Al Filreis, "Teaching Modern & Contemporary American Poetry to 36k"
b'Al Filreis has taught his \\u201cModPo\\u201d course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more than 36,000 students. The course, as in its previous versions, does not include lectures, being based instead on discussion \\u2013 the collaborative close readings of poems. The course grows out of Filreis\\u2019s work at the Kelly Writers House; he has been Faculty Director of this literary freespace since its founding in 1995. Filreis is also co-founder of PennSound, the Web\\u2019s main free archive of poetry readings, publisher of Jacket2 magazine, and producer and host of \\u201cPoemTalk,\\u201d a podcast/radio series of close readings of poems. In conversation with Nick Montfort, Filreis will discuss ModPo and his perspective on writing, teaching, and digital media.\\n\\nFilreis is Kelly Professor of English and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to Left, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modernism, 1945-60, and other works. He was chosen as Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 2000.\\n\\nPart of the Purple Blurb series, and co-sponsored by the SHASS Dean\\u2019s Office and the Literature Section.'