Tag cloud

Al Filreis

Below you see a tag cloud generated by TagCrowd.com. TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. I created a tag clowd by using as sourcetext the typescript of the first chapter of my new book. I've set it here to create an image of words based on frequency of use, asking it to choose only the top 50. I don't know where "oj" and such "words" came from, but "ltr" I know is the abbreviation for "letter" (as in an archival letter) used in the footnotes. And "Mac" is the first half of the surname "Mac Low" which the machine reads as a separate term because of the space. Thank goodness I've used "poetry" more often than "communist"!

created at TagCrowd.com

"TagCrowd is being used far beyond the online realm: as topic summaries for speeches and written works; as visual summaries for survey data mining; as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start; as resumes in a single glance; as visual poetry."

Visual poetry. That I can see.

Okay, then. Now I'm creating a tag cloud without the frequency numbers from the text of a magazine article about Gertrude Stein, a review by Philip Hensher of Janet Malcolm's new book about Gertrude and Alice. Here goes:

a about after alice americans an and are as be book but every for have her i in is it malcolm mean much not of one read stein that the there they time to toklas up was with work write

created at TagCrowd.com

Finally let's try a poem itself as the sourcetext. I use William Carlos Williams's "The Rose Is Obsolete" from Spring and All and here is the result:

created at TagCrowd.com

The original poem is here.

November 2, 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.