Al Filreis | Jacket2

The clumsy Euro-modernist sources of an anti-anti-intellectual

On Charles Bernstein's 'Pitch'

Al Filreis

On April 12, 2016, Charles Bernstein gave a reading from his new-new book Pitch of Poetry at the Kelly Writers House. I gave the introduction. Earlier I published a version of that introduction here in my Jacket2 commentary series, titling it “Clumsy, erroneous, freakish, foreign.” Now, thanks to the video editing of Dylan Leahy of the PennSound staff, I am able to make available at video recording, below. And below that is a second video clip from the Pitch event — Bernstein's finale: a selection from the aphorisms that appear toward the end of the book.

On Naomi Replansky's last poem ever (video)

'About Not Writing' collaboratively read

Al Filreis

We at ModPo have added new materials to ModPo pertaining to Naomi Replansky’s poem “About Not Writing.” This, according to Replansky herself (who is ninety-nine years old as of this posting), is the last poem she will ever write, and, as the title suggests, is about that very cessation. The links below will work for you if you are enrolled in ModPo (it’s free — enroll here any time).

[] read Naomi Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO TEXT
[] watch Naomi Replansky perform “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO
[] watch a discussion of Replansky’s “About Not Writing”: LINK TO VIDEO

These are now part of the ModPoPLUS syllabus, chapter 3 (week 5). The discussion was moderated by me and Anna Strong, and we were joined by ModPo’ers near and far: Alonna Shaw, Arif Dalvi, Mandana Chaffa, Nadia Ghent, Raymond Maxwell, and Shoshana Greenberg. Chris Martin and Zach Carduner did the filming, and Zach did the editing.

Ahmad Almallah: Finding the way between

Al Filreis

Ahmad Almallah, screenshot from the film "<a href="https://youtu.be/FdfuOkrAwcQ"> Words Adorned: Andalusian Muwashshah Poetry </a>" — Ahmad Almallah, screenshot from the film " Words Adorned: Andalusian Muwashshah Poetry "

In new poems Ahmad Almallah seeks not a way that is mapped or directed. Nor does he follow a course. His way — his poetic mode and compositional method — is to be scrappily “on the move” (as he writes in a new work), “the metal collecting / the way on the way.” The metapoetic nonnarrative gesture here is primarily aesthetic, of course (Almallah is a poet first and foremost — in intention, vocation, and desire), but the recalcitrant formal heterodoxy seems to be at the same time never an artist’s choice (I’m guessing he hates that MFA-program cliché) so much as an inexorable expression of obsessive topical urgency.

Li Zhimin reads 'A Goal for Mutual Understanding'

Al Filreis

Below is a video clip from Li Zhimin’s recent reading at the Kelly Writers House, introduced by Charles Bernstein. It was edited by PennSound’s Dylan Leahy from the full video recording of the event. There is also, of course, an audio recording. For more information about the reading, click here.

Li Zhimin is a poet writing in both the English and Chinese languages. He has published numerous chapbooks of poem since 2001. His most recent collection is Zhongalish: Think and Feel Globally (August 2016). Currently, Li serves as Chief Professor of Western Literature Studies at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, and is Director of both its Modern Poetry Studies Centre and Foreign Languages Training Centre.

Alan Bernheimer's multilingual poetics

Q&A on January 17, 2017

Al Filreis

Alan Bernheimer (left) with Ariel Resnikoff — photo by Kelly Writers House staff posted to KWH Flickr site

This is a fifteen-minute excerpt from a fifty-four-minute event featuring Alan Bernheimer on multilingual poetics — on January 17, 2017, at the Kelly Writers House, in a series curated by Ariel Resnikoff. The excerpt features the session’s Q&A.

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Alan Bernheimer responds to questions about his translation of Philippe Soupault’s, Lost Profiles: A Memoir of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, which was published in November by City Lights. The book is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by a co-founder of the Surrealist movement. The video below is a fifteen-minute excerpt from a fifty-four-minute-long program held at the Kelly Writers House on January 17, 2017.

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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.