Al Filreis | Jacket2

A Polish poet writes 33 poems directly into English

Grzegorz Wróblewski's new project

Al Filreis

Grzegorz Wróblewski has written a new series of poems. "From January to May 2023," he tells me, "I was intensively dealing with asemic writing and an unexpected, very unusual project for myself. During this time I wrote 33 poems directly in English. It was the first time in my life that I made such a linguistic experiment. They have no Polish equivalents. I made a volume of poetry out of it and gave it a title I Really Like Lovers of Poetry. Writing poems in English turned out to be a completely different internal issue for me, a mysterious and at the same time fascinating psychological journey. So far, my poems have been translated from Polish by excellent people, such as Piotr Gwiazda or Adam Zdrodowski. I asked for proofreading by Marcus Silcock Slease. He sent the poems back to me very quickly and made no major changes to them. I didn't know how to define this process."

Grzegorz Wróblewski writes the following about a series of new poems he has written:

Notes toward a pedagogy of ModPo

Al Filreis

Published in the June 2023 issue of Marsh Hawk Press Review — some of my speculations on what has been happening in our open, open-ended online course on poetry in the past decade. I attempt to describe an emergent learner-centered learning that is motivated by certain kinds of poems and situates itself in a third space.

Grezgorz Wróblewski's asemic art

Al Filreis

Painting of Grzegorz Wróblewski by Janusz Tyrpak.

Over the years, Grzegorz Wróblewski has appeared in Jacket2 in various forms and genres. In 2015 we published five of his poems. My commentary series featured his book Zero Visibility in 2017. In 2014 we transcribed an interview conducted by Piotr Gwiazda. The late John Tranter, in Jacket issue 29, April 2006, published three poems, including “I put off the knife from my hand till tomorrow” (“Blood can wait / Blood will cool yet / From January till the month called December”). One can find more appearances here.

Questlove on Baraka

Further notes on PoemTalk episode 128

Al Filreis

In 2018, PoemTalk's 128th episode was made — a conversation in which Tyrone Williams, Aldon Nielsen, and William J. Harris joined me in the Arts Cafe of the Kelly Writers House to talk before a live audience about Amiri Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things (In Town).” Go HERE for a program note and links to the edited audio recording of the episode and also an unedited video recording. Recently we found a relevant piece published in the New York Times four years earlier. It was written by Questlove, and it refers to the studio session in which The Roots collaborated with Baraka to record "Something in the Way of Things."

Chat GPT cannot say why Stein is apt to teach online

Al Filreis

After a few unremarkable responses from ChatGPT about Gertrude Stein in ModPo, there was this bland answer. Perhaps this AI program isn't yet picking up content from YouTube videos. The third paragraph here is just guessing, based on what it finds about Stein on the web generally, that ModPo focuses on literary history in the survey-course sort of way. Most interesting to me: the program did not analyze any sort of relationship between Stein and the open online course form—many people, many interpretations, open verse, etc. The AI here is "thinking" in an authoritarian (this is the answer) sort of way even about Stein when asked the "why" about online teaching. What it's missing is not a super-subtle point, I think, and such an idea is amply available across web content. In short: somewhat surprisingly, not meta- at all.

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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.”

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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.