12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eric Weiskott
Eric Weiskott grew up in Greenport, NewYork, on the east end of Long Island. He teaches poetry and poetics at BostonCollege, with a focus on the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Weiskott is the author of thefull-length poetry book Cycle of Dreams (punctum books, 2024), thepoetry chapbook Chanties: An American Dream (Bottlecap Press, 2023), andthe scholarly book Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). His poems appear in Fence, TexasReview, and Exacting Clam.
How did your first book or chapbook changeyour life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does itfeel different?
Well, Chanties came outa year before Cycle of Dreams but was written much later. I’vebeen living with the core poems of Cycle of Dreams in someform since college (2005–2009), whereas I wrote Chanties in2023. A difference between the books is that Chanties isexploring the prose poem form, while Cycle of Dreams is moreinterested in couplets and the sonnet. Also, Chanties isthemed where Cycle of Dreams found a medieval interlocutor inWilliam Langland. It’s like the difference between a concept album and aninterview.
How did you come to poetry first, asopposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I guess I have always been a poet and areader of poetry, from the time I could. And for me reading poetry and writingit are two sides of the same activity. I don’t remember a time before poetry. Iadmire short stories and novels that are done well, but they rarely inspire meto write fiction.
How long does it take to start anyparticular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is ita slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, ordoes your work come out of copious notes?
Most of the righthand-side poemsof Cycle of Dreams, the original ones, have been percolatingfor over a decade. The project was languishing for the longest time—its themesand gestures made sense in my head, but not to readers, until I realized thatwhat it needed was a second dimension, something to simultaneously ground itand question it. I found that in William Langland’s fourteenth-century dreamvision Piers Plowman. The lefthand-side poems are free adaptationsof passages from Piers Plowman. The work of Anne Carson (who saysshe never works with fewer than three desks full of different materials) helpedme see the energy that could come from combining things. Christian Schlegel’s HonestJames (2015) was also an influence.
Where does a poem usually begin for you?Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project,or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
Poems usually begin for me with a phrasethat catches my attention. It’s usually not my own language, but language I’ve(over)heard during the normal course of my day. My mentor, the poet Elizabeth Willis, has said that it is amazing what you can hear in political discourse ifyou listen to it poetically. I find this to be true of all language: it’sconstantly coming at us, and it’s the poet’s job to catch language as itscreeches past. The dead metaphors in idioms are gemstones for poetic making.To answer your second question, I find it difficult to write a standalone poem.While (as my last answer reveals) the shape of the book is frequently unclearto me for most of the composition process, I’m always writing toward somethinglarger than a poem.
Are public readings part of or counter toyour creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy doing readings. I’ve read atthe Brookline Booksmith and at Trident in Boston, as well as at Boston Collegealongside colleagues. I’m thankful to have many poet-friends in my department:Allison Adair, Allison Curseen, Sarah Ehrich, Kim Garcia, Suzanne Matson, JamesNajarian, Maxim Shrayer, Andrew Sofer.
Do you have any theoretical concerns behindyour writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?What do you even think the current questions are?
For me, the poems find the questionsrather than the questions leading the poems. With Chanties Inoticed that a lot of poems ended with references to climate change—like “Forecast”does in Cycle of Dreams. In Cycle of Dreams somethemes that emerged were the politics of memory and the practice of annotationor commentary. A late addition to the manuscript that I felt really openedthings up was the addition of italicized glosses or marginal notes here andthere, often taken from other, non-poetic texts. This mimics how medievalreaders marked up their manuscripts. It allowed me to bring extra voices intothe poem without having to create a tunnel between voice A and voice B: A and Bcan simply sit side by side on a single line of type, because all readersintuitively grasp what it means to write or type in the margins. There’s powerin the margins, and the margins are places for questioning power.
What do you see the current role of thewriter being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think therole of the writer should be?
There’s a long tradition of (aprivileged few) writers taking up a lot of air. Think of Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures, later published as books. “Here is the master.” In a way theinstitution of the MFA continues that tradition, as does, in a low-brow mode,MasterClass’s videos by subscription. In response to this, the zeitgeist in2024 suggests that writers (even poets) are just like anyone else. That claimsstructures Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry (2016). “Don’t worry,I, a published poet, also find poetry weird and aggravating.” I think writersare among the people doing the work to question our world and realize a betterone, but lots of other people are also doing that work: activists, parents,teachers of all kinds.
Do you find the process of working with anoutside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As you know, unlike fiction, poetrygenerally isn’t edited too heavily by the press. I have a small group ofwriters I share work with; it has taken a lot of time and happenstance to findthem and figure out what to trade in kind (since they are not all writingpoetry now), but it’s working. I began searching more actively for fellowwriters around the time when I began teaching creative writing workshops. Itdidn’t make sense to host this formative intellectual community with mystudents, which resembled my experience of poetry in college, and not work tocreate something similar for myself in the present.
What is the best piece of advice you’veheard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Allison Adair visited my class and toldmy students, “When you’re moved by the spirit, write; when you’re not, revise.”It’s fantastic advice.
How easy has it been for you to movebetween genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
In hindsight I can see that I gravitatedtoward the Middle Ages because it was the great era of self-theorizedliterature. It was only much later that “poetry” and “critical writing”diverged. As Ingrid Nelson writes, “Where a modern reader sees in a literarytext something to be analyzed in a separate critical work, medieval literatureitself serves the purpose of dilation and explication typical of much moderncritical analysis” (“ Form’s Practice ,” 38). So I suppose I have alwaysbeen interested in how poetry and critical thought can speak to each otherinstead of just blocking each other. We are all familiar with the poem thatthinks it has all the answers, or the essay that buries the poem underirrelevancies. Cycle of Dreams achieves a poetry/criticismmeld in one way, by placing lines of poetry and sentences of criticism on thesame line of type; my current monograph project, which comparesfourteenth-century and contemporary poetries, does it in another way and inanother mode. That’s not to say it is easy to do. There’s an inescapableasymmetry between poetry (even critically inflected poetry) and criticism,because poetry is fundamentally an event, but criticism is fundamentally acommentary.
What kind of writing routine do you tend tokeep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Teaching creative writing has reopenedmy creative writing practice. I write along with my students, then do deeprevisions over the summer.
When your writing gets stalled, where doyou turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled, I read.Some poetry books I have loved lately are Alice Notley’s Mysteries ofSmall Houses (1998), Solmaz Sharif’s Customs (2022),and Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence (2019). Studying medievalliterature, so much of which is translated from or otherwise derivative ofearlier texts, has given me permission to be directly influenced by writerswhom I admire. Billy Collins once read at BC, and in the q&a he said hefound his voice in poetry by deleting all other influences. The poet in avacuum: I thought it was bad writing advice as well as a shallow account of howpoetic voice is made (though unsurprising, coming from Collins, whose poemshave an annoying sameness).
What fragrance reminds you of home?
Salt air! I grew up on the shores of theLong Island Sound.
David W. McFadden once said that books comefrom books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whethernature, music, science or visual art?
Music is a close second to poetry forme. I listen to music all day and tend to binge on individual singers orgroups, going deep into their catalog to get a comprehensive sense of theirsound. I guess I can’t help approaching it like another form of research.Neither of my poetry books is primarily music-based, but a chapbook manuscriptI have drafted contains ekphrastic poems about Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch. Thepoem is a kind of song, less because of the shared lineage of lyric thanbecause it’s words in time. My current monograph project has a chapter onDylan.
What other writers or writings areimportant for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
See my answer to your question aboutgetting stalled.
What would you like to do that you haven’tyet done?
Right now I’m working on a long poem.All my poems are short; I want to tap into the capacity of a poem that goespages without ending, like Lerner’s “The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also,”his Walt Whitman poem. Even the page-and-a-half poems of Notley’s Mysteriesof Small Houses are mysteries to me. I can already feel the poemI’m writing subdividing itself into sections. I’m essentially a lyric, not anarrative, poet.
If you could pick any other occupation toattempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would haveended up doing had you not been a writer?
I could have imagined a career as alawyer or a mediocre guitarist.
What made you write, as opposed to doingsomething else?
I’m uncertain how to answer, as I don’texperience writing as a choice. It’s a compulsion I have always felt, since Ilearned to read and write. For most people, there is a certain autumn when theyare no longer returning to school, and reading and writing therefore take onsome new professional, instrumental significance in their lives, or elsereading becomes strictly for pleasure. Because this turn never happened in mylife, I’ve never really reassessed my relationship to writing or reading. Theclosest was in graduate school, when I went on a long creative-writing hiatusto become an expert in medieval literature and write a dissertation. I wouldhave found it too hard to do both at once, though my cohort-mate, the poet and professor Edgar Garcia, managed to do it. Cycle of Dreams islike a synthesis of my college and graduate-school selves.
What was the last great book you read? Whatwas the last great film?
I think it is not too early to callElizabeth Willis’s Liontaming in America (2024) “great.” Anextraordinarily multifaceted and moving book, it’s destined to become a classicof American literature. It’s part critical history of Mormonism, part spiritualbiography, part defense of poetry. Willis doesn’t write remotely like Nabokov,but her book has a Nabokovian (or Langlandian) kaleidoscopic quality, as if allof life has rushed into the prose. I’m more of a TV-series junkie than a filmbuff, but the last film I remember loving was The Long Goodbye (1973),directed by Robert Altman and starring a young Elliott Gould.
What are you currently working on?
I have a chapbook manuscript I will berevising in the new year. Working title: Sisyphus the Completist.And I’ve just this semester begun writing toward a second full-length poetrybook, possibly combinable with Sisyphus. Too early to say muchabout it, but I am drafting it on blank pages in a rare book of mine from 1745.
