happy holidays from all of us

Happy holidays to all our presenters, audience members, friends and supporters from all of us at 3805 Locust Walk in Philadephia. By the way, are you following us on Facebook yet? Great way to keep up with what's going on here: click here for a direct link.

Talking about the art of Sigmund Laufer

Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee talk about Susan's father, Sigmund Laufer, whose art is currently on exhibit at KWH's Brodsky Gallery.

Stefan Sagmeister visits KWH

At right: Stefan Sagmeister, the designer-artist, being introduced by Kenny Goldsmith. Claudia Gould, director of the Jewish Museum and until recently director of the ICA here in Philly, then interviewed Sagmeister for an hour--part of a great day of events around Sagmeister's visit to Penn. The designer's work is central to the two-semester seminar being taught by Goldsmith as a collaboration between CPCW and the Writers House and ICA, co-sponsored by Penn's provost and by the School of Arts & Sciences. The next time the course will be offered is academic year 2013-14.

video interpretation of a poem

Several of our students have made this video interpretation of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe: "Bells."

RealArts@PENN summer internships

Here is a video introduction to our "RealArts@PENN" summer internship program. Click here for more.

Amina Gautier on November 29

On Tuesday, November 29, starting at 6 PM, our "Cheryl Family Fiction Series" presents Amina Gautier. Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for her short story collection At-Risk (University of Georgia Press). Over sixty-five of Gautier's stories have been published, appearing in Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review among other places. Her work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Ucross Residency, and Sewanee Writer's Conference and has been awarded the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Schlafly Microftiction Award, the Danahy Fiction Prize, and a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Gautier teaches at DePaul University.

new PoemTalk episode now out

PoemTalk is a series of 30-minute podcasts/radio shows recording at the Writers House monthly. The format is simple: four people from the world of poetry and poetics gather to talk about a single poem for which there's a recording in the vast PennSound archive. Recently the 47th PoemTalk episode was released. Click here and have a listen!

Jennifer Egan back at KWH

our Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing

The Kelly Writers House is affiliated with CPCW, the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. KWH was founded in 1994-95; then, in 2003, all of Penn's writing programs converged to form a center with associated organizations: the Creative Writing Program, the Critical Writing Program, the Writers House, and then, soon, PennSound (now the largest archive of recorded poetry anywhere), the Bassini Writing Apprentices, the CPCW/ICA yearlong seminar on contemporary art and writing, the PoemTalk podcast series, RealArts@Penn, and others. All friends and denizens of the Writers House are invited to explore our community, and give us a call at 215-746-POEM or stop by 3805 Locust if you ever have any questions about how to take fullest advantage of the resources of our writing block down here at 38th.

Video excerpt from a celebration of Gertrude Stein

Dylanfest on October 20 at 6 PM

Nine Dylanists each talk about - and briefly play - one favorite Dylan song. It's Thursday, October 20, at 6 PM, to help celebrate Dylan's 70th birthday. We've got quite a line-up. Cecilia Corrigan on "Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat"; Anthony DeCurtis on "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar"; Greg Djanikian on "Señor"; Al Filreis on "Series of Dreams"; John Giannotti on "Bob Dylan's Dream"; Jessy Ginsberg on "Up to Me"; Alan Light on "Where Are You Tonight"; Ralph Rosen on "Idiot Wind"; Nina Wolpow on "Don't Think Twice." And Jessy Pepi Ginsberg will perform her own arrangement of "Up to Me."

Beijing-based journalist for "Science" - October 6

October 6, a lunch talk with Mara Hvistendahl, supported by the Maury Povich Fund for Journalism Programs, 11:30 AM in the Arts Cafe.

Mara Hvistendahl is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science. Her first book, Unnatural Selection, is a captivating and at turns sinister technological history that examines not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies underlying sex selection but also the West's role in creating them. Her award-winning writing has also appeared in Harper's, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy. Proficient in both Spanish and Chinese, she has spent half of the past decade in China, where she has reported on everything from archaeology to the space program. A former contributing editor at Seed magazine and journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Hvistendahl sits on the advisory board of Round Earth Media, an organization founded to promote international journalism.

lunchtime seminar on pastoral

“PASTORAL ORIGINS,” A CONVERSATION WITH ANNIE SEATON

12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe

rsvp: email wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM

Since Theocritus, the pastoral has been about origin, loss, and difference. This stands against the cliched image of the pastoral as idealized nature scenes of frolicking, hyper-sexual shepherds. In fact, those cliches, along with the dryly canonical nature of much of the secondary literature on the pastoral, have encouraged the neglect of some important and interesting themes. Quietly influential, the pastoral affect is, in fact, one of the dominant cultural modes by which the West represents itself — and it may even, in fact, be one of the earliest sources of the mythopoetic fashioning of cultural nationalism, considered broadly. This talk will consider passages from Theocritus to Heidegger, to read the pastoral as a search for lost origins vs. a clash with "difference." After a brief introductory talk by Annie Seaton, participants will be invited to consider and discuss passages.

Ann Seaton worked with Mary Lefkowitz and Frank Bidart at Wellesley, where she was a two-time undergraduate Academy of American Poets Prize winner and a Mellon Fellow. At Harvard, she studied American, French, and English literature and literary theory with Barbara Johnson. Subsequently, Annie was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown, and has taught at Skidmore, CUNY, and Bard College, where she is presently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities. Annie is working on a book-length project, Pastoral Origins. Her main interests are in Ancient Greek, English Renaissance, French 18th and 19th century, and American 18th-20th century literature.

Susan Schultz visits the Writers House

On Wednesday, September 14, join us for a poetry reading given by Susan Schultz. It begins at 6 PM. Susan M. Schultz teaches at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She has edited Tinfish Press, which publishes experimental poetry from the Pacific, since 1995. Among her books of poems and poetic prose is Dementia Blog (Singing Horse Press, 2008). She is also the author of A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 2005), and of the Tinfish Editor's Blog, among other work. Susan will be spending the better part of a week with us, while she begins her sabbatical leave from teaching and makes her way from poetry spot to poetry spot on the US mainland. Susan Schultz's book, Dementia Blog, is an innovative look at the way memory works and, at once, a memoir of her mother's struggles with Alzheimer's Disease. An episode of PoemTalk was devoted to that work. Please listen.

2011-12 KWH online book groups announced

Shakespeare - David Foster Wallace - John O'Hara - Bob Dylan - romanticism
poetics & motherhood - John Barth - Lorrie Moore

We are pleased to announce our slate of 2011-2012 alumni online book discussion groups. All Penn alumni (and parents of current students) are eligible to participate. We have hosted these groups every year since 1999, and thousands of alumni have enjoyed wide-ranging conversations about books with Penn faculty.

Go here to see this year's groups. Sam Apple discusses David Foster Wallace. John Richetti, distinguished professor of English emeritus, leads a conversation about Shakespeare's sonnets. Myra Lotto and Michael Gamer team up to talk about romanticism. Patrick Bredehoft will lead a 10-day discussion of Bob Dylan's "talkin' songs." I will lead a month-long online seminar on the short fiction of John Barth. And more.

No special software or applications needed. All you need is a working email address. To register, write to whbook@writing.upenn.edu. We continue to be grateful for the generous support of David Roberts (W'83) who makes KWH Book Groups possible.

Jacket2

KWH regulars already know how proud and happy we are about Jacket2, a new poetry/poetics magazine which launched in April and is already going strong. J2 is edited and published out of the Writers House in close association with PennSound, PoemTalk and other Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing projects. Recently J2 released the newest episode of PoemTalk - on a poem by John Wieners - which was recorded at KWH. J2's feature on poetry in 1960 is based on a symposium held at the Writers House last December. We hope all fans and friends of the Kelly Writers House will have a look at Jacket2, and let us know what you think of our newest venture.

1960 symposium published as J2 feature

Back in December 2010, some 60 people gathered in our Arts Cafe to talk about the poetry and poetics of the year 1960 - 50 years later. They heard short presentations by various poets, each having written in effect a retrospective review of a book of poems published that year. Then there was a lively Q&A in the usual KWH style. The entire event was recorded; the presentations made available to us as typescripts; the Q&A was transcribed. New materials were added. Others wrote responses and additional retrospective reviews. And the whole thing - a big "feature" - was recently published in Jacket2. Go here and have a look at - and listen to - the feature.

Goldsmith goes to Washington

At right is a photograph taken of Kenneth Goldsmith at the White House - yes, the White House. On May 11, Kenny (who teachers here at CPCW and is a longtime friend and affiliate of the Writers House) performed his poetry (and that of Whitman and Hart Crane) along with several other poets, including Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove, and Billy Collins. He also co-led a poetry workshop for schoolchildren, a session hosted by Michelle Obama. We're quite tickled that this "weird" conceptual poet was invited to such an event. Our friends at Jacket2 have somewhat "covered" this happening, so go here to J2 for a link to the video of the aforementioned workshop.

Jenny Egan and Sam Donsky, May 14

Alumni Authors Spotlight: Jennifer Egan & Sam Donsky
May 14, 4:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
To RSVP: call 215-746-POEM. RSVP required.

Our Alumni Authors Spotlight reading will feature fiction writer Jennifer Egan (C'85) and poet Sam Donsky (C'07), who will read from their work then join us for a post-reading reception.

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep. Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in June 2010. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

Sam Donsky (C'07) is a second-year student at Penn Law School. He has been involved with Kelly Writers House since 2003 and first shared the KWH podium with Jennifer Egan in May 2005. Donsky's first poetry manuscript, Poems vs. the Volcano, is a collection of 100 poems -- one for each movie that he has seen since graduating from college.

Katie celebrates Maury celebrating journalism

Katie Sanders blogs for Her Campus and recently contributed an article entitled "Talk show host Maury funds UPenn journalism endowment, student offers thanks." Katie is referring to a recent celebration at KWH of Maury Povich's gift endowing programs (events, seminars, workshops, talks, etc.) about journalism. The celebration, aptly, was really more of a discussion session on the future of journalism, featuring panelists Anthony DeCurtis, Paul Hendrickson, Avery Rome, and Dick Polman - along with observations made by many eminent journalists in the audience.

Perloff at KWH April 24-25

Marjorie Perloff is our third Kelly Writers House Fellow for the spring of 2011. She will join us for the better part of a week in late April. There are two public programs: on Monday, April 24, at 6:30 PM, she will give a talk. The next morning, at 10 AM, Al Filreis will interview her and moderate a discussion. Both events are free, of course, and open to the public - although reservations are required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-573-9749.

Ashley Parker talks about working with Maureen Dowd

Maury Povich (C'62) donates $1M to KWH

As many friends of KWH already know, Maury Povich (a Penn alum, class of '62) has made a very generous donation of $1 million - to endow the Povich Fund for Journalism Programs at the Kelly Writers House. We invest an endowment gift and spend only the interest, which will defray the costs of our events having to do with journalistic writing every year forever. We are thrilled, and we are honored by Maury's belief that we are worth this major expression of philanthropy. Previously Maury and his wife Connie Chung endowed a faculty position in Creative Writing, the Povich Writer-in-Residence position--which is held by the wonderful Dick Polman. Recently the Huffington Post ran a little piece about the gift and here is a link to that.

Kelly Diamond makes a TV show

Kelly Diamond wanted to make a TV series, set at Penn and written, acted, directed and produced by students. Of course the Writers House was willing to help host and support the project. Recently the Pennsylvania Gazette ran a nice article about Kelly's first forays into making TV. You can find the article here. At the end of the piece you'll read this: "Diamond is only a sophomore, but if you ask [Al] Filreis where she’s headed he doesn’t hesitate. 'There’s no doubt she’s going to L.A. or New York, and she’s going to write for television. No doubt in my mind. And I’m excited about that, because that’s what she was born to do.'"

Jacket2, "pretty much the most robust place"

In the new issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette, we find a nice article about Jacket2 by Sam Hughes. Here's an excerpt, quoting J2 publisher Al Filreis:

“The poetry world is huge, vibrant, full of odd and interesting and brilliant people all over the world—and they follow everything in the field. So while it might seem like the announcement of a change in a magazine is not going to rock anybody’s world, it did. There was a big response to it, and almost all of it positive.”

Jacket2 is going to be “pretty much the most robust place where you can look and find stuff about poetry—modern, contemporary; particularly contemporary,” he adds. Including, of course, poems. He describes it as a “fully integrated site” that will play off the raw material of spoken poetry provided by PennSound. “Between the two, we’ll have a whole lot covered.”

And here is a link to the whole article.

apprenticeships

Not long ago, an issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette included 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.”

KWH on YouTube

Subscribe to the Kelly Writers House YouTube channel. It's been there for a while, but in the past six or seven months we'be been adding a slew of video clips from a selection of our programs. Click here and click "subscribe." Of course the best way to enjoy recorded KWH events is by watching full videos on "KWH-TV Reruns" - here. Or by going to the KWH web calendar, finding the event that interests you, and clicking on links to audio and video recordings. But we do realize that many people, if not most, go to YouTube reflexively to find video--and we want to be there too. Much of the work on the KWH YouTube channel has been done by our own Amaris Cuchanski. (Amaris has helped us build up the PennSound YouTube channel as well.)

Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever just a little while ago left the Writers House, where she'd spent two days with us as our first of three Writers House Fellows for 2011. Penn's student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, covered last night's event - a reading/talk given by Susan mostly about her biography of Louisa May Alcott. Here is that article. In it you see Susan Cheever quoted as saying that she'd been so moved and impressed by the Writers House--the people and the place--that it felt as if she'd died in a car crash and awakened in heaven. Pretty heavy stuff. Very soon the video and audio recordings of the two public events will be available.

new jewish writing, coming up

[At right: Rivka Fogel]. Join on us Thursday, February 24, for New Jewish Writing featuring Shahar Bram, Jessica Greenbaum, Bob Perelman, and Rivka Fogel (C'11) at 6:00 PM in our Arts Cafe. This program is sponsored by Zeek: a Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, the Jewish Studies Program, and Writers Without Borders. Here's a profile of one of the presenters: Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn where she lives, finally. A graduate of Barnard College and an initiating graduate of the University of Houston's Writing Program, she has worked as a business reporter for Forbes Magazine, a researcher for The Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Division, an English Dept adjunct, and as an editor for a magazine-on-tape for people who are visually impaired. She is presently the chief domestic scientist for a family of husband and two teenage girls, and poetry editor of the Massachusetts based annual, upstreet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty, won the Gerald Cable Prize, and poems from her second manuscript have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Torah: A Woman's Commentary, CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Nextbook and . . . ZEEK. She is the founder of Foot Traffic Presents, which sells home-made muffins to passersby for charities benefiting girls and women in the third world (mostly), and which raised $1,500 in its first eleven weeks. Last year she was a runner-up to be Brooklyn's Poet Laureate, and that's a good thing because it sounds like it would have been the hardest of all her non-paying jobs to date. For more information, including profiles of all the presenters, click here.

teaching poetry online at KWH circa 2001

mind of winter

At left, you see members of the KWH community gathered around the dining room, keen to finish off the home-made soup. Soup? Yes, it's winter and we recently celebrated the cold by our annual "Mind of Winter" event. Here are some photos taken by Arielle Brousse. Here is a link to the web calendar page for this year's event. And here is a "Mind of Winter" page recording all the Minds of Winter ever. Soon that page will feature recordings of the 2011 event (but not quite yet; come back soon).

Charles Alexander at lunch on Tuesday Feb 1

Charles Alexander will be with us this Tuesday (Feb 1) at noon for a lunchtime program featuring this wonderful and important poet. Charles Alexander is the founder and director of Chax Press, in Tucson, where he has lived all but three of the past 27 years. His books include Hopeful Buildings (Chax 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (Segue 1992), Near or Random Acts (Singing Horse 2004), and Certain Slants (Junction 2007), which includes 30 sections of the ongoing work Pushing Water, which is expected to be published in its entirety in 2011. He is currently at work on a book about the pleasures of poetry. Rsvp: email wh@writing.upenn.edu or call 215-746-POEM.

introduction to RealArts

Not too long ago Anthony DeCurtis hosted a session at the Writers House that served as an introduction to the RealArts summer internship program. The video here gives you the first few minutes of that session.

visiting Chinese poet Yanrong reads a poem

The Chinese poet Yanrong performs his poem, "Prophecy and Carnival," in Chinese, while Charles Bernstein reads an English translation. On December 9, 2010, a group of poets from Wuhan, China, visited the Writers House: Liang Biwen, Liu Yishan, Chen Ying-Song, Tian He, Wang Xinmin, Ke Yumin, Li Ming, Hu Xiang, Liu An. Several American poets read their work in English and listened while the visiting poets read their poems in Chinese.

north of invention

At the end of his reading tonight at the Kelly Writers House, Fred Wah was joined by Nicole Broussard. They read a poem of hers, together, she reading, of course, the original French, while he read an English translation. A wonderful way to end a long and continuously interesting day of talks and readings, day one of the "North of Invention" program. Be sure tomorrow--Friday, January 21--to watch the live video stream, starting at 10:30 AM eastern time.

scaremongering in the media

Dick Polman discusses scaremongering in the media. Visit our YouTube channel for more video excerpts.

ah, the singularity of the Writers House scene

When Susan Howe visited us last spring, we were ready. So ready! Such a classic Writers House scene: the edgy and famously "difficult" poet (=supposedly difficult to read) is coming to spend time with us and we not only read the poetry, and talk it through until we get it; but, more, we make T-shirts and feel, well, the sheer singularity of the context. Writers House Fellows, every spring, every single spring since 1999: we are starting up again and this spring we'll be spending time with Susan Cheever in February, Edward Albee in March, and Marjorie Perloff in April.

snow again

Our Class of 1942 Garden as it looked yesterday morning after Philly got 6-8 inches of new snow. We love our garden, and here is more about it - and here a glimpse during renovation.

KWH on YouTube

At right you see a videocap of Kaegan Sparks delivering her valedictory speech at last May's "Senior Capstone" program--our way of enabling departing members of the Writers House community to say a goodbye that's truly ALT-graduation. An excerpt of Kaegan's speech is available here on YouTube. Now, if you haven't spent any time watching our collection of video excerpts on YouTube, please go here and have a look. Thanks to Amaris, KWH"s YouTube maven, this collection is growing every week.

the writers' block at 38th

Since 2003 the Kelly Writers House has been affiliated with all of Penn's other writing programs through the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW). CPCW is the home of the Critical Writing Program, which hosts the Marks Writing Center and through which all undergrads fulfill their writing requirement; the Creative Writing Program; PennSound; RealArts@PENN summer internships; the Bassini Writing Apprenticeships program; and the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics (CAAP). Go here and explore all of it. KWH is of course at 3805 Locust Walk and the rest of CPCW has its home at 3808 Walnut. These two buildings, though on different blocks along 38th Street, are back to back. We call it The Writers' Block.