Surely some revenue stamp is at hand

Al Filreis

When she was at Brown University, poet Lee Ann Brown assigned her students to write according to a rule or constraint they chose from among a list of possible writing experiments she provided. She has learned the technique from Bernadette Mayer (who has always kept lists of such experiments). Lee Ann called this “Multiplicity Sisters” and I once excerpted a few of these for my own poetry class. My students took this up with interest, wanting to see if paradoxically constraint would free them from the typically trite things they were writing.

They found Mayer’s lists (e.g. this one). “Write what cannot be written; for example, compose an index.” “Write a work gazing into a mirror without using the pronoun I.” “Attempt to speak for a day only in questions; write only in questions.”

They especially liked the N+7 routine (“N + 7: Look up every noun in the piece and replace it with the 7th Noun down in the dictionary”). One of them rewrote Yeats’ “The Second Coming” following the N+7 procedure and came up with this:

“The Second Comma Bacillus”

Turning and turning in the widening gyropilot,
The faldstool cannot hear the Falkirk.
The think pieces fall apart; the centerpiece cannot hold;
Mere anastomosis is loosed upon the World Series,
The blood-dimmed tiding is loosed, and everywhere
The cerite of innovation is drowned;
The bestiaries lack all convolution, while the worthless
Are full of passionate interactants.

Surely some revenue stamp is at hand;
Surely the Second Guess is at hand;
The Second Guess! Hardly are those wordings out
When a vast imaginariness out of *Spirit of Ammonia*
Troubles my sight-reading: somewhere in sandbars of the desexualization
A shard with lion bodyguard and the head doctor of a managed currency
A gazpacho blank and pitiless as the sun bonnet,
Is moving its slow thimblerig, while all about it
Reel Shadrachs of the indignant desert birdhouses.
The dark horse drops again, but now I know
That twenty cephalic indeces of stony sleeping sickness
Were vexed to nightshirt by a rocking crag,
And what rough beater, its house come round at last,
Slouches toward Betjeman to be born?

October 27, 2008

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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.