ModPo in California

The ModPo team recently returned from a five-day visit to Calfornia. We met with folks at Coursera in Mountain View on Thursday (talking about improvements to the platform we use to host ModPo, especially the discussion forums). Then we picked up Jake Marmer at the end of his teaching day and drove together up to San Francisco, along the way (literally in the car) making two new ModPoMinute videos. In San Francisco we met up with Ariel Resnikoff, after which Jake and Ariel and I made two new videos: one on Jerome Rothenberg and another on Paul Celan.

Then we all gathered for a ModPo meet-up at SF Wharton, where a group of 35 or so ModPo’ers did collaborative close readings of a poem by Joanne Kyger (“September”) and another by Robin Blaser (“Bird in the House”). Then next day we flew to L.A. and encounter 75 degrees and plentiful sun. Our meet-up at UCLA was arranged by Danny Snelson, who also joined us for the gathering. Here 40+ ModPo’ers gathered to do collaborative close readings of a poem by Julia Vinograd and another by UCLA poet-professor Harryette Mullen, after which a number of folks joined us for dinner and drinks at a nearby Westwood restaurant.

On Saturday we met Molly O’Neil at the Santa Monica pier and filmed three new ModPo videos, two to be added to ModPoPLUS and one to be an episode of ModPoMinute. Then to the home of Marjorie Perloff where Marjorie, Anna and Al made a video about a passage of prose and verse in Williams’s Spring and All. Then Danny Snelson and Nancy Perloff arrived, and joined Al and Marjorie for a video about notes on conceptualism by Marcel Duchamp. Finally, we recorded a new episode of PoemTalk on John Cage’s Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake.

Here are some photos taken on the Santa Monica pier:

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