Introducing PoemTalk

I'm taking a moment here to pull the remarkable Al Filreis onto my own small blog stage. He's the Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House located down at the University of Pennsylvania—a remarkable program about which you might have read in the pages of a recent New York Times. He's also one of the most popular and beloved teachers of poetry and story on any campus anywhere, and he's so ridiculously inventive and innovative that it is frankly difficult to keep up with all that he gives straight back to the world. (Plus he answers his emails at 5 in the morning, in one half of a millisecond, as if he's been waiting for your note all night long.)

This morning's emails carried a message from Al about a program I am so happy to share. It's called PoemTalk, it's a podcast, and it's the product of a collaboration among Kelly Writers House, PennSound, and the Poetry Foundation. Here's the tagline straight from Al's note: "Four colleagues in the world of poetry collaborate on a close (but not too close) reading of a single poem." First up is a fascinating analysis of the William Carlos Williams poem, "Between Walls."

Here's how you can log on (below). The image above is one of the reasons why you should: Because it's cold outside, and because words are fire.

[] program notes: http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/
[] ITunes: http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/2007/12/were-on-itunes.html
[] at the Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audio.html
[] RSS feed (subscribe): http://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcast_poemtalk.xml