Al Filreis

J2 launches

A preface from the publisher

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

Daughter is to dad as beach is to mountains

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

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

    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

    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.

    Finding Stevens along dream streets

    Melanie Almeder's poems

    Melanie Almeder has a new book of poems out, On Dream Street. “La Pluie,” a poem written “after Marc Chagall,” is in the Wallace Stevens idiom: “The only green thing: the tree at the center, / bent by the pull of wind in the frail sails of its blossoms.” I’d say Almeder is not a Stevensian poet overall: she believes in natural description and doesn’t dwell on abstractions as lovely in themselves. But she’s got the Stevens phrasing here and there and it’s personally gratifying to me that she does. Why? Because I taught her, not at Penn as a member of the faculty — but at Virginia when I was there teaching as a doctoral student. Melanie was even then — as a freshman — a fine writer and a great student. And I recall that in class (although it was supposed to be a composition class of sorts) I read aloud from Stevens’ poetry semi-obsessively. The book is published by Tupelo.

    Adrienne Rich, 'quite struck dumb'

    Surely one of the highlights of my involvement with the Writers House Fellows program — which has brought three eminent writers to the cottage at 3805 Locust Walk each year since 1999 — was the visit in April 2005 of Adrienne Rich. She gave a wonderful reading and we had a terrific interview-style conversation the next morning.

    Baseball as civic religion

    I adore baseball in every way it’s possible to do so: see it live, play it (rarely but longingly), view it on MTV.TV, read about it. I always read at least two baseball books each summer. (One of this summer’s reads is Dan Okrent’s Nine Innings.) My interest in the 1950s of course leads me to baseball through another route — actually it’s three interests converging: baseball, the ’50s, and poetry. The best expression I know of this is Gerald Early’s essay published in the American Poetry Review in July/August 1996, “Birdland: Two Observations on the Cultural Significance of Baseball.” I put an excerpt from this essay on my 1950s site.

    West Philly is home

    Back in 1998, my employer, the University of Pennsylvania, created a mortgage incentive plan: the idea was and is to encourage Penn-affiliated families (staff and faculty) to choose to live in Penn’s neighborhood rather than the Main Line or South Jersey. I had wanted my family to live in West Philly and this was just indeed the incentive I needed. I was the first Penn person to use the plan; probably that is why the Philadelphia Business Journal came out to the house to do a story on the program featuring my move. If one goal of this project was to induce faculty to be more present on campus and more involved in the life of the university’s neighbors, I think it surely worked in my case. The main force behind this innovative program – and the mortgage incentive system was just one part of it — was Judy Rodin, then president of the university. In the fall of ’06 I invited Judy back to Penn (she’d left to run the Rockefeller Foundation) to give a talk about the urban university. We recorded this talk, and I also produced a podcast about it.

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