Collection

Alliterative Verse / Avant-Garde

A conversation among Old English, Middle English, and contemporary poems

BY Eric Weiskott

A tenth-century codex printed on aged pages lies open on a tile floor.
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A jeweled brooch in the shape of a disc with intricate, curling metalwork.
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A pile of silver Anglo-Saxon coins alongside one modern-day one pence coin on a red background.
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Closely-cropped view of pages from a tenth-century codex.
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Called Lud’s Church, this natural cleft in the rock hidden in the Black Forest was a place of worship in the 15th century for followers of John Wycliffe.
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Manuscript from “Vision of Piers Plowman”.jpg
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Bright gold metalwork artifacts lay in gloved hands held out to display the items.
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This collection of poetry, curated by Eric Weiskott, surveys Old and Middle English poetry by comparison to contemporary poems that explore similar sounds and formal techniques. In his introduction, Weiskott writes,

The connection between alliterative verse and contemporary poetry is not a matter of sourcing. It is not that contemporary poets thrill to the subtleties of Winner and Waster, an alliterative poem from the 1350s. Instead, the two bodies of poetry belong together because, for 21st-century readers, they both push the envelope of what poetry can be and do. [...] 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.

Introduction
Poise: Lines/half-lines
Medieval and contemporary, poetic lines find their equilibrium in the balance between two halves, or two ideas, or two possible interpretations.
“dear Poet”: Subjectivity And Song
Who is speaking when the poem speaks? What comes first, the poem or the self?
Death And Beauty: Lyricism/finitude
The genealogy of lyric poetry in English stretches all the way back to the age of Bede. As compact and often enigmatic compositions, lyric poems have a special purchase on the twin problems of death and beauty.
“what If?”
Poetry is a machine for imagining the world otherwise. These poems ask a simple but profound question.
“a Modern Letter Sent From Antiquity”: Time-warps
Poets look to the past for inspiration. The poets in this section flex their historical imagination.
Swords And Viscera: Battle, Encounter, Race
These are poems with body counts; their grotesque fascination with disembowelment corresponds to how they consider the social meaning of human difference.
Say What I Am Called: Riddle, Charm, Prophecy
If a poem baffles you, maybe that was the idea! These poems are keeping something from you.
Lions, Dragons, And Werewolves: Romance
The most popular and widely disseminated literary genre before the novel, and one of the inspirations for the novel, was romance. Medieval European culture articulated an enduring connection between powerful and fantastical creatures and romantic love.