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.