Eric Weiskott, "Cycle of Dreams" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) and "Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-Text" (U Exeter Press, 2025)

Summary

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.

Transcript

[Eric Weiskopf]

Ugh.

[Depop Advertiser]

You said you were over him, but his hoodie's still in your rotation. It's time. Grab your phone, snap a few pics and sell it on Depop. Listed in minutes with no selling fees. And just like that, a guy 500 miles away just paid full price for your closure. And right on cue.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Hey, still got my hoodie?

[Depop Advertiser]

Nope. But I've got tonight's dinner paid for. Start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste list. Now with no selling fees, payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.

[Shopify Advertiser]

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into Sign up for your $1per month [e-mail] SpecialOffer welcome to

[Eric Weiskopf]

the New Books Network.

[John Yargo]

Welcome to New Books and Literary Studies. I'm your host, John Yargo. Today I'm excited to share a conversation I had with Eric Weiskopf, professor of English at Boston College. Eric has previously published Meter and Modernity in English verse 1350-1650 from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as English Alliterative Verse, Poetic Tradition, and Literary History from Cambridge University Press. He's also the author of the chapbook titled Chanties An American Dream from Bottlecap. Eric serves as a co editor for the Yearbook of Langland Studies as well. Today, we are Discussing two of Eric's recent books that share a connection to the 14th century English poem Pierce Plowman. The first is Cycle of Dreams, a poetry collection that uses motifs, literary dev, and themes from William Langland's surreal poem as a springboard to meditate on the equally surreal experience of political and social life in the 21st century. Cycle of Dreams is published by Punctum Books. The second book we are discussing is Eric's new edition of the A Version of Pierce Plowman from the University of Exeter Press. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Welcome to the podcast, Eric.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Thank you for having me on.

[John Yargo]

Both of us. Love Pierce Plowman Maybe love is the wrong word. Enchanted by, disturbed by. I don't know. Can you tell us a little bit about your first encounter with Pierce Plowman?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. I first read it in graduate school. Or I read part of it in a class with Ian Cornelius, who was One of my advisors. It was a class on multilingualism in medieval England. And. And the reason Pierce Plowman is a good poem for that class is how much it mixes and matches the English and Latin languages.

[John Yargo]

Oh, awesome. Were you immediately, like, drawn to it, like, carried away by its theological speculation and aesthetic puzzles?

[Eric Weiskopf]

It wasn't love at first sight. I thought it was good. But in the context of the class, it was just one of many examples. Honestly, 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. And therefore, it was kind of like when someone you respect recommends a book, you take that recommendation with a lot of weight. And so that's what I did. And so after graduate school, I read the full poem, and it exists in three versions. So first I read the. I finished the version we were reading, which was B. Then I read the C version, and then finally I went back to read the A version, which is the one I've now edited.

[John Yargo]

Let's talk a little bit about the A text. What are some of its most salient features? It's the earliest and shortest version of Piers Common, right?

[Eric Weiskopf]

It's the earliest and shortest version. It's probably an incomplete draft that accidentally escaped into circulation. Probably. Langland wasn't intending to publish this version of the poem, and it's unfinished. It stops at a moment of spiritual impasse, a significant moment, but not a moment that would be a good moment to end a poem on. The poem is a dream vision, and the dreamer is at the end of the A text, distraught by the thought that all of his learning, his book learning, has merely given him further ways to justify sin to himself? And wouldn't it be neater and more spiritually efficacious to be an ignorant Plowman who can, he says, pierce heaven with a single paternoster? That that idealization of. Of the unlearned is the note of spiritual despair on which this version of the poem ends.

[John Yargo]

I often have that thought myself that all this learning is just a really neat way to justify my own, you know, foibles or sentence. That's really fascinating. Let's step back a little bit and talk about scholarly editing. How did this book come together? And for listeners who might be considering preparing a scholarly edition, what advice would you give? What recommendations would you give?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, I very much remember the moment I decided to do this edition. I just thought I'd teach Piers Plowman in lots of my classes, but it's A very. The B and C texts are quite long. They're like 7,000 lines, so. And it's difficult Middle English language. So unless it's the only text you teach, you can't get through it all in. In 14 weeks. And I. I started to grow tired of, like, the point in the poem that I had to stop when I taught it alongside other texts, as I do. I teach it in an alliterative poetry class. I teach it in a political poetry class. And you always kind of stop in the middle. So I thought if I could edit, if there were an edition, a student edition of the A text, it's so much shorter. You can get through all of it, even though it's incomplete. Or you can start with the A version and then switch segue to the C version, which is the version I usually teach. And, in fact, there are a number of medieval manuscripts that do that. So this was a medieval way of reading the poem, was splicing the A version to the C version. So I sort of fantasized about teaching a class that did that. But there was no suitable edition of the poem. There were old scholarly editions, and then there was a kind of quirky 2011 edition that was based on an unusual rogue manuscript and just wasn't suitable. You know, the editor. It wasn't a critical edition. The editor didn't correct a lot of the obvious errors. So, like, Pierce Paimon is difficult enough without the textual errors. I just thought my students would be ultra confused by that edition. So I thought, well, I just have to do it myself.

[John Yargo]

And what was the process of submitting it to a press or, you know, talking to an acquisitions editor?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, that day that I decided to do it, I started to draft. I mean, I sent an inquiry email to an editor at University of Exeter Press, and they were interested, and I submitted a proposal. And the readers they sent the proposal to liked it. So then I did it. It took, like, two years of work, specifically, two summers. One summer to establish the text and another summer to write the introduction and notes and finalize the text. And I visited a bunch of libraries that hold manuscripts of this version of the poem to check the manuscript readings against what previous editors had seen in the manuscripts. There weren't gigantic mistakes to correct, but I wanted to see them for myself.

[John Yargo]

So you started by gauging the interest of a press just to.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I did, yeah, sure. Yeah.

[John Yargo]

Okay, let's turn to this book of poetry, A Cycle of Dreams. When did you catch on to the fact that you were writing a book of poetry in such sustained conversation with Pierce Plowman.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, it was really a late breaking part of this book. Pierce Plowman was when I first started writing some of the original poems in this book. I was in college and I had never read Pierce Powman before. So the core of this book is actually like a much revised, much expanded version of my undergraduate honors thesis, which was a book of poetry with a bunch of later poems as well. And then they're all revised. And the breakthrough moment in writing the book was when I realized that my poems. I liked my poems, but they were kind of out to sea. They needed a conversation partner. And I found that in Pierce Palman. It's a poem I know well. It's a time period I know well. And I also thought that Langland's voice and areas of focus were a good match for what I wanted to do in my own poetry. Piers Palman is a. An aggressively political poem that thinks about social formation and social reform in very explicit ways. That. And it thinks about economic distribution in ways that continue to resonate. It's also a plague poem. And so once Covid happened, I was thinking back on this poem with a whole new set of understandings of its. Of its cultural moment. So it's. Despite being so old, it also felt to me very now. So I wanted to do. Once I had this idea, I wanted to do like adaptive translations of it that would make it feel of our moment because there have been close literal translations that just tell you what the Middle English says. So that freed me to do something more experimental.

[John Yargo]

Yes, that's exactly what I enjoyed so much about this collection. You said Pierce Plowman as aggressively political in the sort of the unreserved and unreticent way you're saying, making biting satire. Much appreciated.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Thank you.

[John Yargo]

Yeah. I want to turn to a line from the introduction of your edition of Pierce Plowman. And I really love this quote. Pierce Plowman does have a form, but it must be caught in transit like a train or an arpeggio, not taxonomize like a species. End quote. Talk to us about some of the formal features of Pierce plot.

Sure.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, in some way it's. It. Its form is paradoxical. It's so intensely literary that it's easy to misread it as non literary. If you read in. In Middle English, if you read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the way that that poem is fictional is so recognizable to us as readers of the modern novel. There's a frame narrative, There are tales There are people who tell the tales. The tales reflect back on who tells them. The tales begin and then they have a climax and then they end and someone else tells the tale. It's neat and sort of telegraphic, and it also matches like later developments in imaginative writing. Pierce Powman. Everything's more in flux in terms of its form. It's cycles through genres, it cycles through ideas. It often proposes an idea and then has another speaker counter the same idea. But without any final resolution of the debate. There might be preliminary resolutions and there might be a power differential or a differential in authority between the two people or the two speakers who are disagreeing, but you never quite know where to land between two voices in a debate. It's a dream vision, but it activates an extraordinary number of other genres as it goes through. And what is difficult about reading the poem is also what's really rewarding about reading it. It's just Langland's ability to pivot from one mode or genre or idea to another, often with like a single word. So, like, here's an example in the opening of the poem, in the prologue of the poem, at a certain point, there's a set piece of a description of rats and mice holding a parliament, which is a kind of allegorical representation of English parliament in the 14th century. And the only warning you have that this is about to happen is the word. Then a verse paragraph opens, you know, then a bunch of rats ran out. The poem doesn't give you any other kind of couching for that moment. There's no Chaucerian, you know, like frame narrative that holds the moment. It just. Then you swing into this other thing and you have to go with it. So that's what I love. And that's part of what makes the poem feel aggressive. It's like not. It gives the effect of a poet being so ardently, you know, in. In haste to tell us something important that he can't be bothered to do the normal poetic things that. That other poets might. Might do. Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[1-800-Contacts Advertiser]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts

[Shopify Advertiser]

in time for this class.

[1-800-Contacts Advertiser]

I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.

[Eric Weiskopf]

And breathe.

[1-800-Contacts Advertiser]

Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.

[Eric Weiskopf]

1-800-contacts.

[Experian Advertiser]

My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big Financial Friend Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills so saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your Big Financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills are subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and one plus cancellations paid. Membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details.

[State Farm Advertiser]

Experian this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

[John Yargo]

Cycle of Dreams has an epigraph from Morton Bloomfield's monograph Piers Plowman as a 14th century apocalypse quote. It is like reading a commentary on an unknown text. Bloomfield here is talking about the way the poem has these expansive passages and then jumps sharply to another topic, just as you were discussing, like what it would be like to read only the footnotes to a poem or a religious text. What does that idea enable for you as a poet?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure, I mean that it's like the most famous sentence that's been written on Pierce Palm and it gets quoted and re quoted and completely out of context of what Bloomfield was actually arguing in that part of his book. It's the most famous part of his book because it just seems to strike at something so true to the poem. Exactly the quality I was describing a moment ago. Just its kaleidoscopic use of genre, which that's Bloomfield's main topic in his book. He sort of has to invent this category of apocalypse to capture the kaleidoscopic quality of Langland's play with genre and also the the pivots between one idea and the next. It again, it gives the effect of commentary on a text that we can't know or name. As if, if we just found this, you know, special, this special primary text that Langland is thinking about. It would explain the poem's circuitous form. But there is no such text. The poem just gives us that sensation of there being a missing, an absent source of authority to which it responds and you know, this relates to a book. We're not talking about the monograph project I've just finished. But that effect of, like, tantalizing a reader with an inapprehensible ulterior form of authority is something that poetry did before Langland and that poetry continues to do in our contemporary moment as well. Just as one example, your paraphrase of Bloomfield as you know, like, what it would be like to read only the footnotes to a poem. I mean, there's a. There's a book of lyric essays that has that form. It's Jenny Boulley's the Body. It's composed entirely of footnotes. And she has a really engaging, affecting way of using the footnote form in the absence of a text. And that's a much more contemporary book. So I'm interested also, I guess that's obvious in Cycle of Dreams. I'm interested in how 14th century poetics can. Can continue to matter, like in our contemporary and also in our American poetry scene.

[John Yargo]

Perhaps you can read the opening passage of Pierce Plowman.

[Eric Weiskopf]

So I have to say the version of the poem I'm translating in Cycle of Dreams is not the version I've edited, But it's not that different in the opening lines. So here's what the opening of the A text sounds like in the prologue.

[Eric Weiskopf (reading Middle English)]

In a summer season when softe was the sun his shopman to a shrewd as he a shapewear in abyt as an ermit unholy of werkes went weed in this world a wondrous to heir. But on a May morning on malverne hilles may befell fairly of faerie me thou y was wary for wand writ, and went ame to rest under a broad bank be a burne seed. And as he lay and laned and loked on the watrys he slummered into a sleeping swigd so merry than I to meta a mervellos Sweven that he was in a wilderness wiste I neverwhere ack as he beheld into the east an hech to the sonne issachha tur on a toft trigeli immached a deep daler beneath a dungeon therein with de PA die ka sanderke and dreadful of sichte.

[John Yargo]

Mostly I asked you to do that because I just love hearing you read Middle English, and it's wonderful. But talk to us just about how you read those lines or some of the cruxes.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, so much is happening in these lines. These lines frame the whole poem. As vision. So the eye of the poem, the dreamer wanders about the English landscape until something magical happens to him. The word ferli and faerie indicate a supernatural occurrence, and he falls asleep. And the vision he has is the substance of the first portion of the poem. He's sitting by a stream and its burbling sound puts him to sleep. And this is all a conventional dream vision opening. Although it's hard to say exactly how conventional it is because so many of the other examples in English are later than Piers Plowman and maybe influenced by it. And at the end of what I read, the dreamer sees the first images of the dream, which are a tower on a hill and a fortress in a valley, Dun djeun, which doesn't necessarily mean dungeon, but could just mean fortress. And later we will learn that the tower is where truth dwells, that is God, that is, it is heaven. And the fortress is where wrong, that is Satan dwells. And therefore it is hell, which is. But the whole poem takes place in between these places. The very next line, after what I read, refers to a fair field full of people, Fairfield full of folk. And so the whole poem is situated in the world as opposed to heaven or hell. So it's very different, for example, from Dante's visions that take us to heaven and to hell.

[John Yargo]

And those lines about the second line is Ayesha Bora. That's attracted a lot of critical attention, right?

[Eric Weiskopf]

That's right. So in the second line, very strange second line for a poem, Langland has his dreamer, or soon to be dreamer, say that he dressed himself in a shroud as if he were a sheep, which activates the. The biblical verse about a wolf in sheep's clothing. So if you look like a sheep but are not a sheep, that that's potentially bad. That's potentially a sign of treachery. So the poem begins with a note, with a really surprising note of like, self accusation. The dreamer is immediately presented to us as someone who might not be who he seems, and therefore who's cultural authority is like, severely under pressure. It's different from having presented him either as an authority figure or as a sort of like innocent everyman who's just going around learning about faith because he's earnestly interested in learning about it. So it does this third thing, which is it makes him suspect in his earnestness.

[John Yargo]

Let's turn to your companion poem here. The wanderer lapses into a wondrous dream. Can you read it for us?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. So this is the very first poem in the main section, the first main section of Cycle of Dreams after a prefatory poem. And it's translating a different version of the poem, but the same lines. Here the wanderer lapses into a wondrous dream in summertime when sun shines sing I made a poem of my habit Addressed the wandering problem in sheep's clothing Wandered the world one morning near Heartbreak Hill A fairlie befell me Shot like magic. Sick of wandering, I rested there myself by the bank of the Charles. And as I sat and heard the waters Their sweet song swayed me to sleep.

[John Yargo]

Thank you. Many of the features of Pierce Plowman for me, like Malvern Hills and this sort of romance language is so foreign and kind of exotic to me. But here you've sort of transposed that into the familiar for me at least, Heartbreak Hill, which I drive past every day, the Charles. And I'm drawn to the way you're using this kind of medieval enchantment of the modern world to launch into the themes of this poetry collection. How did this particular poem take shape?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Yeah, I mean, I was toying around with adaptive translations of Pierce Plowman independent of the other poems in this book. So I didn't initially see them as one project, but I was toying around with translating the poem in and. And transposing its places to places that were around me. So, like another. A form I use in this book is that lines also have some sometimes glosses. So here I've. I didn't read it, but I've glossed. And as I sat and heard the waters with Long Island Sound, 1986. So I was born in 1986 and I grew up on Long island, and the Long Island Sound is what separated me from Connecticut and Massachusetts where I did my schooling and now work. So that body of water is my body of water.

[Eric Weiskopf (reading Middle English)]

Yeah.

[Eric Weiskopf]

So I guess I was interested in what it did to update it. Like, would it just be hokey or would something come out of making the details in the poem not just geographical details, but like cultural touch points too, as familiar to readers in the 2000 and twenties as Langland's reference points were to readers in, like the 1380s, let's say.

[John Yargo]

Of course, I'm deeply interested in how your poetry is fitting the tools of pre modern political allegory to 21st century politics. Can you read allegory of corporate personhood? Fourth?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. So this is also. Cycle of Dreams is arranged so that the left hand, side or verso of each page opening is Langland's voice modulated through my translation, and the right hand Side or recto is my own original poetry. I've been told it's actually quite difficult even for people who know Pierce Paimon, to distinguish the two, which I guess is what I was going for. I wrote these two originally separate sets of poems towards each other. I revised them towards each other. So this is a translation, very adaptive translation of Pierce Plowman, allegory of corporate personhood. Corporations panhandled publicly, crammed it into bags and bellies, lied for their supper, squabbling, Lord knows at the bar, slept with gluttony, woke up with curses in their mouths, pursued by sleep and indolence.

[John Yargo]

Okay, now can you read the recto? Sure.

[Eric Weiskopf]

So this is. This poem's called F. A stellar fuck all of pronouns invests literature. An imaginary bomb comes for the archbishop. Poetry is destructive, but history is creative. The stakes are so high because the stakes are so low. This poem has a body count. This poem has a body count. The streets are gunked and dangerous and the ones buried above them. No one can thrive at this altitude. Every unhappy realization is unhappy in its own way. Warily Tolstoy lowers the quotation marks and fades into the cartoon hedge. The barber wields decades. Decades belong to this season's haircut. This time I'd like you to cut it in the shape of capitalism. Please, I'm begging you. Get a haircut or we'll buy you out. That does it. Pierces the stale, heavy air of the boardroom or the oak paneled seminar room. The red thunderous F. Thank you.

[John Yargo]

How does a poem like that take shape?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I think that if I'm remembering correctly, in college I started writing some of these lines. I think it used to start with the streets are gunked and dangerous. And those first several stanzas are newer writing. So there's a. Because these poems at their core are now so old. I mean, I graduated from college in 2009. There's a palimpsestic quality of them for me where there's still some cores of lines that haven't changed that much. But I've written around them, I've added to them, I've extended the lines, I guess a little bit like Langland with Pierce Baumann. I didn't think about that until just now, but yeah, the text that appears on the rectos, the right hand sides of the page openings in this book represent many layers of revision.

[John Yargo]

I mean, I love the point that you make for those who don't have the book in their hands on the left side of the. Of the book where you're connecting medieval allegory to this very pressing issue that we have. Or you're taking Langland and using it as a springboard to think about this. I think the ways in which corporations have been granted personhood and all the kind of problems that emerge out of that.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Right. I mean, personhood, who gets to be a person and how personhood is endued and embodied is a preoccupation of Langland's poem. In addition to being a dream vision, it uses personification, allegory. So the dreamer meets people like Robin the rope maker, but also abstractions like truth and bribery and holy church, and speaks with all of them. So the poem is constantly showing us persons coming into being. One scholar writes that Langland has an incarnational poetics where every. Everything he's talking about is always just coming into being just on the tip of his tongue, just. Just coalescing before your eyes. There's an incipient quality to the texts. Persons, voices, scenes. Sometimes they don't quite coalesce. Like, you know, the named characters like Robin the robemaker never quite become like characters that you can track through the poem. Even the title character, Piers the Ploughman, is actually quite scarce in the poem. There are a couple of key scenes, but it's not like every single part of the poem has Piers the plowman at the center. So what I was doing in this adaptation is taking a passage in the prologue of Pierce Ploughman that's about beggars. And it's Is being sort of is condemning beggars for asking for more food than they can eat at once. So the fact that they have bags is the. Is the bad thing. For Langland, it's okay to beg, but if you're begging with a bag, that means that you're getting extra, you're storing away food for later, and that. That means you're. You're greedy. So I just thought that kind of like, I don't want my poem to be condemning people who need to beg for food. Instead, it could be condemned, condemning corporations and. And then there's this question about corporate personhood that's arisen in the 20th and 21st century. That could reflect back on Langland's allegorical method.

[John Yargo]

Yeah. And on the recto side, one of the sort of marginal glosses here follows this line. These two lines, a stellar fuck all of pronouns invest literature. And then the marginal glosses, MFA versus nyc, which was. I forget who wrote that article. Or wasn't that.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I feel like it started as like a blog post. I also forget who wrote it, but it was like a much read, much cited blog post about. About how to become a poet. Yeah. Probably from like the early 2000s. I don't remember the date. Right, right. From a while ago.

[John Yargo]

Yeah, yeah. But, but excellent and lovely. And of course, the line, the stakes are so high because the stakes are so low. Which is. Isn't that how people describe academic work or academia or whatever?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Yeah, the. The fight. The fight is so bitter because the stakes are so low. Right. So sort of a riff on that. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess just to answer your broader question about, like, how I pieced together a poem, like f. I mean, I think I'm a. I come out of a language school poetry tradition, a sort of avant garde tradition that is especially associated with academia. It's like a. The opposition would be academic versus mainstream or avant garde versus mainstream. It's a somewhat of a fallacious distinction because there are plenty of avant garde poets now who have achieved mainstream success. But at any rate, therefore, because of. Because of coming out of that scene or that, that idiom of poetry, as opposed to, say, mainstream American poetry or slam poetry or other kinds, strands of poetry writing, um, I'm always interested in voice and in messing with voice. And what makes a poem cohere for me or like, makes me feel like I'm finished with it is when the sequence and sort of the, the. The. The path that the poem is creating through itself via voice feels compelling. Like each link feels compelling. So I don't think this poem is, like, making a coherent point about MFA programs or the study of literature or academic feuds or Tolstoy or anything. Like. It's not propositional, but what I hope it is doing is achieving a certain sequence of voicing that says something new.

[John Yargo]

I'm fascinated with the language school background. Like, how is a. A poetry workshop in a language school tradition or in this avant garde tradition different from maybe other kinds of workshops? What kinds of critique do you get that's different or unique?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, I don't want to overstate the difference, and I haven't studied with more mainstream poets, so I wouldn't want to presume. But I mean, my poetry teacher in undergraduate, who was the director of the thesis that this book is somewhat distantly based on was Elizabeth Willis, who in turn studied with Charles Bernstein at SUNY Buffalo and others at SUNY Buffalo like Robert Creeley. So that's sort of my advisor and my advisor's advisors, that sort of lineage. But I guess what I learned from Liz Willis's poetry workshops was an openness to experiment and an openness to form. I mean, what she used to tell me when she was advising my thesis was a poem is like an animal. Like you can try to ride it, but it also has things it wants to do. And if you're going to succeed at getting somewhere via the poem, you need to respect its animal nature. And there has to be some sort of compromise between what you want out of it and what it wants out of you. And if you. If you forget, the more you forget that, the more you feel like you're just going to master this animal, like, the more it's just going to kick you in the teeth. Okay. Okay. I love.

[John Yargo]

I love like a disavowal of mastery or a skepticism of mastery.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Maybe that's. That's sort of the language poetry move it. It came at relatively the same time as. As post structuralist, you know, French theory. Just this realization that language is always escaping from us. It doesn't. It. It seems to me like true of. Of language use, both of published authors that we study as critics and. And of creative writing, that we are. We ourselves are trying to do just that. You have to account somehow or accommodate somehow the ways that language escapes us. And there's a kind of dishonesty in the pre. In the. In the sort of structuralist and earlier philological tradition that tries to pretend like language doesn't ever become fuzzy or doesn't ever mean the opposite of what it means or, you know, like when you're trying to. Here's a really quick example. In the. In the Old English Exeter Book, there are all these riddles, and they have maybe solutions. They aren't stated, but we have critical consensus on the solutions. But a lot of the times in the process of describing, I don't know, a sword without ever saying the word sword. The poem also throws up all these weird side issues that are never resolved. Metaphorical descriptions that don't eventuate in a solution, and that's necessary. Poststructuralism and the language school of poetry 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.

[John Yargo]

I can see how that kind of training makes you like, the perfect interlocutor for Langland and his tradition. Can you read another poem for us? Song for Pragmatic Communists.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. So this is an original poem, Song for Pragmatic Communists. The pragmatic communist votes for the fascist. The pragmatic Communist stays home. Pragmatism and communism have a long untold history. And the pragmatic communist has learned to tell it. The white domestic terrorist has composed a communist manifesto. The networks have a field day. This democracy isn't going to undermine itself, is it? The white domestic terrorist has composed a communist manifesto. The pragmatic communist works within the system. The pragmatic communist chips away behind the scenes. Pragmatism is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same problems. Words bent around pain, words bent around money. A melancholy communism that has learned to disrupt the competition.

[John Yargo]

Thank you. I just wanted to hear you talk about this poem, actually something that you said earlier. Your poems are non propositional. Sort of reframes this poem for me, but can you discuss the poem for us a little bit?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. I mean, I think this one is probably a little more propositional than F, but still, 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, which is not that hard to do because American political discourse is so stringent and narrow and oversimplified and over binarized. But anyway, I mean, the basic context for this poem is just the infighting on the left around the 2016 election and just the increasing despair that a lot of leftists in America feel about the possibility of a. An economically and socially transformative politics in a country where communism has always been a scare word and fascism has always been not a sayable word for what's happening in our government or in our society. So I was thinking about those things and trying to figure out a way for the poem to hold them. And a lot of poems in this book are sonnets. And so this poem took its final shape once I realized that it wanted to be a sonnet. So I don't think it always had 14 lines. And it didn't. It didn't always kind of fold, you know, fall into quatrains and three quatrains and a couplet, but. But now it does, because I wanted it to be part of a set in the book.

[John Yargo]

Yeah. What does that form open up for you in this poem?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I mean, it's a form that's recognizable to readers, so it gives me something to play against. Like the reader already knows what a sonnet might be like, where the pivot points are, how a sonnet thinks. So it's just like a frame I can appropriate. It also creates the possibility for certain kinds of Repetition that are not. That are more than just a repetition. So like when I say the white domestic terrorist has composed a communist manifesto, and then three lines later I say it again. That line brackets a quatrain in the sonnet. So it isn't just repeating a line, it's marking a structural unit.

[John Yargo]

What was the revision process like on this poem?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I don't have strong memories of it, except I don't think it was always a sonnet. I think that came that idea to put it into sonnet form came through revising the whole book together and realizing that a bunch of my poems were close to being sonnets or would be improved by like, a lot of them ended up being 11 or 12 lines. And I was like, well, what if I took these 11 or 12 lines and also added some sort of punchy couplet that comments on them so that instead of just being Inertly there, the 12 lines became like, answered by the two lines. And that really opened something up for me because I think I sometimes struggle to figure out how to make the poem answer itself or complete its form. I'm good at broaching something in a poem, and I'm less good at figuring out what comes to me less naturally. Is like to figure out how to make the poem feel and look finished for the reader. And the sonnet form is like a way to do that on the page. Reader listeners can't see this, but I've indented the couplet. So you just looking at it, you can see that it has that like 12 plus 2 form. Excellent.

[Redfin Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get [e-mail] own the dream.

[John Yargo]

Can we turn to Pierce Plowman and the section on the plowing of the half acre? Would you read an excerpt?

[Eric Weiskopf]

I'd be happy to.

[John Yargo]

So

[Eric Weiskopf]

in this part of the poem, Langland is always reimagining society. He's imagining society refounded from nothing. And in this poem, it's being refounded on a strip of arable land called a half acre, a typical unit for English agriculture in the 14th century, which is an extremely provocative place to imagine the birth of society and pier's the plowman. This is the passage he's most in charge of. Has gathered a bunch of people who are supposed to plow the half acre. But some people decide to, you know, fuck off to the bar and sing hey Trolley Lolly. And so here's what Piers says in response.

[Eric Weiskopf (reading Middle English)]

May the prince of Paradis quoth pierce though in broth, but yif ye rise the rather in rapa yo to werche shall no grain that here groweth glad o yo at nede and ichth yedaiche for dwell the devil have that wretch.

[Eric Weiskopf]

So Piers says, basically, by God, unless you get up right now and hasten to the fields, not a single grain that grows here will relieve you when you need it. And though you die out of despair,

[Eric Weiskopf (reading Middle English)]

who cares than were Fetur's affair Then feigned hem blinde some laid her legalerie as such a laurel as Conna and pland him to Paris with such a pithouse wardis we have none limes to labour with. Lord, ye grassed beye aqui prae for yo peris and for your ploch bother that God of his grasse your grain multiple and yielde yo of your almes that ye given us here for we maun noether swinken sweate such sickness assaileth.

[Eric Weiskopf]

And basically, then some fakers were afraid and pretended that they were blind and said, we'll pray for you peers, as long as you keep giving us food.

[John Yargo]

What are some editorial decisions you had to make with this passage? How did you approach the editor's challenge of what to gloss or what to footnote?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Yeah, so decisions include, like, when to. When to offer a gloss. So this is for students. And so I'm glossing every word that isn't spelled the same and has the same meaning as the present day English word. I have a small glossary of the very commonest words. But for all the other words, like I'm, you know, the word for fakers, featurus, and the word for afraid, affaired, those are glossed on the side. When the gloss gets too long, it has to become a footnote. And then the notes also, you know, talk about other things. Like I have a footnote on the hey Trolley Lolly song, and I have a footnote on Piers's rautha, which is like righteous indignation. It's not sinful wrath, but it's a special kind of wrath that like, you know, Hebrew Bible patriarchs can feel ira perzelum, like righteous rage. So it's like everything in Piers Pamen. There's two versions of wrath. There's a sinful version and a righteous version. And Piers is definitely feeling the righteous version in this moment. And then there's textual decisions, like in the line where the fakers say that they have no limbs to labor with. The base manuscript I'm using has them say instead that they have no hands to labor with, which wrecks the alliteration. And is. Is. Is overly specific since what they've just done is, you know, comp. You know, arrange their legs. Aleri. They've sort of crossed their legs in some weird way to make their legs look broken. So hands is a worse reading because their legs are also part of what they're faking about.

[John Yargo]

Oh, can you read a little bit further on?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure.

[Eric Weiskopf (reading Middle English)]

Yafet besoth quoth Peiris that ye sayin I shall it sona spie ye bin wastur ze wat wail and treoda wat the sotha and iam his holder, hina and auchta him to warner which wastours in this world are his workmen destroyeth.

[Eric Weiskopf]

And Pierre says, well, if you're faking, I'm going to find out about it. I bet you're wastrels. And truth knows the truth. Capital T, Truth. The character knows the truth, and I am his loyal servant, and I'm obliged to warn him what wastrels in this world destroy his servants, sabotage his servants. You eat what those who plow for us ought to eat.

[John Yargo]

I love that word. I guess one of the things that drew me to this passage was, you know, and wasting. And that is a social critique, right?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. Yeah. And Langland is. In using that word, he's channeling an earlier poem, Winner and Waster, which is also a dream vision, also a personification allegory, and also an aggressively political poem. It's a key inspiration for Piers Plowman. And the character of Waster in that poem represents economic expenditure. It sounds like a bad thing, but in the poem Winner and Waster, Waster actually makes a bunch of really good points about how it's important to keep goods and money in circulation. If you just win and win, meaning accumulate and accumulate wealth and goods, then all you've got is a, you know, a pile of money that you can't use and a barn full of rotting bacon. Right. So. So you need Waster. You need. You need someone to spend it. But here, Langland is definitely using it as a. As a pejorative term for someone who's, you know, subsisting on. On charity without Contributing to society.

[John Yargo]

I always like talking to writers about the writing process. How do you compose academic prose? What are some of your strategies? What is the revision process like?

[Eric Weiskopf]

So my academic writing often starts with a small question or something I want to find out and then snowballs. So I write by accretion. It's often I begin the writing process assuming I'm going to write a two to five page note and then accidentally I write more and more and eventually I think, okay, I'm a couple pages away from the correct size for like an article, so I'll just keep going. But then I, I do also publish a lot of scholarly notes and those are all like article sized ideas that I didn't have time for or didn't have inclination to make into articles. So I love the note form for that reason. But I mean strategies include simultaneous attention to the text and what I want to say about it and then figuring out how what I want to say fits into the history of comment. Is this a passage or a point that lots of people have made? And therefore I have to be really careful about what exactly is new in my interpretation. Or sometimes, particularly now that I'm also publishing on contemporary poetry, it's like the first thing that you have that has ever been published on this book or this poem or whatever. I mean that's a totally different.

[John Yargo]

Yeah.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Game where you're like, well what, what would it make sense to say as the very first thing or like the first published review of this book of poetry? There's a kind of freedom, but also kind of like a falling into the abyss feeling for a medievalist in that, in that moment that I find very complementary with like yet another reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Like how can you possibly say something new after all of these books and essays? So there's I, I enjoy both challenges. Saying something new about something really old and well worn and also saying something new about something brand new.

[John Yargo]

So when you set out on a project, you're, you begin with perplexity is what I'm hearing. Like you don't know what the answer is going to be or what the argument will be.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Definitely, I'm definitely someone who decides what I think via writing. And I'll, I'll try out an argumentative tack and I mean I'm, you know, I'm fairly good at intuiting what argument I want to stick with. But, but sometimes I, I make some significant qualifications or alterations in the argument. I, I start off thinking I'm going to claim One thing and then a counterclaim is really compelling. And so I claim some third thing that synthesizes them. Or, or, or I just put the, I put the, you know, the contrary evidence right inside of the, the note or article as well and discuss, you know, the limitations of whatever reading method or interpretive conclusion I, I wanted to give.

[John Yargo]

And so does, like, giving talks. Is that one of the uses that you get out of, like, putting, Putting the work out there in the world?

[Eric Weiskopf]

Sure. Yeah. I, I really enjoy participating in conferences and I, I used to do more of it when I. When I first. When I was on the tenure track at first. But it's a. It's a really nice way to share work in progress and, and sort of take the temperature of what you're doing in a room of people who really know their stuff.

[John Yargo]

We're approaching the end of our conversation. I'd like to hear about your next projects. You have a new monograph on the horizon. What is Unherd Melodies, Apophatic Poetics and Literary Reading About?

[Eric Weiskopf]

So it should be out this fall, I'm told, from Fordham University Press. It is a monograph that brings together 14th century poetry and 21st century American poetry. So in that way, it's like the scholarly monograph twin of Cycle of Dreams. I think of them as twin books. One's critical, one's creative. And it especially centers on four poets. Langland Chaucer on the Middle English side, Ben Lerner, Claudia Rankine on the contemporary American poetry side. And then it does talk about a lot of other texts and authors. It's a big book with lots of different things in it. There's a chapter on Nabokov, there's a chapter on Bob Dylan. There are parts of the book that are about other medieval poets like John Gower and the Gawain poetry. But the book is a sort of methodologically attuned study. I have keywords that organize the book. So the keywords are. See if I can remember them. So the keywords are lyric and meter and career and literary reading itself. And so for each keyword I'm asking what. What does the kind of similarity but also friction between Middle English and contemporary poetry tell us about this keyword? There's a certain morass of polemic about lyric in contemporary literature. But, like, what does it mean to then go back to the way Chaucer handles lyric? Does it shed any light on this contested term? And the meter and lyric and reading are like centrally important terms. Career is the odd one out because it generally goes without saying there isn't a big body of theoretical scholarship on the concept of career. So my favorite thing I'm doing in this book is just bringing forward Career as an optic and naming it and offering some preliminary comments on it. And I'm just a completist by nature. Once I like someone's poetry, I want to read everything they've written. So I'm trying to make a virtue of that. I just can't help it. I can't help not reading everything or, sorry, I can't help reading everything. But I also think that something is gained when you're like, okay, so Ben Lerner's 1004 or Claudia Rankin's Citizen are the books that get most talked about and assigned. But what do those books look like? If you read all of Lerner's or Rankin's books and interesting things happen in

[John Yargo]

both cases, what is the Dylan chapter about?

[Eric Weiskopf]

The Dylan chapter is about the middle decades of Dylan's career that are least loved by fans. The 70s and 80s, basically. And again, completeism. So the premise is, if you love Dylan's early stuff, and maybe even a lot of people love his Time out of Mind and later stuff, then you need to go to the middle of the career to understand him holistically. Because the same impulse to self revision that led to these incarnations of him that we love also led to some of these other incarnations that people found to be less successful. So I didn't necessarily persuade myself that, like, Knocked Out Loaded was, you know, as good an album as some of the other ones. But by listening closely to all of those albums in the middle of his career, I did learn a lot about how he kind of, like, passed from one stage of himself to the next. 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. And I wanted to understand the whole sequence of why it was that, artistically speaking, he went from one kind of musical style to the next. And like, like Langland, he was chewing through genres. And I wanted to understand what that signified for his whole career. So it's actually, it's. It's a. It's a partial view of Dylan to only be caring about the 1965 and earlier stuff, or with a slight secondary focus on the 2000s and later stuff, because there's a lot of thinking and interest in those middle albums.

[John Yargo]

Do you have any other projects that you're working on or hobbies or anything else you'd like to.

[Eric Weiskopf]

I'm in between monograph projects. Now, with unheard melodies coming out, I would hesitate to predict a next monograph project, but I'm working on another editing project, which is I'm editing another Dream Vision. It's in the Langland tradition. It's a probably 15th century poem called Death and Life, which stages an allegorical debate between death and life, both visualized as women, which is interesting. That's not always how death is visualized, but it pertains to certain passages at the end of Pierce Plowman. It's inspired by Langland's depiction of the crucifixion and resurrection sequence as a allegorical battle between death and life, in which, paradoxically, life is victorious via death. So you know, Jesus is like the one person death can't really kill, and that is theologically central in Christianity. And anyway, so the poem deals with theological themes, but it deals with them allegorically in this extremely winsome and lush Dream Vision scene. So I've been editing that poem alongside some all of the shorter alliterative poems, which there are like 15 little alliterative bits and bobs that I've that most of which have never been edited or published before. Certainly not for students. Most of them are political prophecies, so I've just decided to draw them together.

[John Yargo]

Yeah, I'm anticipating enjoying Death and Life. Thank you for coming on the podcast, Eric.

[Eric Weiskopf]

Thanks so much for having me. Tom.

[1-800-Contacts Advertiser]

Toogood and co. Coffee creamers are made with farm fresh cream, real milk and contain 3 grams of sugar per serving. That's 40% less than the 5 grams per serving in leading traditional coffee creamers for a rich, delicious experience experience. Whether you enjoy your coffee hot, cold, bold or frothy, two good coffee creamers make every sip a good one. Two good Coffee creamers Real goodness in every sip. Find them at your local Kroger in the creamer aisle.