A Poetry Class for 36,000

December 10, 5:30pm in MIT’s 6-120

Al Filreis

Teaching Modern & Contemporary American Poetry to 36k

Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he
offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more than
36,000 students. The course, as in its previous versions, does not include
lectures, being based instead on discussion – the collaborative close
readings of poems. The course grows out of Filreis’s work at the Kelly
Writers House; he has been Faculty Director of this literary freespace since
its founding in 1995. Filreis is also co-founder of PennSound, the Web’s
main free archive of poetry readings, publisher of Jacket2 magazine, and
producer and host of “PoemTalk,” a podcast/radio series of close readings of
poems. In conversation with Nick Montfort, Filreis will discuss ModPo and
his perspective on writing, teaching, and digital media.

Filreis is Kelly Professor of English and Director of the Center for
Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is
the author of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to
Left, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modernism,
1945-60, and other works. He was chosen as Pennsylvania Professor of the
Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 2000.

Co-sponsored by the SHASS Dean’s Office and the Literature Section.

All Purple Blurb events are free and open to the public. The Purple Blurb
series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and Writing and
Humanistic Studies.