I have a poem guide for this Middle English alliterative poem as well as a translation into Present-Day English, both up at Poetry Foundation.
alliterative verse / avant-garde
I have a new curated collection of poems, premodern and contemporary, up at Poetry Foundation. Come for the Anne Carson; stay for the Piers Plowman. This was a lot of fun to pull together. It is inspired by my current book project, which likewise juxtaposes premodern and avant-garde contemporary poetry, but there are many poems in the collection not discussed in the book (and vice versa).
From the introduction:
So many of the poems brought together here, premodern and contemporary, travel that circuit between paying rent and creating art: the demands of the aesthetic economy balanced uneasily against the demands of the economy-economy. The 20th- and 21st-century poems in this collection broach a transtemporal communication through which readers can receive “a modern letter sent from antiquity” (Willis, “Tiptoe Lightning”). Certain time-bending passages in St. Erkenwald and other alliterative poems anticipate the linkage, as if these distant poems were expecting us all along.
video interview
There is a new video up at abitlit.co featuring Andy Kesson’s interview with me about my new book.
virtual exhibits
My second monograph, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, currently appears in three virtual conference exhibits, each carrying a discount code for 40% off:
- Shakespeare Association of America (code SHAKES40-FM)
- Renaissance Society of America (code RSA40-FM)
- Medieval Academy of America (code MAA40-FM)
Some highlights of the book: it’s organized by metrical history rather than clock time; Lord Byron flits in and out of the book; new readings of Langland and Chaucer and their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reception; a sociopolitical argument about the formation of an “English literary tradition”; George Gascoigne is an unexpected star; some of the first readings of the metrical forms of English political prophecy.
announcing a new book
A description of my second monograph, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, is live at the University of Pennsylvania Press, plus an endorsement from Jeff Dolven which I deeply appreciate. The book is scheduled to appear in print this November.
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