ModPo announces partnership with the New York Public Library

Al Filreis

A still from the introductory video to ModPo.

We are all looking forward to the start of ModPo 2014 on September 6. The site will open at 9 AM Philadelphia time. At that moment (and of course any time after) you’ll be able to go here

https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry

and click through to the actual ModPo site.

Meantime, I’m pleased to announce that I will be in Prague, Czech Republic, on Tuesday, October 14, to join a meet-up/gathering of any and all ModPo’ers in the area. We will gather at 7 PM Prague time. We are looking for a place to host the event. If you can help us, or know of a good place, please contact me.

Of course we encourage the formation of ModPo meet-ups – weekly, monthly, one-time, whatever. Once the course starts you can use the “Study Groups” discussion forum for organizing both virtual and face-to-face gatherings.

I’m writing today to announce that ModPo and the New York Public Library are collaborating to host a weekly meet-up every Thursday from 5:30-7 PM during ModPo’s 10-week session, starting on September 11. I myself will convene and moderate the first of the weekly NYC gatherings – September 11 at 5:30 PM. The group will meet every week at the Hudson Park Library located at 66 Leroy Street, New York, NY 10014. If you are in NYC or nearby, please plan to join us for each week or any week.

Many thanks to Luke Swarthout, Isaac Cameron & Miranda Murray of NYPL and our own Julia Bloch for working out this collaboration. We will announce further such collaborations in the future.

Below is a list of all the TAs and Community TAs (or CTAs) for ModPo 2014. The TAs are highlighted in bold. They will be joined, of course, by me, Julia Bloch, and our amazing IT guys, Chris Martin and Zach Carduner. What a team! We’re all glad you’ll be joining us. We are very grateful for the CTAs, who have volunteered their time and energy to make ModPo among the most interactive and responsive and humane MOOCs anywhere.

TAs (in bold) and CTAs for ModPo 2014

Lily Applebaum
Dennis Aguinaldo
Karren Alenier
Mary Armour
Sangeet Bird
David Blaine
Andrea Buonincontro
Ali Castleman
Mandana Chaffa
Ian Chowcat
Matthew Corey
Amaris Cuchanski
Laura Cushing
T. De Los Reyes
Jeremy Dixon
Marc Drexler
Kent Ekberg
Tamboura Gaskins
Dave Green
Emily Harnett
Mark Herron
Allan Keeton
Bob Keim
Robin Kello
Ray Maxwell
Max McKenna
Marcia Nuffer
Molly O'Neill
Paige Polcene
Therese Pope
Dave Poplar
Nicola Quinn
Christina Rau
Ingrid Ruthig
Mark Snyder
Massimo Soranzio
Bill Speer
Carol Stephen
Treva Stose
Anna Strong
Eric Alan Weinstein
Jason Zuzga

August 9, 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.