PoemTalk's first 46 episodes

Al Filreis

PT#1: William Carlos Williams between walls
PT#2: Adrienne Rich won't wait
PT#3: George Oppen's ballad
PT#4: Allen Ginsberg sings Blake
PT#5: Ted Berrigan's "3 Pages"
PT#6: Jaap Blonk sound poem
PT#7: Jerome Rothenberg's paradise
PT#8: Rae Armantrout's "The Way"
PT#9: John Ashbery at a crossroads
PT#10: one of Gertrude Stein's portraits
PT#11: Erica Hunt's "voice of no"
PT#12: Ezra Pound's America
PT#13: Kathleen Fraser's dangerous highway
PT#14: Wallace Stevens at the end
PT#15: Lyn Hejinian's change
PT#16: Creeley driving the car
PT#17: Rodrigo Toscano's political poetics
PT#18: Lydia Davis has a position
PT#19: Bob Perelman's inner unruly child
PT#20: Amiri Baraka's Kenyatta
PT#21: Charles Bernstein's restlessness
PT#22: Louis Zukofsky begins anew
PT#23: Cid Corman really knew terror
PT#24: Barbara Guest, a poem about painting
PT#25: Alice Notley on the Lower East Side
PT#26: wild Vachel Lindsay
PT#27: Robert Duncan opens the field
PT#28: Jack Spicer to shrink: drop dead
PT#29: Kit Robinson ponders mad men
PT#30: the W. C. Williams we remember
PT#31: Robert Grenier's box of poem-cards
PT#32: Susan Howe's Emily Dickinson
PT#33: flarfist Sharon Mesmer
PT#34: Charles Olson's Maximus
PT#35: Bruce Andrews at the center
PT#36: J. Scappettone writes through H.D.
PT#37: Jena Osman drops leaflets
PT#38: Norman Fischer would like to see it
PT#39: Etheridge Knight & Gwendolyn Brooks
PT#40: Susan Schultz blogs dementia
PT#41: Ezra Pound in Venice
PT#42: Nathaniel Tarn's eco-poetics
PT#43: John Weiners by night
PT#44: Fred Wah's race to go
PT#45: Eileen Myles does what she teaches
PT#46: Jackson Mac Low writes through Ezra

October 16, 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.