House, 

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    • Writing about 9/11

    Al Filreis

    Greg Manning came to the Writers House in September 2006, almost exactly five years later, to discuss writing about his and his wife's experiences during and after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

    Rosanne Cash

    Al Filreis

    The first Blutt Singer-Songwriter Symposium at the Kelly Writers House featured Rosanne Cash. The event took place on April 12. Anthony DeCurtis moderated a Q&A; with Rosanne, and she played several of her songs (guitar and voice only — what a treat), including a favorite of mine, “Black Cadillac.” The session was recorded and audio is available for free download (right-click on the link above). The July/August 2007 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette includes a good article about the program. Rosanne will be a hard act to follow, as it were, but we’ll be hosting another singer-songwriter symposium next spring. The photo here is of Sam Preston, Penn’s eminent demographer and former dean (and avid songwriter himself), with Rosanne after a wonderful celebratory dinner in the Writers House dining room.

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