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.