Pete's 90th

Al Filreis

Dave Matthews at the Garden last night.

I and 15,000 others sang “Happy Birthday” to Pete Seeger last night at Madison Square Garden. Springsteeen sang “The Ghost of Tom Joad” with Tom Morello, after a longish introduction by Bruce which ended: “He’s gonna look a lot like your granddad that wears flannel shirts and funny hats. He gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass.” We saw and heard Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp (“If I Had a Hammer”), Ani DiFranco (selflessly sang to accompany several others), Arlo Guthrie (“Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), Billy Bragg (prefaced by a great story of Pete’s musical teachings), Bruce Cockburn (intense as always), Emmylou Harris (the most moving performance of “The Water Is Wide” I’ve ever heard), Joan Baez (two songs — the first not quite her usual, the second, “Jacob’s Ladder,” fantastic), Kris Kristofferson (“Got a Hole in My Bucket, Dear Liza”), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Richie Havens (sang “Freedom” — his Woodstock song), Roger McGuinn (did the Animals version of “Turn, Turn, Turn”), Steve Earle, Taj Mahal (a favorite of mine), Bernice Reagon, Dar Williams, Tom Chapin, Tom Paxton, Eric Weissberg, and others.

The opening of the four-hour performance: a lone light shone on Seeger (but we didn’t really know it was Pete) as he played a flute solo called “Menomonee Love Song.” the lights came up, they revealed the outline of a sloop, apt for an event titled the “Clearwater Concert” after the organization’s vessel, the gaff sloop Clearwater.

Best:

1) Dave Matthews, after telling us he should introduce himself as “David,” since that’s what his mother called him and she was the one who took him to his first concert, near Croton, NY — a Pete Seeger concert. Matthews sang an emotional but musically pure version of “Whiskey Rye Whiskey.”

2) Emmylou Harris, “The Water Is Wide,” noted above. Not a dry eye in the house.

3) Springsteen and Morello, trading verses of “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Earlier in the week (!) I’d seen Bruce with the E Street Band, a great concert. The whole band did its hauntingly good “Tom Joad,” but this, Bruce in the clear voice of a guy singing for just ten minutes in a whole evening, and two acoustic guitars, and a harmony with Morello, was even better.

4) Seeger, Baez, Billy Bragg, Emmy Lou Harris singing “We Shall Overcome.”

May 4, 2009

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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.