Mandana EM Chaffa organized a ModPo meet-up in NYC (which Emily Harnett and Ali Castleman and others attended) and here is what Mandana wrote afterwards:
“Can poetry offer solace in times of turmoil? How do aleatory poetry and chance operations reflect our modern society and the impact of so many sources of information? How does Week 9 — and Week 10 — poetry circle back to where we started two and a half months ago? That, and more, was on the table (except that we didn’t use a table) during this last NYC ModPo meet-up for 2016, with our very special guests and amazing TAs, Emily Harnett and Ali Castleman. They are even more awesome in person than on your screens.
Jake Marmer and I, on the road (as it were) in San Francisco, conversed somewhat randomly on Bob Kaufman’s “CROOTEY SONGO” and Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” How could these two poems connect? Maybe they don’t but we gave it a try. To hear a reading of Kaufman's poem, skip forward in the video to 25:19.
ModPo people in LA: James, Lori, Leigh, Darlene & Robin
ModPo people gather at a coffee shop in Los Angeles on October 22, 2016, to record an improvised collaborative close reading of Frank O'Hara's "Les Luths." HERE is a link to the video they made. HERE is a link to ModPo's collection/augmented syllabus called "CCCR" (Community Collaborative Close Readings).
Charles Bernstein after reading at the Kelly Writers House on April 12, 2016; photo by Al Filreis
Pitch of Poetry is a book full of important essays. And of course I urge you to read the whole thing. The seven essays under “L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E.” The seventeen pieces about individual writers under the titular heading “Pitch.” The comic deadly serious epilogue under “Bent Studies,” that catalogue of recalcitrances, aphoristic chips from the workbench of a life’s work of radical anti-sectarianism, index-sourcework for what I take to be Charles Bernstein’s most significant contribution: his incessant anti-anti-intellectualism. If you can’t manage all that reading, I recommend starting with the eleven collaboratively written essays under “Echopoetics,” for there is where readers will locate the heart of this poet-critic’s intellectual generosity and aesthetic flexibility.
What follows is the text of an introduction I gave at a book launch event marking the publication of Pitch of Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2016) held at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia on April 12, 2016. — Al Filreis
This is a book full of important essays. And of course I urge you to read the whole thing. The seven essays under “L=A=N-G=U=A=G=E.” The seventeen pieces about individual writers under the titular heading “Pitch.” The comic deadly serious epilogue under “Bent Studies,” that catalogue of recalcitrances, aphoristic chips from the workbench of a life’s work of radical anti-sectarianism, index-sourcework for what I take to be Charles Bernstein’s most significant contribution: his incessant anti-anti-intellectualism. If you can’t manage all that reading, I recommend starting with the eleven collaboratively written essays under “Echopoetics,” for there is where readers will locate the heart of this poet-critic’s intellectual generosity and aesthetic flexibility. “Echopoetics” is a poetry of call and response. Its poetic theory and its frankly affirmed values are discernible variously in these essays, talks, conversations, statements and anti-programmatic programmatic dicta.