A soul collected

Al Filreis

I’m looking at a file that is an accumulation of letters, emails, and documents all pertaining to a longtime search for a few frames in a documentary. The oldest item is a letter dated 1989. In all the time since, on and off, I’ve been trying to get a screenshot of a painting by Alice Neel featured briefly in the film Alice Neel: Collector of Souls, produced by Nancy Baer. Bear made her Neel film for TV and it was aired on PBS (part of a series called Women in Art).

Neel did a portrait of Ronald Lane Latimer, who was born James Leippert and had about five or six pseudonyms other than Latimer. In the mid-30s Latimer published books of poems at the small press he founded, Alcestis Press. He published Williams, Moore, Allen Tate, Stevens, Robert Penn Warren (Warren's first book), Willard Maas, Ruth Lechlitner, and others. Until I published by book on Stevens’ poetry in the politically radical context of the 1930s, very little was known about who Latimer/Leippert really was. He was a bisexual avant-gardist living and publishing booked in Greenwich Village, while being a semi-secret Communist, while enrolled in a school preparing him for the priesthood upstate, while engaged to a young woman in Albany … while corresponding crucially with Stevens and other poets, while running away from certain demons. I was able to track him mainly because I compiled a list of his pseudonyms.

I became fascinated with Latimer and tried to find photographs of him in his various phases: Columbia student, publisher-communist, then Buddhist in flowing robes in New Mexico, then expatriate in Japan, finally Episcopal priest in Florida (while living with a young man whom he told neighbors was his son — and who might have been his son, for all I know, but doubtful). I actually have a photo of him in Florida, posing, in his collar, with his large dog. And I have one of him standing on the steps of Columbia’s library from 1932. But I’ve only had a glimpse — on TV as it aired — of the Alice Neel portrait of Latimer depicted in the Nancy Baer documentary. (There’s also a painting done of Latimer in Buddhist robes done by Santa Fe-based painter Miki Hayakawa.)

For some reason I’m back on the trail, looking to be in touch with Nancy Baer, hoping to find a reproduction of the Neel portrait, hoping even to see a copy of the documentary (which is rare). Anyone with leads? Please contact me at afilreis AT writing DOT upenn DOT edu.

June 1, 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.