Quasi-nonintentional poetry and these dark times?

Al Filreis

Mandana EM Chaffa organized a ModPo meet-up in NYC (which Emily Harnett and Ali Castleman and others attended) and here is what Mandana wrote afterwards:

“Can poetry offer solace in times of turmoil? How do aleatory poetry and chance operations reflect our modern society and the impact of so many sources of information? How does Week 9 — and Week 10 — poetry circle back to where we started two and a half months ago? That, and more, was on the table (except that we didn’t use a table) during this last NYC ModPo meet-up for 2016, with our very special guests and amazing TAs, Emily Harnett and Ali Castleman. They are even more awesome in person than on your screens.

As always with the Gotham City gang, we were joined by fantastic, unexpected participants who made the conversation richer and more wide-ranging, whom you’ll see on the photo below (please tag yourselves!).

On a personal note, I want to thank everyone who turned out for this session’s meet-ups. For me, close-reading is dependent upon community, and year after year, this community — encompassing new and old friends, past and present poetic schools — exemplifies a generosity, an openness of spirit and heart that I cherish deeply always, and especially today.

Please watch this space for future (less frequent) meet-ups in 2017, but in the meantime, thank you. Thank you, Emily and Ali, for sharing your gifts with us today, and all of you for taking time out of your Saturdays to join us. You make the world both large enough to contain multitudes and intimate enough to make true human connections. Isn’t that the spirit of ModPo? And the meaning of our too-brief lives?”

November 13, 2016

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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.