When Harold met Wally

Al Filreis

Harold Bloom was "madly in love" with the poems of Wallace Stevens from the time he was an undergraduate at Cornell University.He traveled from Ithaca to New Haven in 1949 and found his way somehow into the reading Stevens was giving that night for the members of a New Haven (not Yale-affiliated) humanities group. That night Stevens would read a short version of what became "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Norman Holmes Pearson, the legendary Yale English professor (and conduit between Yale and the OSS/CIA), saw the lonely-looking young Bloom and took him under wing, at least long enough to encourage the young man to approach the great poet, which Bloom did.

I don't how many times Bloom has told the story of his one encounter with the beloved poet, but a few years ago it was recorded as Bloom taught an undergraduate class at Yale, devoting all hour and twenty minutes of his lecture to a discussion of one poem, "The Poems of Our Climate" of 1938. Today, as I did household chores, brought in the houseplants from the back deck, made my lunch, etc., I listened to the entire lecture, hilariously and brilliantly digressive (at several points Bloom admits to being insane and that the main issuance of his madness is an addiction to never approaching the finality of any point). I then edited the recording and here is the 5-minute segment in which Bloom tells the story of meeting Stevens in 1949.

The title of Bloom's book about Stevens is indeed taken from the poem he taught the day the Yale podcast people made their recording: "The Poems of Our Climate." In that book, not surprisingly, he discusses "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and here are a few pages.

November 1, 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.