Suddenly everyone began reading aloud

Al Filreis

Last night's Cobbingfest — an event on visual and sound poetries — at the Kelly Writers House featured readings by Maggie O'Sullivan and cris cheek and a panel discussion led by Charles Bernstein that included O'Sullivan and cheek as well as Matthew Abess and Marvin Sackner. Once the recordings of the readings and talks are available (soon, I should think) I will surely link them here. Come back.

At left: the late Bob Cobbing (d. 2000).

Matt Abess is a senior undergraduate who was drawn into this poetics through courses and other doings and connections at the Writers House and Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW). During 2005–06 he took Kenny Goldsmith's year-long course we do in collaboration with the ICA, a variant on Kenny's "Uncreative Writing" seminar; then in the spring of '06 was Kenny's apprentice through our relatively new program of writing-arts apprenticeships. And in summer '06 we sponsored his research at Marvin and Ruth Sackner's remarkable concrete poetry archive in Miami. All the players in supporting Matt already knew and liked each other and his wonderful work served to bring us all together. Add O'Sullivan and Cheek to the mix — Matt, working with Charles and KWH Director Jessica Lowenthal — invited them, and you have a memorable few days.

After the reading last night I chatted with Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman about the event, about Cobbing, and about the extent to which there was a parallel development of sound poetry on the U.S. side. Here's a link to that 5-minute conversation.

[] The Daily Pennsylvanian covered this story in its October 12, 2007 issue.

[] PennSound has put up quite a good collection of Cobbing pieces, with lots of help from Matt Abess and PennSound's Managing Editor Mike Hennessey.

[] Our "Suddenly Everyone Began Reading Aloud" page is already up — and soon will have added to it links to the recordings of the October 10 and 11 events.

[] Matt received the annual Kerry Sherin Wright Prize given to a Writers House community member who proposes a program or project that befits the capacious and communitarian spirit of our former director, Kerry Sherin Wright. The funds that come with the prize literally paid for the program last night.

[] The Writing Arts Apprenticeships program has been made possible by a generous gift from Emilio and Reina Bassini, members of the Writers House Advisory Board and good friends.

[] Kenny Goldsmith's UbuWeb has a few Cobbing video materials as well as a link to Matt Abess' paper, and of course also has some fabulous Cobbing sound pieces.

[] Matt worked with our friends in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library — in particular, Dan Traister — on an exhibition of Cobbing's work (visual and also sound). The show is called "Make Perhaps This Out Sense Of Can You" and is up until December 16, 2007. Rosenwald Gallery, 6th floor, Van-Pelt Dietrich Library Center University of Pennsylvania, 3420 Walnut Street. Gallery hours: Monday–Friday, 9am–5pm, Saturday, by prior arrangement, noon–4pm. 1-800-390-1829.

October 12, 2007

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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.