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.