Al Filreis

edit, a new series

2009-11-10T07:38:00.005-05:00

Danny Snelson, newly a Philadelphian and physical in addition to virtual member of the Writers House and PennSound communities, has organized a new series at the Writers House - called "EDIT." On November 17 EDIT brings Jeremy James Foxtrot Johnson for a 6 PM program. Listen here for an announcement, with more details. (At right: Danny Snelson.)

not to enclose, but to move within

2009-11-10T06:51:00.004-05:00

I've made available a several-page excerpt from George Hartley's book on language poetry. This is the passage in which he outlines modernist influences: Dickinson, Stein, Ashbery, Williams, and Zukofsky. I chose a section that focuses particularly on Steinian and Ashberyian elements of the movement. On Stein:

Stein's importance for them appears to lie in the following qualities of her work:

1. Although her work appears to be meaningless, it does have meaning; in fact, it seems to be an exploration of the very conditions for meaning.

2. Meaning is not forwarded as something existing out in the world but as an interaction between subject and object.

3. Her work appears to operate under the assumptions of the Saussurean conception of meaning as a function of a system of difference.

4. She does not write in order to enclose (define, delimit, decipher) the world but to move within it; in other words, she does not function according to the static determinism of the noun but through the process of relationship.

5. Her foregrounding of the material side of language (sound, rhythm, syntax) is a formal analogy of the process of perception--the "movement 'spreading' from transparency . . . to the implied darkness & opacity of blindness."

I the people

2009-11-09T14:30:00.003-05:00

Today we're releasing episode #25 of the PoemTalk podcast series. This one features a discussion of Alice Notley's poem "I the People" with Zack Pieper, Joe Milutis, and Erica Kaufman. Click here for the PoemTalk site, full program notes, and links to the podcast, the recording of the poem, and PennSound's Alice Notley page.

Notley crew

2009-11-07T12:15:00.002-05:00

Joe Milutis, Zack Pieper and Erica Kaufman. They talked with me about Alice Notley for a PoemTalk episode being released on Monday. Stay tuned.

featured in iTunes

2009-11-06T11:42:00.006-05:00

As of this writing, the Kelly Writers House is featured on iTunes - in the music store under "writers & writing." Click here and you'll be taken to a link directly to iTunes.

Writers House audio in iTunes: a sampling of 50 of our programs, and the complete run of our podcast series.

respiratory constraint

2009-11-06T11:26:00.003-05:00

John Shea is writing a series of "Tales from Webster's," each constrained by inclusion, consecutively, of words from the dictionary. A recent work in the series runs from respiratory system to resuscitator. It has been published in Literal Latte here. He calls them tales; to me they read like poetry; the magazines published them under fiction. Pay the category no mind.

context art

2009-11-06T10:28:00.008-05:00

Just now. I'm happy when I see that ART is at the center of the noisy discourse. Then again, shift to the right side of the bumper, art has become peripheral. So much for my predilection. I'm standing in front of the great Gehry performing arts center at Bard College--buttressed by several giant polished-chrome bumpers turned on their sides--and I can't help impose the aesthetic on the tawdry car parked nearby. (Cage asked, Which is more beautiful, the sound of a truck passing in front of a factory or the sound of it passing in front of a music school? I suppose my answer this morning is the latter.)

tweeting Al

2009-11-05T09:15:00.002-05:00

Follow me on twitter here: https://twitter.com/Afilreis. Click on the image at left for a sampling of recent tweets.

redesign

2009-11-04T15:18:00.003-05:00

I'm working with the painter Ken Krug to redesign my old, old huge "Representations of the Holocaust" web site (born as a gopher [pre-web]) in 1993). Here (above) is a sneak preview of the new look.

perpetuating myths of originality (Goldsmith responds)

2009-11-04T06:17:00.019-05:00

Kenny Goldsmith responds to my blog entry of October 12, entitled "5-page paper on Stevens, yours for just $59.75." Here's what Kenny writes:

A few weeks ago, you blogged about the conundrum of finding a paper mill selling an interpretation of Steven's poem "Mozart, 1935," which might have incorporated your own work on this subject into it, a remix of your own words. You say, "Is it possible that I would have been buying a hack-job remix of my own article on the poem?" You then go on to say that "I think I would have asked for reimbursement from my university-sponsored research fund for this expense. After all, it would have been research. No? How desperate would a student have to be to use one of these sites?"

My answer is not desperate at all. In fact, each semester, I force my students to purchase a paper from paper mills and present it as their final project as if they wrote it themselves. Each student must stand up in front of the class and present it with such irrefutable conviction as if they themselves wrote it and truly believe every word of it. Failure to do so convincingly results in group censure from the class, and ultimately in a lower grade.

The kernel of how we must teach today is embedded in your quandary. By reifying the old lines of "this is mine" and "this is not," we perpetuate myths of originality. Was your research sprung completely from your own genius? Most likely not. You sourced it from dozens of places. What is original -- and genius -- is the way you wove those sources together. But isn't that what good research always has been? It's just that the digital makes this process transparent and eminently elastic in ways that were hidden before.

Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" (the title of her forthcoming book on the subject) to describe a new tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that due to changes brought on by technology and the internet, our notion of genius -- a romantic isolated figure -- is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined a term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing and maintaining a writing machine.

It's time to let go of notions of propriety and ownership of language, particularly in university situation where there is a subsidized economy. None of us are writing for profit -- we are subsidized by research funds and university positions -- and are thus obliged to take the most theoretically radical and experimental positions possible. Imagine if other research wings of universities such as science labs took the safe and known ways? They certainly would be upbraided for not taking chances. Why can't we do the same?

- - -

Now my reply to Kenny's reply:

I'm sort of hoping that the parents of our students will see the $59 charge on their sons' and daughters' credit-card bill, and a discussion of this purchase will ensue. In such a conversation--I'm imagining it taking place over the Thanksgiving dinner, with Aunt Minnie and Uncle Schloime listening in--Kenny's teaching will spread like waves across the pre-postmodern generations, the tuition-paying traditionalists who thought that by sending their kids to an Ivy League school they were escaping unoriginality rather than venturing to its center.

Anyway, the tone of my blog entry was all wrong, as I can see upon re-reading, and I think threw Kenny off. I find the fact of a $60 50-page paper on Wallace Stevens absurd and I'm not primarily concerned about the fate of my own academic writing in the world of digital copying. Really. I don't disagree with Kenny--as he knows--about remix. I don't fear it and I have very little concern about owning my interpretation of a poem by Wallace Stevens. It was my hook, my start on writing about the topic. Already not a fan of the grade-giving and grade-getting system of higher education (a view to which this blog amply testifies), I'm bemused by the lack of consciousness and laziness of people in that system feeling the need to pay top dollar for a dumbed-down academic remix. A little bit work of could have produced the same for free. You see, that's where we begin to see differences between Kenny's uncreative writing course and the paper mills he seems to favor (he doesn't really favor them--imagine him and the purveyors of such a venture in the same room!--but his position necessitates that he be annoyed by people annoyed by them). Kenny's students are (to say the least) extremely conscious of the aesthetic or anti-aesthetic (but that's still an aesthetic) of the sampling, and the violation of conventional values--a violation felt as such by the giant middle on the spectrum running from cool anti-authorial stealing to lazy pirating advantage-taking profiteers--is material for his pedagogy and their learning. He "forces" them to engage in such violation and it's the beginning of their venture into the art world. Kenny and his students, brilliant in their creative uncreativity, are doing one thing, which I admire and literally support. And his world is energized by its all being free. A gift economy thriving on the new digital world in which authorship has happily disappeard. I'm there too. But the purveyors of the paper mill have created something that is the opposite of the gift economy, and the result is an uncreative uncreativity that only very very superficially befits the world Kenny enjoys living in.

To me, this is all about pedagogy and the fate of higher education. I adore the energetic, intense, resourceful (that's, by the way, another word for creative) not-lazy students who are self-consciously participating in the lazy buy-your-papers economy. I don't adore students for whom this process is a matter of sheer unselfconscious laziness. The former is learning, being part of a community of learners (such as in Kenny's amazing classes), and it is always, always a rigorous uncreativity. The latter are mere corner-cutters, seeking the easy. I have little time for them. What Kenny and his students do is not easy--seems easy, but isn't. Let's make that distinction.

crime fiction

2009-11-03T09:57:00.002-05:00

At left: Lenny Cassuto and SJ Rozan. Cassuto has written a literary history of crime fiction and Rozan has written 11 crime-fiction novels. They will lead a conversation about crime fiction at the Writers House next Tuesday at November 10. Click here for a 50-second audio announcement about this event.

tweeting Walt & other day topics

2009-11-03T08:54:00.003-05:00

Here's your link to the cartoon. I'm fascinated of course by the constraint borne upon Whitman's cornucopian language. (Thanks for Kristina Baumli for alerting me to this.) To subscribe to "your daily Al," click here.

the future of the book?

2009-11-02T18:10:00.001-05:00

These are indeed bookshelves.

sound anthology

2009-11-02T13:28:00.005-05:00

My dear old friend John Richetti has been recording an anthology of restoration and 18th-century poetry for several months - for PennSound. And today we are announcing the completion of this new sound anthology, hoping that (among others) teachers are able to use it to bring the poems to life and to present an easy-to-access (and free, of course) set of downloadable files. This is the first of its kind for this body of writing, so far as we know.

Grenier video

2009-11-01T19:47:00.002-05:00

The video recording of Robert Grenier's presentation at the Writers House last week is now available.

dropped calls? feh, try dropped phone

2009-11-01T07:43:00.005-05:00

Beth Kwon has dropped her iPhone, and now, on her blog, discusses her sad telephonic options and fate. "Mr. Jobs, you're killing me" is a memorable line here.

my delicious links

2009-10-31T18:00:00.005-04:00

poets in the green room

2009-10-31T17:52:00.003-04:00

Robert Grenier and Ron Silliman at the Kelly Writers House this past Tuesday (October 27), just before Bob's reading/talk.

can a poem be political?

2009-10-31T12:43:00.002-04:00

Kevin Davies on political poetry:

I'm reminded of Ed Dorn saying something like 'You're handing me this piece of paper and telling me it's political? It's about as political as a gopher hole.' I'm totally agnostic about the ability of unpopular verse to affect change in the political world. I just don't believe it. I don't think for a second, oh, here I am striking a blow against capital. Political change is not made by the choices that we're making in verse. We're doing this so that certain possibilities can exist in the world. So that works of art can exist, temporarily, and they'll certainly bear traces of our political vision because if they don't they're no good.

Ezraversity circa 1960

2009-10-30T13:15:00.002-04:00

When Ezra Pound and Donald Hall converged.

Alf teaches poetry virtually

2009-10-30T06:25:00.003-04:00

Here "I" am - my avatar, Alf Fullstop - teaching modernist poetry last night to a group of folks from around the world (one from Puerto Rico, another from Hong Kong) in Second Life's virtual Kelly Writers House.

transcribing the world, no more or less than that

2009-10-29T09:56:00.004-04:00

Transcribing the world this entire year with our students.

the whenever-we-feel-like-it aesthetic thrives

2009-10-29T08:20:00.004-04:00

"Whenever We Feel Like It" is a new poetry series. It's put on by Committee of Vigilance members Michelle Taransky and Emily Pettit. The Committee of Vigilance is a subdivision of Sleepy Lemur Quality Enterprises, which is the production division of The Meeteetzee Institute. Yeah, yeah. There have been three readings so far, the most recent quite recent: October 21. Click here for information about all three events and audio recordings divided by poet. On October 21: Sanae Lemoine, Joshua Harmon, and Andrew Zawacki.

Ashbery actually explicates

2009-10-26T23:07:00.004-04:00

Rare it is that John Ashbery explains one of his poems. But, in a radio interview in 1966, he did that just. He read "These Lacustrine Cities" and then went line by line offering various sorts of explanations - paraphrase, sources for phrases and words, a sense of the process of composition. Now we have released a PennSound podcast, #18 in our series, featuring this recording, which aired on WKCR. The podcast is 18 minutes long.

autumnal podcast

2009-10-26T18:20:00.010-04:00

Today we release the 22nd in our series of Kelly Writers House podcasts. This one features 5 excerpts from the vast archive of our programs - all having, in one way or another, to do with autumn. Autumn comes to 3805 Locust. Have a listen.

The podcast features Ellen Yin (founder of Fork restaurant), Tom Devaney (from his poem "At Franklin's Grave"), former longtime KWH director Kerry Sherin Wright ("Autumn Lullaby"), Eileen D'Angelo ("Love Letter to a Moody Sea") and Ben Lerner (excerpt from "Doppler Elegies").