And now we begin week 2 of ModPo 2018 (with a note on PennSound)

Happy Sunday to you (and happy early-hours Monday to ModPo friends way way east of us)!

Now we begin to read our week 2 poems, discuss them, listen to recordings of these poems as performed by the poets, and watch and discuss our videos about them.

The week 2 poems, videos, links to audio, and headnote—are all here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/home/week/2

The poem-by-poem discussion forums are here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/discussions/weeks/2

I’ll have more to say about the essay many of you will be writing this week—on a poem by Dickinson. For now, I’ll point out where all four ModPo essay assignments are explained: HERE.

A word about audio. In week 2 for the first time you will encounter audio recordings of most of our poems. ModPo is a project among a series of four connected projects all hosted by the Kelly Writers House: PennSound, Jacket2 magazine, PoemTalk, ModPoMinute, and of course ModPo itself. PennSound, the world’s largest archive of recordings of poets reading their own poems, is very much worth a long visit. It was founded and is directed by Charles Bernstein and me (Bernstein we encounter as a so-called “Language poet” in week 8 of ModPo). Anyway, we are PennSound are thrilled to add to the texts of the poems these quite compelling audio recordings of them. Many argue that the audiotext of a poem is as (distinctly) significant as the written or printed text. In any case, they certainly are worth hearing. (As with everyone else here, PennSound is free and open to all.)

Pondering my own attic dance today,

—Al