Ted Berrigan at Bard College, 1982

Al Filreis

Recently we found a recording of Ted Berrigan’s reading at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, December 15, 1982: it had not been segmented yet, and naturally we were curious to know which poems he performed on that occasion. Thanks to Anna Zalokostas, Berrigan's PennSound page now includes links to the individual poems, as well as, of course, the whole recording. Here are the segments:

introduction (0:52): MP3
discussing his writing (15:09): MP3
A City Winter (0:13): MP3
A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1:29): MP3
Give Them Back, Who Never Were (4:02): MP3
Now that I (0:34): MP3
Okay. First. ... (1:38): MP3
Every day back & forth (1:07): MP3
Turk (0:56): MP3
Let No Willful Fate Misunderstand (2:01): MP3
Warrior, Warrior (1:22): MP3
To Sing the Song, That Is Fantastic (1:39): MP3
In Your Fucking Utopias (4:26): MP3
XIII (2:08): MP3
The School Windows Song (3:22): MP3
Without Scruple (2:07): MP3
Ass-face (0:29): MP3
Natchez (2:01): MP3
Space (3:31): MP3
To Book-Keepers (3:58): MP3
Stars & Stripes Forever (0:38): MP3
Down on Mission (0:44): MP3
Dice Riders (0:39): MP3
The Way It Was in Wheeling (0:58): MP3
Sleeping Alone (2:54): MP3
Blue Galahad (0:52): MP3
Sweet Iris (3:54): MP3
Creature (1:43): MP3
Providence (3:29): MP3
Wantonness (1:53): MP3
You'll do good if you play it like you're (1:30): MP3
Pillow Talk (1:35): MP3
Interstices (1:27): MP3
To Be Serious (2:07): MP3
Mutiny (1:49): MP3
Ode (0:48): MP3
Poets Tribute to Philip Guston (0:44): MP3
The Who's Last Tour (1:17): MP3
Red Shift (2:11): MP3

April 25, 2014

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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.