Creeley on Dickinson

Al Filreis

Image of Creeley courtesy Francesco Clemente (from a 2002 oil painting); image of Dickinson courtesy Penelope Dullaghan (from a poster she created for the Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA).

In late September of 1985, Robert Creeley visited New College. He gave three lectures on Emily Dickinson (one each on September 20, 23 and 25) and a reading (September 23), introduced by Aaron Shurin and Duncan McNaughton. We at PennSound have now segmented the first of the three talks by topic. Many thanks to Anna Zalokostas for her superb editorial work. The recordings came to PennSound courtesy of David Levi Strauss. So here are the segments of the first lecture on Dickinson:

challenging the image of Emily Dickinson as eccentric, reactive, and fragile (11:06): MP3
on the comings and goings of the Amherst town and church, her secondary school education, and her daily interactions (10:39): MP3
on her family life (3:34): MP3
reading from Emily Dickinson's letters (8:28): MP3
on the patterns of her friends and family (13:47): MP3
reading from Emily Dickinson's letters (3:19): MP3
on her productivity during 1862 (2:39): MP3
on Williams and Dickinson, and not providing explanations (4:55): MP3
death and the Civil War in relation to her poetry (10:57): MP3
reading "Success is counted sweetest" (0:32): MP3
reading "Ambition cannot find him" (0:17): MP3
her influences and reading interests (8:05): MP3
dilemmas of the anthology presentation, rhythmic shifts, metric variations, and her use of the dash (3:23): MP3
on the notions of place and home (14:47): MP3

August 12, 2014

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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.