Wlite: Vol. 1
Wlite: i englisc boc be missenlicum þingum wrætlicum. Vol. 1: Translations from the MS. QV i with Introduction and Paleographical Essay.
Daniel C. Remein, Translator
Wlite is a translation of an impossible book of early medieval poetry and the invention of relations between a poetic avant-garde in the present and its astonishing medieval future.
This book provides an initial glimpse at the historically impossible discovery and content of the manuscript shelf-marked (in an undisclosed private collection) Quidi Vidi i, which contains: evidence of an alternate ‘school’ of experimental or conceptual Anglo-Saxon poets operating near or in the Danelaw in the ninth and tenth centuries, a tenth-century book discovered in a tiny fishing village in Newfoundland in 2009, evidence of a tenth-century telephonic technology, a recovered micro-chronicle of an alternate history of Norse/Anglo-Saxon relations in pre-Conquest England, a whole alternate dawn of recorded English literary history. It forms an anthology of poems by multiple poets reliant on enigmatic and disruptive syntax and dependent on coterie diction saddled with references so quotidian as to parallel those of the twentieth-century New York School. The poems range from riddles to verse chronicle entries, from elegies to homilies in verse, and the manuscript also includes what appears to be the fragment of a longer Beowulf-style narrative elegy about a very ornamental but somehow sentient iceberg.
In the interests of giving the non-specialist access to these texts as quickly as possible, Volume 1 presents a complete translation of the manuscript, leaving an edition of the Anglo-Saxon text to Volume 2, yet still including a full account of the MS’s paleography, codicology, and the most important of the philological notes and commentary to-come. Additionally, Remein includes a theoretical introduction, examining the contribution this MS makes to our actual relations with Anglo-Saxon poetry and outlining a radical program for touching, feeling, speaking-with, and hosting Anglo-Saxon poetry in the present. Wlite is a project that speculates about the medieval-ness of the future of avant-garde poetry in English, but it also speculates about the abolition of necessity and of history conceived as object—seeking not to evade but to enter into authentic historical relations in order to measure poetry’s capacity to flout historical and physical totality and impossibility, not with transcendence but with wonder and the sublime.
RELEASE DATE: Spring/Summer 2012
Daniel C. Remein holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and is a PhD candidate in English at New York University where is working on his dissertation, tentatively titled “Wonder and Ornamentality: A Medieval/Modern Poetics.” His poems appear in numerous journals including Sentence, Sidebrow, Holly White, Lit, and Shampoo; critical essays appear or are forthcoming in Literature Compass, postmedieval, and Glossator. Remein is a member of the BABEL Working Group, co-founder of the Organism for Poetic Research, and edits the journal Whiskey & Fox. He grew up in Cleveland, lived in Pittsburgh, and resides in Brooklyn.
