Better Than Starbucks!
Not your ordinary poetry magazine!
If good coffee (or just the concept of coffee), great books, sharp wit, and great authors excite you, we are for you!
September 2016 Vol. I No. III
We are Better Than Starbucks!
If good coffee (or just the concept of coffee), great books, sharp wit, and great authors excite you, we are for you!
Haiku Gets Its Own Page and It's Own Editor
Kevin McLaughlin, our former Poetry editor from the 1990's has agreed to share his love of haiku and other short, Zen-like poems. If you love to write or read haiku, or both, please look for this new monthly feature, and feel free to send in your own haiku in for Kevin to consider for publication.
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Kevin brings his study of Buddhism and an eclectic taste of everything from vampires and vultures to kayaking into his commentary on the sparks of inspiration that create art in around seventeen syllables.
Professor Filreis, with ModPo Teaching Assistant, Anna Strong in a Modern Poetry session at Kelly Writers House
Featured Poem of the Month
A Reddish Haze
Nocturne of shadow
rise with a Flamingo
charmed by a sunrise
a reddish haze is here
prone upon the pillow
cherished teacup pouts
hushed morning sonnet
whispers at my window.
Dreams left to wander
my fan begins the day
humidity now departing
the sea birds serenade.
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Biography:
Ken Allan Dronsfield, poet and author,
originally from New Hampshire, now
residing in Oklahoma, is the co-editor of the new poetry anthology titled, Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze available at Amazon.com. His work can be found in: The Burningword Journal, Indiana Voice Journal, The Literary Hatchet Magazine, Belle Reve Journal, Peeking Cat Magazine, The Australia Times, Bewildering Stories, and several anthologies. Ken's poetry was nominated for Best of the Net for 2016.
... from the mad mind of a poet
...and now....
Al Filreis is the creator and professor of one of the most successful MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). University of Pennsylvania’s Modern Poetry, or ModPo, for short.
Enrollment is here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modpo
The next 10 week course starts on Coursera, on September 10, 2016, is available completely free of charge to the student and is designed so the student can bite off as small or large of a chunk of learning as he/she is ready for. Most of us are serial repeaters
(Anthony Watkins is about to start his third year and sees no likelihood he will stop taking the class anytime soon)
To the 30,000 or so of us, who know you primarily through your Modern Poetry classes, it is easy to think your life is consumed by poetry. Given that you not only teach us, but also as the Kelly Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, are Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. With Charles Bernstein, Director PennSound, a large archive of recordings of poets reading their own poetry. You publish Jacket2 magazine and host of a monthly podcast series called "PoemTalk", it is clear poetry takes up most if not all your time, but you are also an author and run websites on representations of the Holocaust, and on the cultural cold war of the 1950s.
BTS: I notice that there is very little pre U Penn publicly available about you. Of course your work there has been substantial, but some of us are interested in what you were, how you got to be who and what you are today. I believe you grew up in Brooklyn.
Al Filreis: My parents were both born and raised in Brooklyn. My father’s parents were immigrants (from Poland) and my mother’s side had been immigrants just a generation earlier. I was raised in New Jersey, not far from Newark. I attended an undistinguished public school, then Colgate University where I met a number of remarkable teachers of literature, then the University of Virginia where I got my Masters and PhD, with a dissertation on the life and work of Wallace Stevens.
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