Handbook of Modern & Contemporary American Poetry

Al Filreis

I have an essay in this forthcoming book, and am excited to keep such good company. I expect the book won't be out for another year. And I'm probably jumping the gun in posting the contents but I'll wait 'til someone tells me to take it down. You'll get the gist of what's in it, anyway. (Below at right: Cary Nelson.)

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

Edited by Cary Nelson

1. A Century of Innovation: American Poetry from 1900 to the Present
Cary Nelson

2. Social Texts and Poetic Texts: Poetry and Cultural Studies
          Rachel Blau DuPlessis

3. American Indian Poetry at the Dawn of Modernism
          Robert Dale Parker

4. “Jeweled Bindings”: Modernist Women’s Poetry and the Limits of Sentimentality
          Melissa Girard

Cary Nelson 5. Hired Men and Hired Women: Modern American Poetry and the Labor Problem
          John Marsh

6. Economics and Gender in Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore
          Linda A. Kinnahan

7. Poetry and Rhetoric: Modernism and Beyond
          Peter Nicholls

8. Cézanne’s Ideal of “Realization”: A Useful Analogy for the Spirit of Modernity in American Poetry
Charles Altieri

9. Stepping Out, Sitting In: Modern Poetry’s Counterpoint with Jazz and the Blues
          Edward Brunner

10. Out With the Crowd: Modern American Poets Speaking to Mass Culture
            Tim Newcomb

11. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist Influence on the American Poetry
           Scene, 1920-1960
            Susan Rosenbaum

12. Material Concerns: Incidental Poetry, Popular Culture, and Ordinary Readers in Modern America
          Mike Chasar

13. “With Ambush and Stratagem”: American Poetry in the Age of Pure War
            Philip Metres

14. The Fight and the Fiddle in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry
           Karen Jackson Ford

15. Asian American Poetry
           Josephine Park

16. “The Pardon of Speech”: The Psychoanalysis of Modern American Poetry
            Walter Kalaidjian

17. American Poetry, Prayer, and the News
           Jahan Ramazani

18. The Tranquilized Fifties: Forms of Dissent in Postwar American Poetry
           Michael Thurston

19. The End of the End of Poetic Ideology, 1960
           Al Filreis

20. Fieldwork in New American Poetry: From Cosmology to Discourse
           Lytle Shaw

21. “Do our chains offend you?”: The Poetry of American Political Prisoners
            Mark W. Van Wienen

22. Disability Poetics
           Michael Davidson

23. Green Reading: Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Environmental Criticism
           Lynn Keller

24. Transnationalism and Diaspora in American Poetry
           Timothy Yu

25. “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop
            James Smethurst

26. Minding Machines / Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface
           Adalaide Morris

January 6, 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.