Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Eric Weiskott on Cycle of Dreams and Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-Text

Host: John Yargo
Guest: Eric Weiskott (Professor of English, Boston College)
Episode Date: March 4, 2026
Books Discussed:

• Cycle of Dreams (Punctum Books, 2021)
• Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-Text (U Exeter Press, 2025)

Episode Overview

In this episode of New Books and Literary Studies, John Yargo speaks with Eric Weiskott about his dual engagement with the 14th-century English poem Piers Plowman. The conversation revolves around Weiskott’s creative collection Cycle of Dreams, which adapts Langland’s medieval motifs to contemporary political and social contexts, and his scholarly edition of the A-Text of Piers Plowman, aimed at both students and scholars. The interview delves into translation, adaptation, editorial technique, poetic form, as well as the enduring relevance of medieval allegory for 21st-century life.

Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. First Encounters and Long-term Fascination with Piers Plowman

Timestamps: 02:24–03:55

• Eric’s Introduction: Weiskott first encountered Piers Plowman in a graduate seminar on medieval multilingualism taught by Ian Cornelius.
• He describes his initial interest as not "love at first sight" but notes the influence of respected mentors:

  “It was really more that I could see that Ian was in love with this poem and was devoting his career to it. And I really admire Ian.” (03:11)

• Successive readings of the B, C, and finally A texts of Piers Plowman deepened his engagement.

2. The A-Text: Salient Features and Editorial Rationale

Timestamps: 03:55–08:23

• Characteristics: The A-Text is the earliest and shortest, likely an incomplete draft that “accidentally escaped into circulation.”
• Ending & Themes:

  “It stops at a moment of spiritual impasse...that all of his learning, his book learning, has merely given him further ways to justify sin to himself.” (04:05)

• Motivation to Edit: Frustration with existing student editions, desire to make the whole poem teachable in a semester, and medieval practice of transitioning from the A to the C version in manuscripts.
• Editorial Process:

  “There were old scholarly editions, and then there was a kind of quirky 2011 edition...I just have to do it myself.” (06:46)

3. Cycle of Dreams – Adapting Langland for the Present

Timestamps: 08:28–11:20

• Origin: The core poems began as an undergraduate honors thesis, later revised and expanded with Langland in mind.
• Adaptation Motivations:

  “My poems… needed a conversation partner. And I found that in Piers Plowman.” (09:14)

• Resonance: Weiskott found Langland’s political, economic, and plague motifs newly urgent during the COVID-19 era.
• Form:

  “Once I had this idea, I wanted to do adaptive translations… that would make it feel of our moment.” (10:16)

4. Challenging and Restless Poetic Forms

Timestamps: 11:20–15:47

• On Langland’s Form:

  “Its form is paradoxical. It’s so intensely literary that it’s easy to misread it as non-literary… Everything’s more in flux in terms of its form.” (11:20)

• Contrasted with Chaucer’s easily recognizable fictionality and structure.
• Emphasis on frequent pivots, unresolved debates, and shift in genres.
• Weiskott highlights abrupt transitions as a formal aggression in Langland’s poetry.

5. Bloomfield’s Commentary and Medieval Poetics in the Modern World

Timestamps: 15:47–18:49

• Discussion of Morton Bloomfield’s observation: Piers Plowman feels “like reading a commentary on an unknown text.”

  “It gives the effect of commentary on a text that we can't know or name... The poem just gives us that sensation of there being a missing, an absent source of authority to which it responds.” (16:19)

• Weiskott links this “tantalizing” absence to both medieval and contemporary poetic practice, referencing Jenny Boully’s The Body for contemporary comparison.

6. Poetic Reading and Adaptive Translation

Timestamps: 18:49–26:39

• Reading Middle English: Weiskott recites and explains the A-Text’s opening, highlighting its supernatural markers and the positioning of the poem’s action in the world between good and evil.
• Modern Adaptation:

  “I was toying around with translating the poem and… transposing its places to places that were around me.” (25:13)

• Use of local references like “Heartbreak Hill” and “the Charles” to contemporary Americanize the poem’s setting.

7. Medieval Allegory for 21st-century Politics

Timestamps: 26:39–35:18

• Allegory of Corporate Personhood: Weiskott adapts Langland’s critique of “wastrels” to modern issues like corporate excess.

  “What I was doing in this adaptation is taking a passage… that’s about beggars… Instead, it could be condemning corporations.” (31:25)

• Poetic Technique: Cycle of Dreams alternates adaptive translations of Langland (verso) and original poems (recto), distinguishing the author’s dual voices.
• Avant-garde Influence:

  “I come out of a language school poetry tradition, a sort of avant garde tradition that is especially associated with academia.” (33:30)

• Emphasis on voice and deliberate non-propositional sequencing.

8. Language, Voice, and Poetic Inheritance

Timestamps: 35:18–38:45

• On poetic composition as an interplay of intention and the poem’s “animal nature.”

  “A poem is like an animal. Like you can try to ride it, but it also has things it wants to do… there has to be some sort of compromise between what you want out of it and what it wants out of you.” (36:10)

• Appreciation for poststructuralist views: Language that always “escapes from us.”

9. Political Allegory: "Song for Pragmatic Communists"

Timestamps: 39:01–44:14

• Weiskott reads “Song for Pragmatic Communists” and discusses the process of shaping it into a sonnet.
• The poem responds to leftist dilemmas in U.S. politics, especially around the 2016 election.
• Sonnet structure used to give rhetorical and visual closure:

  “What interested me about writing it was writing towards the edges of a political proposition. So instead of the poem being a vehicle for political sentiment, I see this poem as a vehicle for thinking towards the outer limits of American political discourse…” (40:12)

10. Editorial Approaches to the A-Text

Timestamps: 44:44–50:10

• Plowing the Half-Acre Scene: Weiskott reads and explains the famous passage.
• Glossing Choices: Each non-modern word is glossed unless universally common; longer notes go into footnotes.
• Textual Decisions: Editorial choices sometimes follow or stray from manuscript evidence for alliterative or interpretive reasons.
• Social Critique: The notion of "waster" draws on earlier allegorical traditions and highlights the poem’s engagement with economic justice.

11. Writing and Revision—Academic and Creative

Timestamps: 51:32–54:32

• Academic Prose Approach:

  “My academic writing often starts with a small question or something I want to find out and then snowballs. So I write by accretion.” (51:44)

• Describes interplay between writing, revision, and conference presentations to test ideas and arguments.

12. Upcoming Projects: Unherd Melodies and More

Timestamps: 55:11–62:00

• Forthcoming Monograph: Unherd Melodies: Apophatic Poetics and Literary Reading (Fordham, 2026), a critical “twin” to Cycle of Dreams linking Langland and Chaucer with contemporary poets Ben Lerner and Claudia Rankine.
• Focus on key terms: lyric, meter, career, and literary reading.
• Special chapters on Nabokov, Bob Dylan’s “middle albums,” and more.

  “So to make an analogy to Langland, like, Dylan had an A version and a B version and a C version and a D version…” (58:21)

• Next Editorial Projects: Editing Death and Life, a 15th-century allegorical dream vision debating death and life (both personified as women), and a collection of shorter alliterative poems.

Memorable Quotes

• “It’s so intensely literary that it’s easy to misread it as non-literary.” – Eric Weiskott (11:20)
• “My poems... needed a conversation partner. And I found that in Piers Plowman.” – Eric Weiskott (09:14)
• “Everything he’s talking about is always just coming into being just on the tip of his tongue, just coalescing before your eyes.” – Eric Weiskott (30:26)
• “A poem is like an animal. Like you can try to ride it, but it also has things it wants to do... If you forget that, the more you feel like you’re just going to master this animal, the more it's just going to kick you in the teeth.” – Eric Weiskott (36:10)
• “Language is always escaping from us.” – Eric Weiskott (37:06)
• “Poststructuralism... would say that’s just what language is like. You can’t be very precise in describing something without some other imprecision elsewhere in your description.” – Eric Weiskott (38:32)
• “I decide what I think via writing.” – Eric Weiskott (53:48)

Notable Readings

• Middle English Prologue of the A-Text (18:52–20:08)
• Adaptive Translation and Original Poem:
  • “Here the wanderer lapses into a wondrous dream...” (23:51–24:36)
• Allegory of Corporate Personhood and “F” Poem (26:51–28:54)
• “Song for Pragmatic Communists” (39:01–39:58)
• Plowing the Half Acre Passage (45:53–46:58)

Further Information

• Cycle of Dreams brings the surreal, political, and allegorical energies of Piers Plowman to bear on contemporary issues of corporate power, language, and crisis.
• Weiskott’s annotated A-Text edition seeks to make the earliest version of Piers Plowman accessible for students, reflecting both traditional scholarship and creative approaches.

For listeners interested in medieval poetry, adaptation, or experimental approaches to translation and editorial practice, this episode offers rich insights, lively readings, and thoughtful discussion on the relevance of the distant past to urgent questions of the present.