Return to the tapeworm foundry

Al Filreis

A few years ago Darren Wershler-Henry visited us from Toronto. His book of 2000, The Tapeworm Foundry, was being celebrated by an exhibit in the KWH gallery ("KWH Arts," we called that ongoing project then — now The Brodsky Gallery). Kaegan Sparks commissioned a number of Writers House-affiliated people each to make art from an instruction of the sort that fills Darren's book. I wrote about this at the time of the exhibit.

One artist dipped her long hair into calligraphy ink and dragged it across long rolls of paper (this is actually a classic Fluxus piece). Another person created an inky footprint and then ran it through an OCR (text-recognition) program and printed the “language” that resulted and put the two up on the wall, side by side. Another pair of artists counted all the periods (at ends of sentences) in all the books on a Writers House bookshelf, then printed out the periods on 8.5 x 11" paper and wrapped the bookshelf in the paper.

While Darren was in the house, I gathered him, Kaegan and Kenny Goldsmith in my office, and the four of us talked about Darren's book and the exhibit, and about conceptual poetics/concrete poetry generally. This is the newest in the series of "PennSound podcasts", and please have a listen.

1. Links to works produced for the exhibit.
2. Video recording of the opening program.
3. Photos of the event.
4. Text of Tapeworm available at UbuWeb.

December 18, 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.