Crowdsourcing collaborative close readings of supposedly 'difficult' poems globally

Al Filreis

Today I distributed the following announcement widely to 130,000 participants in "ModPo," the free, open-enrollment, noncredit 10-week course in modern and contemporary U.S. poetry:

I am very excited to announce a new aspect of ModPo that I hope will intrigue you and perhaps induce you to participate. We have created a new section of ModPo that parallels the main ModPo syllabus, "chapter" by "chapter" and week by week, and offers links to short video recordings of ModPo people around the world gathered in small groups conducting collaborative close readings of our poems — and related poems — themselves. Yes: we are now calling for crowdsourced collaborative close readings.

To see the basics of the new ModPo page for this, just go back to the ModPo 2014 site here—

https://class.coursera.org/modernpoetry-003/wiki/crowdsourced_close_readings

—and have a look. There are already a few videos linked there.

To prepare for the full release of a wide range of these videos for ModPo 2015 (which starts on September 12, 2015), I am calling on any and all ModPo people to organize small groups—together near where you live (in a "meet-up") or in some way remotely/virtually—and film a ten- or fifteen-minute discussion of any ModPo poem or a poem by one of the ModPo poets you deem relevant to our discussions and themes.

The "ModPo Crowdsourced Close Readings" project page is introduced this way:

This is a new section of ModPo, in progress. It is created to parallel the ModPo main syllabus, just as ModPoPLUS and the Teacher Resources do, but here the video discussions feature ModPo people around the world doing close readings of ModPo poems.

Guidelines for those who wish to contribute videos to this project:

1) record in landscape (wide image rather than tall);
2) try to keep the recorded session short —10 to 15 minutes is ideal;
3) good audio quality is crucial, so somehow get the camera's microphone close to each speaker;
4) upload your video to YouTube and let us know where we can find it; and finally
5) please note that this is a curated collection, so for various reasons (length, technical quality, duplication of content) it might be decided that your contribution will not be included.

Once you've uploaded your video, please let us know by writing to modpo@writing.upenn.edu .

Here are two examples of such videos:

1) made by a group in Edinburgh in 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfgBe0i5BYs
2) made by a group in Sri Lanka in 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY_GUS31HSo

I'm very excited about this new potential for diversifying and further democratizing our poetry community, and hope you are excited too. So put away your modesty and try to make a video just like the ones I and the TAs have made! Take it from us: it's fun and edifying.

As of today already, there are 5,000 people signed up for ModPo '15. If you haven't re-enrolled, please consider it and here is the link: https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry .

February 28, 2015

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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.