Alphabetic constraint

Al Filreis

Pasternak

Piano, piano, piano,
A decrescendo.
Such desires as he knew.
Transparency of the house.
Error made him lose another
chapter.
Right that he should leave
the enjoyment.
Now the name of an enormous variety
of satisfactions.
And he started forward, fell, arose
fell again, walked.
Kursk station on a hot summer
morning in the year 1900.

- - -

Tom Devaney is working on a new series of alphabetic acrostics. Above is one of them. He's (often, not always) end-stopping the penultimate line, so that the final line can be a fragment in the imagist mode (with the "objective" descriptor of the haiku operating somewhere back there in the logical-rhetorical lineage).

I believe that the sheer pressure of the constraint has Tom thinking, at the end, that he needs a denotative fragment. In this case somewhat simply, it makes one think of the poem's title in case the connection had been implicit up to that point.

Here's another, working somewhat in the same way.

- - -

Manichaean

My ideas of the prize.
A ship taken by force.
Nautical waves, nautical waves of light.
In a privateer The Manichaean.
Chilling night, steam-engine afternoons.
Here I am without you.
At moments all can spring from all.
Evil is a catch-all crime pitched
to its own composite ends.
Again away from you by the river dock.
NIKE the Greek goddess of victory in billboard bold.

August 20, 2008

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a 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's 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 brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.