ModPo 2019 opening day message from Al
It’s Friday morning as I write this here in Philadelphia USA. Twenty-four hours from now we will begin our 10-week journey through the ModPo course. Whether you are able to devote just two hours per week to ModPo, or dozens of hours per week—whether you have read our poems before many times or are reading them for the first time—we welcome you and encourage you to think of yourself as a participant, a fellow citizen of this poetry community.
There will be weeks when you feel you are able to read all the poems and watch all or at least many of the videos. There will be weeks when you feel overwhelmed by the other aspects of your life and can’t do much with ModPo. That’s okay. The course is designed (truly) to make it possible for you to access it in whatever way that suits you.
It’s free. It’s non-credit. It’s open. (And it’s open all year.) So don’t feel that there’s one way to do ModPo and that if you don’t do it that way you have somehow not succeeded in engaging.
Just now I have created a discussion forum thread titled “ModPo 2019—INTRODUCE YOURSELF HERE!!” Tomorrow we hope that many people will say hello by posting an introduction to this thread. How to find it? Look at the left-side menu and click “Discussion Forums.” If you click “All Threads” you will see it at the top of the list of threads. If you click “Forums” you can then go to the forum called “general discussion” and you’ll find the intro thread there.
Or you can go directly here: LINK TO THREAD.
And explore the ModPo site. Click “Resources” in the left-side menu and click all the links you see in the pull-down menu. We have prepared a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) guide, along with audio recordings that will describe all aspects of the course—focusing especially on how to navigate the site.
If you ever have technical questions or problems, go to the discussion forums and click “Tech Help.” If you have other kinds of questions, write to us at modpo@writing.upenn.edu.
Happy exploring!
I’ll “see” many of you tomorrow. (We say the course starts tomorrow but indeed the ModPo site is open and fully accessible now, and all year long.)
