we're closed this week but we're skittering across the snow

The Kelly Writers House is closed this week, so all the snow that fell on us here and on our many KWH affiliates who spend lots of time in New York didn't affect our operations or our programs. We are certainly looking forward a new semester of events, but in the meantime we're watching our happy pals skitter across the snow. A prime instance: in Manhattan on 12/27/10 Anthony DeCurtis' daughter Francesca and his wife Alex went out into Central Park to play, whereupon they were interviewed and filmed by CBS News. Click here to watch that night's CBS Evening News - go to 3:45 and you'll see Francesca and Alex. We imagine Anthony safe inside, drinking hot coffee and writing another of his fabulous reviews.

our very first live interactive webcast (July 1999)

On July 8, 1999, we at the Writers House held our first live interactive webcast. The discussion was all about William Carlos Williams's "To Elsie" (the pure products of America go crazy) from Spring and All. Al Filreis hosted and was joined by Bob Perelman, Shawn Walker (formerly our first director), and Kristen Gallagher. We fielded questions from people watching on the internet, among them Jena Osman and Terrence Diggory.

It was streamed as video in RealVideo format and preserved as a video later in the same format. (Those who have RealPlayers installed still can watch the grainy video.) Later we extracted the audio from the video and now we've segmented that audio into topical segments. Here are the segments:

[] Bob Perelman reading "To Elsie" (2:21)

[] Kristen Gallagher on facing alterity (4:30)

[] Al Filreis on the poem's uncertainty (1:54)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on "the pure products of America" and the issue of control (5:26)

[] Shawn Walker, Al Filreis, Kristen Gallagher and Bob Perelman on Williams' position towards Elsie (6:44)

[] Bob Perelman and Al Filreis on imagination (8:26)
audience comments and Bob Perelman on "peasant traditions" (3:17)

[] Bob Perelman on how the open architecture and "unsuccessful" quality of Williams' poems are relevant to poetics today

[] Al Filreis on Williams' attraction to the new "mixed" American culture

Here is the link to the page with links to audio and video.

Jamie-Lee's workshop students

Students in Jamie-Lee Josselyn's creative writing workshop performed their own writing at a recent event at the Writers House.

a few words from the Green Couch

We're sitting on the famous comfy Green Couch in our Karlan Family Alcove off the living room at the Writers House. Cozy and warm as always inside, and dismal early-winterish outside. Our programs slow down these days, as the university's semester winds down and faculty and students alike prep for big last papers and final exams. But we're also readying for a huge winter and spring of events, symposia, talks, performances and writing groups. (See the previous entry or click the audio stream just above for much more.)

January at the Writers House

Click here to listen to a summary of January 2011 events at the Writers House - including the several-day "North of Invention" program, a gallery exhibit of photographs by Linh Dinh, our annual "Mind of Winter" event, and the 5th birthday celebration of our Common Press. The photograph here, taken by John Carroll at the 2008 Mind of Winter program, gives you a sense of the fabulous soup we make on that wintry evening - or at least of the pleasure taken from said soup by Michelle Taransky.

we are thankful for poets

Click here to see the "PennSound Daily" entry for the Thanksgiving weekend. This is Mike Hennessey's survey of Thanksgiving poems in the PennSound archive, and there are some very good ones. So go there, have a listen, and be sure to include poets in your list of folks for whom to be thankful. We at 3805 Locust Walk wish everyone, our American friends of course but everyone else as well, a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Writers House turns 15 (YouTube video)

Jacquie Posey took some video at our recent 15th anniversary event at the Writers House - a reading given by four alumni writers. Then Jacquie edited it and has posted it to Penn's YouTube channel. Please watch when you have a moment. Here is a link to our web calendar entry for the event--which features links to the full video and audio of each of the four readings, plus Al Filreis's introduction.

Creative spirit award

Recently Penn held its 76th Alumni Award of Merit presentation. A few years ago--thanks for the hard work of Sheila Raman and others--the university decided to give an annual "Creative Spirit Award" as part of this ceremony. This year poet C. K. Williams (Penn '59) won and our own Gregory Djanikian--poet and director of the Creative Writing Program--gave the introduction. Click here for a video of Greg's intro and C. K. Williams's acceptance, which includes the reading of a poem.

Tony Kushner praises KWH in 2001

Tony Kushner, near the beginning of our talk in the spring of 2011 when he visited as a Writers House Fellow: "To return all of the outrageous compliments, I've really been impressed with the faculty and students I've met here. This has really been, in many, many years of dong this, the nicest two days I've spent on the road. So it's really been a great and wonderful thing. And I learned a new word, profusity, that I absolutely intent to use and I'm absolutely impressed that somebody got those lines of Esperanto. I think that that is really a testimonial to the acuity of the students and also to the fact that Zamenhof was right and it is the world's language." Needless to say, we cherish this great praise.

when Sandy Frazier was with us

Recently we listened again to our great conversation with Ian (Sandy) Frazier, recorded in 2006. Now we've segmented this audio recording into topical segments. Go here and listen to portions of the discussion on populism, Francis Parkman, the connection between democracy and the writing of lists, on the idea of an "open-hearted" American place. The students in the '06 Fellows seminar fell head over heels for Sandy, especially his epic about the American west, Great Plains. Now we hear that he's nearly finished with his big (bigger than Great Plains) book about Siberia. He told us about the book back in '06, and then recently his New Yorker editor, David Remnick (who visited the House a few weeks ago) told us of Sandy's further progress. We can't wait and we recommend Frazier to all our friends.

KWH'ers reach out to high-school kids

Allyson Even, Outreach Coordinator at the Kelly Writers House, has created some wonderful creative writing programming for West Philly high school students. The current issue of Philadelphia Weekly features an article on what Allyson has been doing. Here are several paragraphs that give you the background:

Last year, Even, a Latin American Latino Studies and Africana Studies major and a Creative Writing and Urban Education minor (yes, two majors and two minors), was hired as a work-study student to revive community outreach at Penn’s Kelly Writers House. The afternoon at West Philadelphia Catholic was just one of the many small-scale initiatives she organized, but the event prompted her to question whether the current outreach offerings at Penn was sufficient.

Currently, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships serves as a hub and sponsors for a comprehensive array of community services. Among these is Community School Student Partnership (CSSP), which recruits and trains Penn students to assist hired staff in mentoring and tutoring at West Philadelphia schools through a series of structured programs. The Kelly Writers House also hosts a series of literary-based outreach programs, including WriteOn!, in which fourth- through eighth-graders from two local schools come to the Writers House on select Fridays and Saturdays to engage with Penn students on extracurricular writing projects.

new episode of PoemTalk!

There's a new episode of PoemTalk!

For an event held at the Writers House on November 7, 2001, Jena Osman composed a new poem for the occasion. The occasion was given the title "Finding the Words" (as in: how can we find the words to bespeak a response to 9/11?) and Osman's poem was "Dropping Leaflets." Here is verbatim what she said as she introduced the poem at the Writers House: "The title of this program is 'Finding the Words.' Every day I look in the newspapers. I keep sensing the presence of what's not being told... 'Help me come up with a strategy to get through this white noise.' I don't have that strategy, except to call attention to components of that white noise so we can hear it for what it is. In the spirit of Marianne Moore, who often incorporated what she was reading into her poems, I'm going to read a piece made of words I found when I read transcripts of press conferences given by Bush, Ridge, Rumsfeld, and Cheney in the last few days. I read the transcripts, printed them out, I tore them up, and then I stood on a chair, and then I bombed my office floor with them as if they were leaflets and the leaflets told me what to do. So this piece is called 'Dropping Leaflets.'"

The text of the poem is given here and it was also published subsequently in An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004). The recording made on November 7, 2001, is available on Osman's PennSound author page and linked here.

Al Filreis convened Mark Nowak, Emily Abendroth and Jessica Lowenthal to talk about this poem and more generally some aspects of documentary poetics. They considered, among other things, what happens to such a historically specific writing when some of the context fades as a memory - and whether the aesthetic qualities of the poem become a primary impression. And yet the poem's rhetoric--if that's the right term for a poem constructed of found phrases--speaks to the very question of how we can make ourselves heard in all the centralizing, nationalistic white noise at such a moment.

homecoming: 4 alumni read

Homecoming weekend at KWH: we celebrated its 15th year by hosting an event, open to all, that featured four alumni writers (all former students of Al Filreis): Eric Umansky, who read an essay he'd published in Salon; Kerry Sherin Wright, former long-time director of KWH, who read part of a short story; Suzanne Maynard Miller, who, with some actor friends, staged three scenes from a new play; and Alicia Oltuski, who read about half of a short story about an East German family, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that set up a falling-of-wall re-enactment in the family store each day for tourists. The video embedded above is of Alicia reflecting on her years at the Writers House.

dial-a-poem: 215-746-POEM

About a year ago Curtis Fox, who produces and hosts a weekly poetry podcast for the Poetry Foundation, spoke with Al Filreis about our dial-a-poem project, which is part of a telephone system we at the Writers House set up, figuring that it was beginning to be, or was well into, an age once again in which telephony was the site of convergence for many if not all things communication. Which is a probably an over-fancy way of saying something obvious about how many of us walk around with smartphones and do email, texting and of course phone-calling on the one portable device. So when our email weekly calendars get sent out, listing and linking to upcoming events at the Writers House for the coming week, at the top of that announcement is our phone number: 215-746-POEM (215-746-7636). When you're looking at this emailed announcement on a smartphone, the device will automatically make a kind of hyperlink of the phone number (it knows to do this for every 10-digit number it sees). Touch that link or scroll to it and hit your button, and the phone will automatically dial it. Because of this, we figured we ought to be there with some cool telephony, retro and cutting-edge both. Try dialing 215-746-7635 right now and see what we mean. Press "3" and you'll hear a single poem recording from PennSound - a poem read at the Writers House. Press "4" and you'll hear a 1-minute performance from a member of the Writers House community. Click here and listen to Curtis Fox's interview with me about this new/old version of "dial-a-poem."

happy birthday

Today we celebrated Michelle Taransky's birthday at the Writers House. Sarah Arkebauer whipped up some of her delicious cupcakes, aptly decorated with various Taranskyisms, and of course there were various forms of glitter all around. Michelle, who was not surprised by the little party, went around with her best surprise face on. Happy birthday, Michelle!

Burt Kimmelman is here Tuesday at 6 PM

Poet BURT KIMMELMAN will be reading at the Writers House on Tuesday, October 26, at 6:00 PM. A professor of English at NJIT, he has been called “a successor to the lineage of William Carlos Williams and George Oppen” by Jerome Rothenberg, as well a projector of “great possibility” in his latest collection, As If Free. Please help us welcome Mr. KIMMELMAN, who’ll be introduced by our own Al Filreis!

Burt has published six collections of poetry – As If Free (Talisman House, Publishers, 2009), There Are Words (Dos Madres Press, 2007), Somehow (Marsh Hawk Press, 2005), The Pond at Cape May Point (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, First Life (Jensen/Daniels Publishing, 2000), and Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998); and, The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (Peter Lang Publishing, 1996; paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (Facts on File, 2005) and co- edited The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry (Facts on File, 2007). He has published scores of essays on medieval, modern, and contemporary poetry.

nonsense is okay to us

Our colleagues at PennSound have segmented a reading by Ray DiPalma. It took place on November 10, 1977, and he read with Michael Lally and Bruce Andrews. He read four pieces. One of them, very short, begins "It makes of nonsense..." We think it's quite compelling. Listen yourself and decide. We at 3805 Locust don't mind nonsense. In fact, it makes our day.

PennSound on YouTube

In this video clip, watch and hear Juliana Spahr read from her work, "The Incinerator." The clip is 8 minutes long and was prepared for our PennSound YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/pennsound. There are now 118 videos uploaded to PennSound on YouTube. They range from David Antin rethinking Freud to Kaegan Sparks introducing Christian Bok to John Yau talking with Charles Bernstein.

Max Apple wins major prize

Max Apple--long a member of the Writers House community--has won a 2010 Pew Fellowship in the Arts. The Pew site says this: "Pew Fellowships in the Arts (PFA) was established by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 1991, and annually awards up to 12 fellowships of $60,000 to artists of exemplary talent in the five-county Philadelphia area. The goal of PFA is to assist the region’s most talented artists in furthering and innovating their work by awarding substantial financial support accompanied by a set of customized, focused professional- and career-development resources." For more, check out the Pew site. We at KWH all send our congrats to Max! Check out this interview with Max.

students of Greg Djanikian read their poems

At the end of each semester, students in various writing workshops perform their new writings from the podium of the Writers House. Their classmates get to hear them in a quasi-formal setting present their semester's efforts, but of course friends, family and members of the KWH community get to see and hear them too. Great way to finish the term. Of course we record all this and then carefully index the audio and video files by the name. Click on the video player above and left and you'll get to watch Greg Djanikian's advanced poetry writing class present their poems. (We're boasting these days about our new nifty video media player - embeddable at various sizes. This is not a YouTube video; it's housed right at home, at Penn, on our own media server. Thanks to Mark Lindsay for his programming magic and to the School of Arts & Sciences for collaborating with us as always.)

Howard Fineman offers mini-course

The Writers House will be hosting a mini-course taught by Howard Fineman on political nonfiction. The University of Pennsylvania Current today features a story about this project. "One of the most basic structural problems with the curriculum is the idea of the semester,” says Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and one of the founders of the Writers House. “It often prevents us from engaging brilliant people in the extended Penn community who would be great teachers and mentors of our students but, because they are geographically far-flung and in the world of everyday practice, a semester-long course is impossible. So, I'm thrilled that through the Writers House we can create mini-courses and that someone like Howard Fineman can actually teach our students, despite his otherwise crazy schedule." Here is your link to the article.

Leonard Schwartz here this week

Poet and host of the great radio program, "Cross Cultural Poetics," Leonard Schwartz will be visiting the Writers House this Thursday. He will give a reading at the Writers House at 7 PM. For more details, click here. About his work Richard Foreman has written: "Leonard Schwartz's poems rip apart the organizations of language and experience, allowing those separate realms to collide in ways that give a new electricity to both. His writing is the strongest possible example of a contemporary poetry that makes thought into something sensual, something caressable, enlacing with the reader's lust for those parts of his mind into which he hasn't yet ecstatically tumbled."

Cuban poetry on 9/30/10

Mark Weiss has edited Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, an anthology given the title The Whole Island. published recently by UC Press. We're bringing Mark to the Writers House for an event on September 30. Here's an audio announcement about it. The anthology includes several poems by Jose Lezama Lima and a few others from the so-called "Origenes" group.

we are one of the things you must do before graduating

We were featured in 34th Street Magazine's "Top 50 Things You Must Do Before You Graduate," as follows:

"15. Go to a Speakeasy at the Kelly Writers House (3805 Locust Walk) and meet some of Penn’s most talented poets and a handful of West Philadelphia’s biggest weirdos. Or hang out there any other time — there’s guaranteed to be some good food for the taking in the kitchen. And who knows, you might run into the likes of Joan Didion, Art Spiegelman or Maury Povich (Proud Penn alum!)."

Here's your link to the original. In the photo at left: Art Spiegelman at the Writers House in 2008.

online book groups announced

The Writers House today announced its new slate of online discussion groups for Penn alumni and parents of Penn students. Here's the new roster. Two members of the tenured English faculty - Jim English and Emily Steiner - will each lead groups. Janine Catalano, a former Writers House regulsr, leads a group on writing about food, while Chris Mustazza will moderate a discussion of anonymity and the internet. Al Filreis and Jamie-Lee Josselyn will give folks a foretaste of Edward Albee, prior to his visit next spring as a Writers House Fellow.

Cheever - Albee - Perloff

Our 2011 Kelly Writers House Fellows are featured on the main news page of the Penn web site. Neither Susan Cheever nor Edward Albee have visited the Writers House before. Marjorie Perloff has visited us several times. During one visit she gave a talk on O'Hara, Johns and Cage and PennSound makes available the recording of that lecture.

video of winner of fiction prize

Sanae Lemoine won first place in the annual Creative Writing fiction-writing contest. Click here to watch a 6-minute video recording of Greg Djanikian's introduction and Sanae's reading from her work. Click here and see the KWH web page calendar entry for this event, and from there you'll see links to full recordings, both video and audio, of the entire program - not just Sanae but the other winners as well. Everyone at the Writers House congratulates Sanae on this achievement.

2010-2011 ArtsEdge Resident

The Kelly Writers House and Facilities and Real Estate Services (FRES) of the University of Pennsylvania are excited to announce the recipient of the 2010-2011 ArtsEdge Residency: New York City-based poet and author Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

ArtsEdge is a collaborative residency project designed to encourage the careers of emergent writers. Residencies last for one year and include an apartment, studio space in the AIR Space artistic nexus on 40th street, and close affiliation with Penn's writing communities. ArtsEdge aims to support the work of emerging writers, to foster an environment that will inspire innovative writing, and to enrich West Philadelphia by encouraging young writers to live and work here.

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is the author of the non-fiction book Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press, 2008) -- which we featured for the 2008 Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program. She's also written five books of poetry, most recently Everything is Everything (Write Bloody Press, 2010). Cristin's work has appeared in a wide variety of places including McSweeney’s Internet Tendancies, Rattle, Conduit, Barrelhouse, Pank, decomP, kill author, and La Petite Zine. She lives in New York City, where she helps run the NYC-Urbana Poetry series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

eco-poetics comes to KWH

We're very pleased to announce that Marcella Durand will be the CPCW Fellow in Poetics & Poetic Practice here at Penn for next year. In the spring semester she will teach a creative writing course in eco-poetics. Durand's bio and a brief description of her course are here.

Emily Harnett really gets David Milch

David Milch visited us this spring and most of the students in the Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar were enthralled by his work and by him. Among these was Emily Harnett. Emily was dazzled by Deadwood and then surprised at how brilliant she finally thought John from Cincinnati is--the latter being Milch's supposed one-season HBO flop. Emily wrote a paper about JFC and our YouTube maven Amaris caught up with her and filmed her reading this great paper. Click here and watch.

KWH on YouTube

Subscribe to the Kelly Writers House YouTube channel. It's been there for a while, but this summer we're adding a slew of video clips from a selection of our programs. Click here and click "subscribe." We're thankful already to our own hub member/staffer Amaris who has been uploading videos and will continue to do so all summer.

welcome to the Writers House

These days, when you enter the Writers House at 3805 Locust Walk in Philly, you'll see to your left in the vestibule an exhibit case displaying a new 15th Room Press broadside or some other new art object. You'll also be able to put on some earphones and listen to and watch excerpts from three or four recent KWH programs. Welcome to the Writers House! (Thanks to our director Jessica Lowenthal, who designed the case; and thanks for Steve McLaughlin for editing the looping video.)

new PoemTalk: Howe's Dickinson

From left to right: Marcella Durand, Jessica Lowenthal, Jennifer Scappettone. They're in the faculty director's office at the Writers House, having just finished discussing Susan Howe's reading of Emily Dickinson's "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun." It's the 32nd episode of the PoemTalk podcast. Please have a listen.

Beth Kephart at Alumni Day

At left is Beth Kephart, reading from her work at KWH on Alumni Day, Saturday May 15. She read with Alice Eliot Dark--a fantastic pair of readings. Afterwards photos were taken as Al Filreis and Moira Moody gathered 'round with Beth and Alice. Then separately, Al and Beth went home and blogged about the gathering. Bear with us, as now you read what Al wrote in his blog and follow the link to Beth's blog:

Just a few hours ago today at the Writers House, with me from left to right: Alice Eliot Dark, Moira Moody, Beth Kephart. Alice and Beth read beautifully from their work. I was ready to explain the interlocking connections of these four, and planned to link from here to Beth's blog, which I read regularly. So naturally I went to Beth's blog to pick up the URL for the link and, lo and behold, Beth had driven home and had already written out the merge. So I need only refer to you her blog, which I do so happily. Let me only add that I've been a pleased and moved reader of Alice's "In the Gloaming" for years and was gratified that she chose to read from that very story this afternoon at KWH. Pretty soon we'll have a recording available and you can listen too.

summertime & beyond

Audio announcement about summertime at the Writers House and a glimpse at our 2010-11 program year: mp3. We're closed for programs from mid-May until early September, but watch this space for various updates and announcements. And of course you can call us any time at (215) 746-POEM. When you do call that number, hit "3" to hear a poem from the PennSound archive, or "4" to hear a poem performed by a member of the Writers House community. You can always reach us too at wh@writing.upenn.edu.

apprenticeships

The current issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette includes a story about our apprenticeships program. Here are a few paragraphs:

The apprenticeship program began taking shape in 2002, when faculty member and novelist Max Apple approached Al Filreis, the director of the Kelly Writer’s House. Apple had been at work on a short-story collection, and was looking for a fresh reader who could offer some perspective on how to organize it. “I thought, we’ll call this an apprenticeship, and we’ll put the word out about it,” says Filreis.

Then he went one step further. He decided to form a new program, and found two other faculty members working on their own projects who could use some help. As soon as word got out, “the students applied in droves,” he recalls. “They wanted this.”

After all, this sort of real world “lab experience” is already available to students in the hard sciences. “Typically, the physics student realizes that his own professor is actually working on some very important, cutting-edge research,” he says, and from that point there’s a well-defined path for the student trying to get from the classroom to doing advanced research in a working lab. The apprenticeship model provides the missing link for a writing student trying to make the leap from an undergrad workshop class to the professional craft. “I think with this program we’ve proved … there is such a thing as advanced research experiences in the world of writing,” he says.

By establishing the Bassini Apprenticeships under the umbrella of CPCW, these courses could become credit bearing, says Filreis. The center is devoted to pedagogy that “really works” for the education of young writers, including experiences that might not necessarily take place inside a traditional classroom. “We believe very firmly that students learn best when they are essentially getting a one-on-one experience,” Filreis says, a philosophy that he compares to the intimate size of the Kelly Writer’s House. The largest room can barely hold a few dozen audience members, and “more often it’s one person talking to five people,” he says. “Narrow that down to its extreme, it’s one person talking to one person.”

Anthony DeCurtis

Listen to Anthony DeCurtis read from his writing. He teaches three courses each year through the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) and the Kelly Writers House at Penn. He's a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he has written for nearly thirty years, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times and many other publications. He is the author of In Other Words: Artists Talk About Life and Work (Hal Leonard, 2005) and Rocking My Life Away: Writing About Music and Other Matters (Duke University Press, 1998). In addition, he coedited the third editions of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll and The Rolling Stone Album Guide (both published by Random House, 1992), and edited Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture (Duke, 1992). Most recently he edited Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer (Scribner, 2009). His awards include a 1988 Grammy Award in the "Best Album Notes" category for his essay accompanying the Eric Clapton box set "Crossroads," and three ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in writing about music. Anthony holds a Ph.D. in American literature from Indiana University and lives in New York City.

At the Kelly Writers House Anthony has hosted our annual Blutt Singer-songwriter Symposium: Roseanne Cash, Suzanne Vega, Steve Earle - and next, Rufus Wainwright. And he is co-director of the RealArts@PENN project. His course the "The Arts and Popular Culture" has become a must-take seminar for young Penn writers interested in criticism, reviews, profiles, interviews and other forms of cultural journalism.

television writer genius, with us

We will be talking with screenwriter David Milch on Tuesday 4/27/10, starting precisely at 10:30 AM eastern time. We will be (as always) streaming the video live. Just go here (to our KWH-TV page) and click on the phrase "view live video." The night before--Monday evening at precisely 6:30 PM--Milch will be giving a talk and/or reading. Also streamed live, and the link for that video is the same as the other. Milch is the third of three Kelly Writers House Fellows this spring; the others were Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Howe. Milch wrote for Hill Street Blues, co-created NYPD Blue, then conceived of and wrote Deadwood on HBO for its three glorious seasons. Then John from Cincinnati (one season) and now Luck for HBO (just starting production).

Tan Lin on Wednesday 4/21

TAN LIN is coming to to the Writers House. On Wednesday, April 21st, the EDIT series (Danny Snelson) will host this poet, whose work, says Charles Bernstein, “sparkles with unoriginality and falsification.” Join us for a live publication event entitled “Handmade book, PDF, lulu.com Appendix, Powerpoint, Kanban Board/Post-Its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (xerox) and a film.” A reception will open at 6PM, to be followed by Q&A, printing, and micro-lectures beginning at 7PM. For more information call 215-746 POEM or email wh@writing.upenn.edu.

digital swap meet this week

The students in our CPCW/Writers House/ICA year-long seminar are hosting a DIGITAL SWAP MEET. It runs in conjunction with the Maira Kalman exhibit "Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)" currently at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and is the realization of a project called MILTON. Maira Kalman envisioned Milton as a conceptual space for pleasure and exchange, and DIGITAL SWAP MEET esteems those qualities above all others.

Come upload, download, snoop, peruse, and plunder during this four-day media swap. We'll provide the configuration, you provide the data. Bring your computer and hook in to each of our four drives to view their contents. Within our four terabytes of space, you're sure to encounter something eye-catching to take home with you, and to find room to upload your own files.

Theft is strongly encouraged, as is adding to the collection. So look through your hard drive, come prepared to bring something to the table, grab your computer, and join us at the ICA during some or all of the following hours:

Thursday, April 8: 12-8pm
Friday, April 9: 12-8pm
Saturday, April 10: 11-5pm
Sunday, April 11: 11-5pm

lit mags

Student publications flourish at Penn and KWH. Check out our publications page for links to Penn Appetit, the blog and food magazine founded by the amazing Emma Morgenstern (C'10) (winner of the 2009-10 Heled Travel Grant). There's Penn Review for poetry, fiction, and art; and The Green Couch for long-form literary nonfiction. Or visit the Fword -- "a collection of feminist voices" -- which filled the void left when Pandora's Box shut up shop. KWH keeps current copies of these and other magazines in our front vestibule, so be sure to stop by!

Marathon Reading: THE GREAT GATSBY

Today, Friday, April 2, come over to the Writers House for our fourth annual MARATHON READING! This year's reading is in honor of the 85th anniversary of the publication of THE GREAT GATSBY. Beginning at 3 PM, volunteer readers will take turns reading the book aloud in ten-minute increments, so come for a minute, or stick around for the day; we’ll be saturated by 1920s imagery and advertisements, full of food inspired by Gatsby's lavish parties, and swinging to the syncopation of early jazz.

ArtsEdge Residency Project

We're pleased to announce we are accepting applications for the third year of the ARTSEDGE RESIDENCY PROJECT, a joint venture of the Kelly Writers House and Penn's Facilities and Real Estate Services. The ARTSEDGE RESIDENCY PROJECT offers a one year placement for an emerging writer. The residency includes a subsidized apartment at 40th and Chestnut, (writer pays less than half the rent), studio/writing space in the AIR Space artistic nexus, and close affiliation with Penn's writing communities.

During the course of the residency, the ArtsEdge writer will be encouraged to develop at least one project at the Writers House. Past residents have produced staged readings, organized panel discussions , and coordinated readings by other emerging authors.

For more info, including how to apply, visit our ArtsEdge page. Applications due: April 30.

letterpress doings

We are proudly part of "The Common Press," a letterpress project that is a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, the Fine Arts Department of Penn's School of Design, and the Penn Libraries. The site "Printeresting" has a nice entry on the latest doings of The Common Press. (The Writers House imprint is called "The Fifteenth Room Press. Check us out. And if you want to be involved in presswork--you needn't know anything; we'll teach you--please call (215) 746-POEM and ask us about it.)

we do feel like it

Click here to watch a video recording of Myung Mi Kim's reading at the Writers House back on March 1. The event was part of the "Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series" (more here), introduced by Michelle Taransky and co-sponsored by Asian American Studies at Penn and also the "Talk Poets" group. "The Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series is 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."

Susan Howe

This morning Al Filreis interviewed and moderated a discussion with Susan Howe, and last night Susan read her work, including the opening pages of Melville's Marginalia, sections of The Midnight, and the poems in a series called "118 Westerly Terrace" (the address of Wallace Stevens's home). Click here for links to audio and video recordings of both events.

'Onion' writer talks satire

‘Onion’ journalists talk satire at Penn | Hannah Keyser | The Daily Pennsylvanian | February 25, 2010

Joe Garden along with Chris Pauls of "The Onion" speak at the Kelly Writers House on Thursday evening. "We are very aloof," Chris Pauls declared, causing the crowd to chuckle. Although the predicted snowstorm had started outside, the front room at the Kelly Writers House was packed Thursday evening when Joe Garden, features editor at The Onion, and his fellow writer Chris Pauls came to speak about satirical journalism. The event was made possible by Penn lecturer Anthony DeCurtis, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. "I didn't think he would do it," DeCurtis said of Garden's decision to visit Penn. "He's used to speaking in big auditoriums." "The Onion has done a lot to shape the sensibility of our time," he concludes before turning the microphone over to Garden and Pauls. The presentation opened with Garden detailing a fictitious history of the Wisconsin-based publication. A multimedia powerpoint accompanied the talk and flashed humorous headlines that had the audience roaring with laughter at some of the most significant issues of the past two decades. The headlines included "King of Pop Dead at Age 12" and "Black Guy Asks Nation for Change." Garden, a University of Wisconsin–Madison dropout, first got his foot in the door at The Onion when the editor noticed the tongue-in-cheek signs Garden posted in the windows at the liquor store where he worked, he explained. After 17 years at the online magazine, Garden seemed comfortable using humor in his everyday speech as quotes from past issues of The Onion peppered his answers to audience inquires. "They were quick on their feet," College student Becky McClain said. As a testament to this, Garden offered up recipes for biscuits and sausage gravy when an audience member tested his claim, "Ask me anything."

Susan Sontag has high praise for KWH

Al Filreis writes: "When the late Susan Sontag visited the Kelly Writers House, we had a series of extraordinarily heady discussions. Anyone who has read Sontag can easily imagine this, I think. But at KWH it somehow really clicked. During my interview with her on the last morning of her visit, she gave us high praise - which I've just listened to again after some years: audio. And click here to see the whole conversation segmented into topics."

Lyn Hejinian

In February 2004 Lyn Hejinian was here as a Writers House Fellow. Thanks to the efforts of Rebekah Caton we've divided the full audio recording of that interview into topical segments. Here is a link to page with the list of topics and links to the mp3 files. And here's the list of topics:

1. introduction (5:37): [listen] MP3
2. on Carl Rakosi (1:55): [listen] MP3
3. on "The Fatalist" (15:31): [listen] MP3
4. on Barbarism (4:18): [listen] MP3
5. the western desire to describe (4:11): [listen] MP3
6. "My Life" and compositional practice (2:09): [listen] MP3
7. younger poets and politics (3:21): [listen] MP3
8. poetry and ordinary language (4:08): [listen] MP3
9. terminology in contemporary literary history (4:05): [listen] MP3
10. social aspect of the language movement (1:47): [listen] MP3
11. truncated words (2:44): [listen] MP3
12. poetic practice and technology: engaging texts (3:51): [listen] MP3
13. the anthology process (4:36): [listen] MP3
14. wordplay vs. syntax in "Scheherazade" (4:08): MP3
15. theory and poetry: shared spaces (4:04): [listen] MP3
16. on Charles William Beebe (6:51): [listen] MP3
17. on Russian influences (4:08): [listen] MP3
18. reading from "the Fatalist" (2:09): [listen] MP3

David Sedaris at KWH in 2001

Yes, that's David Sedaris, sitting in our Arts Cafe back in spring 2001, talking with students in the KWH Fellows seminar. Yesterday, Rebekah Caton went into the old audio recording of the hour-long interview-conversation with Sedaris conducted by Al Filreis (another session during the Sedaris visit as Fellow) and segmented it into topics. So each recording, organized by topic, is now between 3 and 7 minutes long. Here is your link. Have a listen! Be sure to listen to Sedaris' reading the night before. Hilarious stuff.

the Kelly in the Kelly Writers House, 12/11/97

At right you see Al Filreis praising Paul Kelly at the December 11, 1997 "re-opening" celebration - a day-long event that marked the end of six months of intensive renovation of the old house at 3805 Locust Walk and the official re-naming of the project: henceforth, the Kelly Writers House. Paul Kelly made the renovation entirely possible with a generous gift. In the coming months we'll be looking for other materials from this big event, including, perhaps, audio recordings. Meantime, you can go here to get a sense of it all.

Creeley on form as an expression of content

Listen here to poet Robert Creeley talking about form as an expression of content.

Yes, the great Creeley was at KWH in the spring of 2000 as one of our earliest Writers House Fellows. Our discussion with him has been segmented into audio recordings by topic. You can see them all by clicking here or by visiting our Writers House Fellows page. The question about form was posed to Creeley by the great recently retired Romanticist Stuart Curran, who, with his students, had been reading and talking about Creeley much of that semester.

they are resolute in Resolute

Several KWH people attended a poetry conference at Banff, Alberta, and there met someone who follows us pretty closely from afar: Michael Nardone. We've been corresponding with him since about his interest in our PennSound archive. He's currently spending a few months on Vancouver Island, but typically he and his wife live in a cabin on the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. (If you want to check this out on Google Maps, look for the town of Yellowknife and move about 150 km eastward.) What is the northernmost listening to PennSound? It seems likely that Michael holds that record. "Probable northernmost Pennsound listening," he writes, "took place during a week up in Resolute. I remember listening to David Antin's war talk with a few arctic scientists stationed there." Resolute is indicated on the map above.

David Milch

David Milch is visiting us at the end of April. Seats are strictly limited; reserve seats by emailing whfellow AT writing DOT upenn DOT edu. For more info, click here.

Milch is known for complex, rich characters and drama that is at once beautiful, profane, complex and sublime; modern and Elizabethan; low and high; comic and tragic. Mr. Milch is the creator (and, often, the main writer) of the television series NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and John From Cincinnati and has worked as executive producer on those shows and others. His joining the writing team at Hill Street Blues (in season 3) many credit as the turning point in that long-running drama. Mr. Milch won the "Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series" Emmy in 1983 for Hill Street Blues and in 1995, 1997 and 1998 for NYPD Blue, among many nominations. He has also won three Humanitas Prizes and two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, which honor mystery writers of all kinds. In 1994, Mr. Milch was named Television Producer of the Year by the Producers Guild of America and in 1999 he was the recipient of the Laurel Award from the Writers Guild of America for Television Writing Achievement. A star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame was dedicated to Mr. Milch in 2006.

Before making his way to Hollywood, Mr. Milch attended Yale and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Mr. Milch's fiction and poetry have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The Southern Review. There is no doubt that Mr. Milch's writerly strength and wild imagination have been the keys to his and his shows' success. The Washington Post has written that in its "beautifully ugly glory," Deadwood is, "magnificently gritty in appearance and poetically obscene in language."

Major League Baseball at KWH

We're excited to meet DOUG GLANVILLE, former MLB player and Penn grad, now "the academic ambassador to baseball" and an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times. Doug will join us for lunch on Wednesday (March 3rd) at noon -- and there are still a few seats left! Do you want to hear about baseball from a baseball insider? Are you a budding sportswriter? Join us! reserve your seat by emailing wh@writing.upenn.edu or call (215) 746-POEM.

all our video & audio recordings

Our "medialinks" web database is a huge, huge, huge index of all recordings--in all formats--made at the Writers House over the years. A few date back to 1996, but for the most part the earliest recordings are from 1997. These days we make both video and audio recordings: the videos are in QuickTime format (.mov) and the audio is always mp3. In earlier years we made RealAudio and RealVideo. You can still download RealPlayer at real.com. In some cases we are converting the old Real formats into .mov and mp3. Here is your link to medialinks.

KWH'ers in Banff

Last night in Banff, Alberta, two time zones away from KWH: immediately after Charles Bernstein's stunning performance of his poetry there was a bit of a group hug among the Penn/Kelly Writers House-affiliated people who are attending the conference, which is entitled "Interventions" and entails presentations about new writing practices. From left to right they are: Julia Bloch, Al Filreis, Rebekah Caton, Charles Bernstein, Kimberly Eisler, Sarah Dowling, Nick Montfort, and Kenny Goldsmith. Nick, a longtime "hub" member and former grad student in Penn's computer science engineering department, is now an associate professor at M.I.T. (Thanks to Erin Moure for taking the shot.)

Joyce Carol Oates visits

In Tuesday's (Feb 16) Daily Pennsylvanian an article covering Joyce Carol Oates' visit to KWH begins this way:

Monday night, students packed into what one organizer described as a “sandbox of a space” to see famous author Joyce Carol Oates. The author of over 60 novels spent the evening in the Kelly Writers House reading four of her pieces, answering the audience’s questions and signing books for students, faculty and the general public. Her visit to the Kelly Writers House was a part of the Writers House Fellows program. Each year the students in the Fellows course read the works of three prominent authors.

For more about the Writers House Fellows program, click here