With his Cycle of Dreams, Eric Weiskott brings readers to the dream worlds of history. More than merely reflective of history, his dream poetry enacts shifts and transformations in the archives, documentation, and textual traditions by which we get our feeling of historical difference and change. Reaching with oneiric adaptation all the way through William Langland’s fourteenth-century alliterative epic of protest, Piers Plowman, this book shows us what it is to stand in the street corners of our oldest poetry to test its hallucinatory reality. In these poems, written at the intersection of scholarship and lyric phantasmagoria, Weiskott’s Cycle of Dreams entrances the book of the true poem, which is the old recursive and portentous because analeptic nightly affair.

~ Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography

Borges famously imagined what might happen if an author tried to precisely reconstruct Don Quixote in a different place and time. The result, literal and absurd, invites us to consider the cultural drift that renders the “classics” new and strange as we gaze back at them across the ages. Eric Weiskott, one of our finest thinkers on Middle English prosody, offers a vision of one possible future for Langland’s Piers Plowman. This late medieval alliterative poem is beloved for its allegorical structure and political critique, creating an entire dreamworld ripe with meaning and wonder. Weiskott’s Cycle of Dreams is no retelling, but a meditation on Piers amidst the conflict and crisis we now live in, weaving in images, allusions, quotations: “Like commentary / on an unknown text,” he writes, “I wake up, torn in two.” As in Langland, there are moments of humor, satire, and real beauty that render this collection a pleasurable and challenging read: “A thing that wrecks the air like butterflies: / the unspeakably beautiful violence of our lives.”

~ David Hadbawnik, translator of The Aeneid and author of Field Work and Ovid in Exile

Cycle of Dreams

Imprint:

by Eric Weiskott

FORTHCOMING Fall 2024

An experimental hybrid work, Cycle of Dreams pairs translation and original poetry. The translations, or adaptations, are of William Langland’s strange and wild fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, a politically radical English and Latin poem written in the wake of plague and divided into a prologue and twenty passūs or steps. Eric Weiskott transposes the action from London and Worcestershire to New England and Long Island. The translations refashion and modernize Piers Plowman by disarticulating its continuous shape and rearticulating it as a collection of lyrics. The translation appears on the left and original poetry on the right in each page opening, so that the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries speak to one another as in a dream.

Like Piers Plowman itself in manuscript culture, Cycle of Dreams attracts paratexts. Images illustrate the absent presence of Langland’s authorship. A series of glosses or marginal notes grounds the poems in critical theory, etymologies, lyric reminiscences, and statistics reflecting the desperation of our economic moment. An “oneirography” or dreamed bibliography names some of the scholarship that supports study of Piers Plowman today and some other sources for Langlandian fever dreams.

Langland can address us today, not in the voice of a bygone author whose “context” must be arduously rearticulated in the laboratories of scholarly endeavor, but one whose utopian vision is in its broad outlines no less urgent in 2024 than it was in 1381, when English rebels used Langland’s title figure as a rallying cry for insurrection. Cycle of Dreams unearths “buried dreams / of a future adequate to the present tense.”

About the Author

Eric Weiskott is a poet and teacher who lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Author most recently of the poetry chapbook Chanties (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and the scholarly monograph Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 (Penn, 2021), Eric is also co-editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies.