Test your knowledge of modern and contemporary American poets with this classic 4Pics1Meaning quiz. Inspired by ModPo. Built to support the Kelly Writers House.
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About The Kelly Writers House
The Kelly Writers House was founded in 1995 by a group of students, faculty, staff and alumni and is an actual 13-room house at 3805 Locust Walk on Penn’s campus that serves as a center for writers of all kinds from Penn and the Philadelphia region at large. Each semester the Writers House hosts approximately 150 public programs and projects–poetry readings, film screenings, seminars, web magazines, lectures, dinners, radio broadcasts, workshops, art exhibits, and musical performances–and about 500 people visit the House each week. They work, write, and collaborate in seminar rooms, a publications room, the “hub” office, a cozy living room, a dining room, a kitchen with plenty of space for conversation, and “the Arts Cafe,” the wonderfully open south-facing room that was originally the parlor. Writers House also has a strong virtual presence. Ongoing interactive webcasts give listeners from across the country the opportunity to talk with writers such as Ian Frazier, Richard Ford, and Cynthia Ozick. And via dozens of listservs and email discussion groups, writers and readers link from across the country and around the world. Through its many programs and projects, the Writers House promotes the full range of contemporary literature, addressing writing both as a practice and as an object of study.
About ModPo
“In this fast-paced course we will read and encounter and discuss a great range of modern and contemporary U.S. poets working in the “experimental mode,” starting with the 19th-century proto-modernists Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and ending with 21st-century conceptual poetics. Aside from providing a perhaps handy or helpful survey and chronology of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, this course offers a way of understanding general cultural transitions from modernism to postmodernism. Some people may wish to enroll as much to gain an understanding of the modernism/postmodernism problem through a study of poetry as to gain access to the work of these many poets. Participants do not need to have any prior knowledge of poetry or poetics. The instructor, Al Filreis, rarely lectures, and frequently calls for “the end of the lecture as we know it”; instead, the video-recorded lessons will consist of collaborative close readings led by Filreis, seminar-style—offering models or samples of readers’ interpretations of these knotty but powerful poems, aided by the poetry-minded denizens of the Kelly Writers House on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.”
