last night's Second Life poetry session

Here's our Faculty Director's 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.

put down the cheese, Alf

At left you see an avatar, Alf Fullstop, preparing to lead a seminar in the virtual Kelly Writers House in Second Life this very night - Thursday, October 29. The poem on the wall, WCW's "Between Walls," is the third of three poems Alf will be teaching. This is our first quasi-formal venture into Second Life with friends of the Writers House. SL gurus we know have built a gorgeous Writers House there, with an Arts Cafe, a living room with a green couch, an upstairs seminar room, a garden. Quite nice. The other night Alf was "in there" and saw wine and cheese on a table in the living room. He learned to "pick up" the cheese and began eating it. Two days later he was back in SL, trying to interact with another avatar, and found that he was still eating the cheese. We need to teach Alf how to put down the cheese.

fall comes to 3805 Locust

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").

new Facebook page

We at KWH are pleased to announce that we have a new Facebook page. Here it is. Please have a look and become a friend. You'll find announcements of upcoming events, links to audio and video clips, comments and updates from members of the KWH community, photos, of course a list of and links to our many friends: poets worldwide, students, Penn alumni, emergent writers and eminent writers, prospective students, supporters...

KWH & Inquirer join forces

We're pleased to announce a new partnership between the Kelly Writers House and the Philadelphia Inquirer, a project coordinated on our side, in part, by Povich Writer-in-Residence Dick Polman. This collaboration has now produced the Penn page in "Student Union 34": college.philly.com/penn. Through this effort, young Penn journalistic writers will be regularly published in the city's premier newspaper. (Do, please, check the web address above regularly for new entries, stories, essays, and features.) Today the site features Steven Waye's article about how pop culture-infused sermons abound in Fishtown.

Jen Scappettone

Our friends at PennSound were pleased a few months back to add a new author page: that of Jennifer Scappettone. Jen has been to the Writers House twice recently. Her page now includes a Segue/Bowery Poetry Club reading; both audio and video of a session she did at KWH with Lyn Hejinian, hosted by Rachel Levitsky; another session in which she read a series of her poems; and a conversation, done as a PennSound podcast.

New Zealander hung out

Wystan Curnow, art critic and poet, last spring spoke at the Writers House on curating as a critical practice. The event was shown live on KWH-TV and is already available as a video recording. Wystan was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, and studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Yes, Penn. So his two-week visit here was actually a return to his alma mater many many years later. One afternoon during his visit he joined Al Filreis, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman to record a PoemTalk episode on a poem by Louis Zukofsky--which was released recently. Then everyone went downstairs for his very good talk on curating. Have a look.

ArtsEdge residency supports artists

Last year was the first year of our ArtsEdge artist-in-residence program, which we're doing in collaboration with the department of fine arts in Penn's School of Design. We offer housing, workspace, and a significant rent subsidy--and, if apt, a course to teach. Greg Romero was our first ArtsEdge-er, a playwright. During his time as artist-in-residence he staged a play-in-progress at the Writers House and, at the time, the Philly Fringe Festival blog ran an entry about it.

when George Oppen turned 100

Our pal Tom Devaney organized a celebration of George Oppen's 100th birthday - and the event happened at the Writers House in April '08. Soon after, we set up a special PennSound page with links to audio recordings of the presenters. Now we've released a PennSound podcast featuring a 23-minute excerpt from that event. The photo here was taken that night - George Economou, Michael Heller, Tom Devaney and Tom Mandel, listening to Ron Silliman present on Oppen.

My Third Eye Sees...

Last Friday, Write-On! head coaches Rachel Shepard (C'11), Collin Schenk (C'11), and Zachary Lyons (C'12), introduced a group of Lea Elementary School 6th, 7th and 8th graders to their third-eyes. Using a writing exercise adapted from Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry, Lea students and their Write-On! coaches collaborated to write a series of poems that discover and reveal the differences between what is seen, what is known, and what is imagined. You can read their poems here, on the Lea Elementary page. We hope you'll check the page regularly for new student poems. Write-On! is Kelly Writers House's literacy outreach program that introduces West Philadelphia students to reading and discussing literature, as well as writing and presenting their own creative writing. Write-On! is supported by The Esther T. Saxon Fund, established by Penn alumni Brian (W'90)and Jerilyn Perman (C'91).

Jerome Rothenberg today

Today: Jerome Rothenberg and others will talk about romantic & postromantic poetry at 5 PM. Join us! Click on the calendar entry for this program and find out more. Come at 5 PM and stay for the reception at 6:30 (good eats) and then stay for the 7 PM poetry reading. Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known poet with over eighty books of poetry and several assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred (1968, Doubleday), Shaking the Pumpkin (1972, Doubleday), Revolution of the Word (1974, Seabury-Continuum Books), and Poems for the Millennium Volumes 1 and 2 with Pierre Joris (1995 and 1998, University of California Press). A Book of Witness, his twelfth book of poems from New Directions, appeared in 2002 (New Directions), and a thirteenth book, Triptych, appeared in 2007 (New Directions). A first translation into French of Technicians of the Sacred was published by Jose Corti in Paris in 2008, and a nineteenth-century prequel to Poems for the Millennium, co-edited with Jeffrey Robinson, appeared in early 2009. His second collection of literary essays, Poetics & Polemics 1980-2005, appeared at the end of 2008, and new books of poems scheduled for 2009 and 2010 include Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010.

the sun is not the sun

Last spring, Matthew Abess, Cecilia Corrigan, Ned Eisenberg, Kim Eisler, Trisha Low, and Kaegan Sparks explored the topography of testimony to life in extremis (in particular, the Holocaust). This followed from the course on the problems of representing the Holocaust, taught every other year in the Writers House, where the issue is most discernible in discussions of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the poems of Paul Celan, the study of survivors made by Terrence Des Pres, and the videotaped survivor testimonies housed at Yale University. That's the intellectual geneology or paths that converged, roughly speaking, and this group, led by Matt, journeyed along it quite a bit further. They made a presentation at the Writers House; now we have both audio and video recordings of the event available. The Holocaust course is being taught again in KWH's Arts Cafe. Anyone who wants to sit in on a session should call (215) 573-9749.

invisible cities - puppet show

Last spring Tom Devaney's creative writing class created and performed a puppet show in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), called "New Invisible Cities." The project was inspired by Italo Calvino's dream-like masterpiece, Invisible Cities. The students and Tom worked with Beth Nixon's Ramshackle Enterprises. Now you can watch a video that will give you a good sense of the project and the show.

Nick Spitzer was here

Nick Spitzer, an musical ethnographer who loves to talk about the nexus of cultures that is New Orleans, came to the Writers House back in May (Alumni Day) to tell some "stories and songs from the road." He's of course the producer and host of public radio's "American Routes." Of course we made a video of the event - also downloadable audio. Our Faculty Director Al Filreis happily introduced Nick, grateful that a few years ago he found us at the Writers House and instantly understood the experiment in creative learning community we were trying.

Fanny Howe's "2002"

Back in October 2003 the Writers House hosted a weekend-long gathering called "Poet-invasion Poetics." On Friday night we went around the room (Arts Cafe at KWH) and most participants read and/or talked. We recorded this session. The next night we held a giant group reading. Among the seminar participants: Rod Smith, Mark McMorris, Ron Silliman, Michael Fried, Erica Hunt, Tracie Morris, Saskia Hamilton, Tim Carmody, Jo Park, Jessica Lowenthal, Kathy Lou Schultz.

Recently our friend Jenny Lesser went back to Fanny Howe's Friday night reading. Jenny listened to the recording and segmented the two poems. They are: "Far and Near" and the poem called "2002". Of course we've added these to PennSound's Fanny Howe page.