Al Filreis | Jacket2

Anne Tardos, five from 'Uxudo'

Al Filreis

Uxudo is Anne Tardos’s interlingualist book of 1999 (Tuumba Books/O Books). At an “After-Englishes” event in Manoa, Hawaii, that same year, Tardos gave an introduction to the Uxudo project. She then read passages from the book. Here is a sampling of five poems/sections:

“She Put It Mildly,” p. 55 [audio segment here; audio recording starts at 00:00 here]. Click on the image above for a larger view of the text.

Adrienne Rich reading at Stanford

Al Filreis

At PennSound we have now segmented — divided a recording into titled poem-length segments — a reading given by Adrienne Rich in 1973. The segmentation was done by PennSound staffer Hannah Judd.

Introduction (3:18): MP3
Burning Oneself In (1:28): MP3
On violence (2:58): MP3
Didactic Poem (1:38): MP3
In the Evening (0:55): MP3
I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus (1:28): MP3
Unwritten Novel (2:43): MP3
The Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect (2:30): MP3
Waking in the Dark (4:26): MP3
Incipience (2:10): MP3
The Stranger (1:33): MP3
Merced (3:13): MP3
A Primary Ground (2:33): MP3
Translations (1:55): MP3
The Phenomenology of Anger (7:11): MP3
Diving Into the Wreck (4:04): MP3

Nathaniel Mackey on 'Splay Anthem'

Al Filreis

Nathaniel Mackey joined host Leonard Schwartz in October of 2006 for a conversation about — and selected reading from — Mackey’s Splay Anthem. Thanks now to PennSound’s Hannah Judd, we are able to present the segments of this audio, as follows:

On Splay Anthem structure (2:38): MP3
On “Mu” (6:38): MP3
“Mu” sixteenth part (2:51): MP3
On movement (4:54): MP3
On ska (2:45): MP3
On Andoumboulou (9:04): MP3
“Song of the Andoumboulou 50: Ring of the Well” (8:29): MP3
On pronouns (6:22): MP3
On “Nub” (2:21): MP3
From “Song of the Andoumboulou 60” (1:09): MP3
On new work (7:27): MP3

Jena Osman on sentimentality and objectification in William Carlos Williams

Al Filreis

On November 11, 2008, the Kelly Writers House hosted a program called “William Carlos Williams and the Women: The Legacy of WCW at 125.” Sarah Dowling, Jena Osman, Pattie McCarthy, and Michelle Taransky. Here, above, is a portion of the video recording of this event — Jena Osman’s talk on sentimentality and objectification in Williams’s imagism.

Rosanne Cash performs Leonard Cohen's 'Democracy'

Al Filreis

Rosanne Cash recited the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy” on January 15, 2017, at the PEN-sponsored “Writers Resist” anti-Trump protest on the steps of the New York Public Library.

It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

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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.