Al Filreis | Jacket2

Langston Hughes and Studs Terkel in 1960

Al Filreis

Note: the audio linked below is temporarily unavailable.

Thanks to George Drury and Lois Baum, PennSound has recently added a stunningly good cache of audio recordings from the “Word of Mouth” series, originally aired on WFMT at Loyola University, Chicago. Among these recordings is a conversation among Langston Hughes, John Sellers, James Cotton, and Otis Spann, moderated by Studs Terkel, at Roosevelt University, aired on WFMT on July 15, 1960. Here is your link to the forty-seven-minute audio: MP3. (We are in the process of segmenting this recording by topic. Stay tuned, as it were.)

Tracie Morris, five pieces (video)

Al Filreis

Tracie Morris performed five of her poems in honor of William J. (Billy Joe) Harris on March 11, 2017, in Brooklyn, New York. Thanks to the efforts of Dylan Leahy, we are making them available as video segments. In the order in which the videos are presented below, they are: “Blackout, 1977,” “Enclosed” (a response to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons), “Morenita,” “Postcard of Parmigianino’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” and “Queens.”

Two poems performed by Tyrone Williams (video)

Al Filreis

From his recent reading given at the Kelly Writers House, we present two video excerpts (thanks for the video editing of Dylan Leahy of the PennSound staff).

Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt

Video recording of one poem by each

Al Filreis

Daphne Marlatt, Fred Wah, and Colin Browne visited Philadelphia on March 15, 2017. They joined me for a recording of an episode of PoemTalk on Larissa Lai’s Nascent Fashion, and then give a triple reading at the Penn Book Center. That reading was recorded on audio and will be available soon at the poets’ PennSound pages. Meantime, I captured performances of two poems as video recordings — Fred Wah reading (his encore poem) from his great book Is a Door, and Daphne Marlatt reading a piece from her Vancouver Poems.

Nathaniel Mackey on Sonny Rollins

[6 minutes; audio]

Al Filreis

In his April 24, 1985, presentation of "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," Nathaniel Mackey spoke about Sonny Rollins for six minutes or so. Hannah Judd of the PennSound staff has now segmented the entire recording of the talk by topic. Here is the segment on Rollins: LINK.

And here are links to all the segments:

On Sound and Sentiment (6:22): MP3
On Sound and Symbol (4:43): MP3
On phantom limbs (5:15): MP3
On Legba (3:02): MP3
On Jean Toomer (9:13): MP3
On William Carlos Williams (20:11): MP3
On the Caribbean and Legba (14:49): MP3
On Williams and stumbling (4:54): MP3
On Ellison (9:22): MP3

On limping (2:06): MP3
On Sonny Rollins (6:35): MP3
On music and writing (4:38): MP3
On "Cane" (7:45): MP3
On wholeness (9:24): MP3
On partiality (14:47): MP3

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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.