new poetry chapbook!

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

I am thrilled to announce the publication of my new poetry chapbook Chanties: An American Dream, from Bottlecap Press. Chanties weaves together different threads of my interests and our collective experiences of living on this planet. The book has been over a year in the making, and I’m excited to share it with you all. You can purchase it today for only $10 here!

Chanties: An American Dream is a shipboard reverie about the American boat we’re all in. Prose poems, lists, and lyrics find their sea legs while musing on a photograph of a lover left on shore. In a contemporary moment when the deep reaches of the forest already belong to IKEA, the ocean beckons. “The depths turn electric.” Responding to the impasse of subjective expression in contemporary lyric theory, these poems are scored in a national “first-person choral.”

Inspiration comes from past and present voyagers on these waters: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Willis, Claudia Rankine, Ben Lerner, and Solmaz Sharif. The epitaphic concluding poem monumentalizes literary missed connections, ships passing in the night. “Here lies all your scholarship. Here lies your poetry.”

Middle English keyboard

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

I have defined a custom input source (aka keyboard layout) for Mac OS to enable me to type the premodern English characters ash (æ, Æ), eth (ð, Ð), thorn (þ, Þ), and yogh (ʒ, Ʒ). This is essential for my research, as otherwise I would have to copy and paste each character each time I type a block quotation or produce an edition of a poem. Now that I’ve gotten used to the custom keyboard I can type Middle English as fast as I type Present-Day English.

my custom keyboard layout for Early English

I defined the keyboard using the following substitutions: ash mapped onto z, eth mapped onto j, thorn mapped onto q, and yogh mapped onto < (lowercase) and > (uppercase). (The letters j, q, and z are rare in Old and Middle English.) If I had it to do again I might have mapped yogh onto x, also rare in Old and Middle English; but I am too used to the layout to want to change it now. I previously replaced v, which is not used in Old English, with wynn (ƿ, Ƿ). As I work more in Middle English than Old English these days, and wynn went defunct before the Middle English centuries, while v was used in more words, it is more important for me to have v available within the custom keyboard.

Here is the latest version of my keyboard layout in .keylayout format for anyone to use. Maybe this will be helpful to the medievalist readers. If you’d like to modify it at all, I recommend the program Ukelele.

To install on a Mac, copy the file into Library > Keyboard Layouts or create this subfolder. Then activate the layout by visiting System Settings > Keyboard > Text Input > Input Sources > Edit > “+.” The custom layout should appear under Others with the name Old English. It is then a simple matter of defining a keyboard shortcut to toggle between the regular layout and the Early English one. I use command + spacebar, which is convenient.

a little project

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

A few of the rare books I’ve purchased recently arrived with mylar film protective covers. It looks snazzy and protects the books from damage due to wear, dirt, and light, so I started looking into gathering the materials that would be needed to do this myself. After watching this instructional video, I assembled:

  • 2-mil thickness archival film in individual foldable sheets
  • 3-mil thickness archival film on a 100′ roll
  • hobby knife
  • self-healing cutting mat
  • ruler
  • tape

It was quite relaxing! I forgot how much I enjoy crafting. I started with my oldest books and then ended up creating covers for some of the paperbacks I use most in the classroom, to prolong their shelf life. I used the thinner film for smaller and newer books and the thicker film for the bigger and older ones. For the new books and the paperbacks I taped the film to the book, whereas I left the film loose for more rare materials.

Rankine/Lowell

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

I have a new note out at The Explicator [free epub / permalink] on the section of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen that engages with Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. My note, “Claudia Rankine and Robert Lowell, Again,” supplements a PMLA article by Kamran Javadizadeh by pointing to a little-known or unknown prior version of the Citizen section, published in the poetry magazine AGNI. I provide a full collation of the early publication with Citizen’s text.

This is the first scholarly output from the contemporary half of my current book project, Unheard Melodies. My book brings together fourteenth- and twenty-first-century poetics.