David Bromige reads at Buffalo in 1992

Al Filreis

On January 29, 1992, David Bromige read a great many short pieces at a reading he gave at Buffalo. The recording has long been available at Bromige's PennSound page, but today for the first time it has been segmented. The segmentations are, as I say, quite new, so if readers and listeners have suggestions for improvement or correction, please by all means pass them along to me (afilreis [at] jacket2.org) and we will apply the fix. PennSound is, to say the least, an ongoing and interative process. Here now are the poems Bromige read that night:

Epigraph from Desire (translation from Nietzsche's The Joyful Wisdom) (1:29): MP3

The Art of Capitalism (1:07): MP3

The states supplanted gold (0:41): MP3

Community leaders (0:19): MP3

Kafka (0:28): MP3

Giant redwoods (0:34): MP3

Reality, of continuing interest (0:19): MP3

She wore white lipstick (0:14): MP3

Civ = blab (0:24): MP3

Ex catheter (0:25): MP3

Fiction of neutralized culture (0:21): MP3

Seated at the organ (groan), for Robert Grenier (0:38): MP3

These days the students demand to be tested (0:41): MP3

Song: Brilliantly inventive, for opal nations (1:10): MP3

Feeling for the blind, for Michael Palmer (0:57): MP3

Vehicle (0:17): MP3

Manana from heaven (0:19): MP3

One (0:18): MP3

Zither music (1:02): MP3

Open wide (0:35): MP3

The fate of presence in our time (0:25): MP3

The poet strolls at evening by the river, for Tom Sharp (0:35): MP3

Associations (0:25): MP3

The referents' lair, for George Bowering (0:46): MP3

Soyez raisonnable (0:48): MP3

Don't drool when you say lot-split (0:46): MP3

Scum to sun (0:32): MP3

Tubal legislature (0:30): MP3

Book ends (0:16): MP3

Clearings in the throat, for Anselm Hollo (1:09): MP3

The poet (0:46): MP3

Clocks, for Cecelia Belle (0:26): MP3

Ancient riff (0:47): MP3

Art as revenge/revenue (0:59): MP3

Might be right, for Samuel Brittan (2:12): MP3

P.g., or, a Canadian narrative, for Barry McKinnon (1:00): MP3

Meanwhile (1:20): MP3

Orphic (0:34): MP3

Trance ending (0:28): MP3

Male order brides, for Michael Davidson (1:19): MP3

Voice (0:18): MP3

Prophetic soul mode (0:38): MP3

Da capo (1:01): MP3

Good god! you, here? (0:31): MP3

Obligatory poem of the perspicacious child, for Robert Creeley (0:14): MP3

On going on, for Cydney Chadwick (1:14): MP3

Personal (1) (0:33): MP3

Personal (too) (0:19): MP3

So, a poetry of immediacy (0:23): MP3

Confidence (0:31): MP3

But one dimension (1:00): MP3

Where we came in (0:48): MP3

Complete reading (39:51): MP3

May 9, 2011

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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.