ModPoPLUS video on Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Chicago Picasso”
We have added Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “The Chicago Picasso” to week 5 of ModPoPLUS. Here is a link to the text of the poem. Here is a link to the video inside the ModPo...
Modern & Contemporary American Poetry (“ModPo”) Blog
Message to ModPo people ModPo 2019 begins
Yes, ModPo 2019 begins on Saturday (September 7). The discussion forums are open now, of course, but on Saturday we will really get going again. I will write again soon to give you some...
Message to all ModPo people before ModPo 2019 begins
Hello to all ModPo people! Greetings from Philadelphia—from the Kelly Writers House, home of ModPo since 2012. “ModPo” is short for “Modern & Contemporary U.S. Poetry,” the 10-week course that is free, non-credit, and...
Shetland poet Christie Williamson visits the Writers House
Shetland poet & ModPo regular Christie Williamson reads his poem “Da Burn” and explains it a bit for us at KWH: http://jacket2.org/commentary/christie-williamson-reads-explains-poem-shetlandic
AP English class tries the ModPo method of collaborative close reading
ModPo’er & teacher Christan Bush tried the ModPo method of collaborative close reading with her students, and it worked! And you can watch it work! The poem they discussed is Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.”...
Rae Armantrout describes her encounter with “Howl”
Watch a discussion—excerpted from a fall 2018 webcast—in which Rae Armantrout describes her encounter with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”:
CCCR video in which Max leads a discussion of Stein in Chicago
We have added to the CCCR* syllabus a discussion led by Max McKenna with some ModPo’ers in Chicago (October 2018) about stanza 2 of Gertrude Stein’s “Stanzas in Meditation.” Here are the links as...
Collaborative close reading of Stein’s “A Table”
ModPo is all about encouraging people worldwide to collaborate on close readings of poems. Here’s the newest addition to the CCCR (=Community Collaborative Close Readings syllabus)—a discussion of Gertrude Stein’s “A Table”: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo/resources/r0Zp9
The poem as a utopian space
Josh Schuster takes a question about the founding of the Writers House and turns it into an observation about the poem as a utopian space. Watch this 1-minute video.
Discussion of Cage’s idea that poetry can demilitarize language
Further discussion of John Cage’s idea that poetry can demilitarize language:
