Eric Weiskott grew up in Greenport, New York, on the east end of Long Island. He teaches poetry and poetics at Boston College, with a focus on the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Weiskott is the author of the full-length poetry book Cycle of Dreams (punctum books, 2024), the poetry chapbook Chanties: An American Dream (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and the scholarly book Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). His poems appear in Fence, Texas Review, and Exacting Clam.
How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, Chanties came out a year before Cycle of Dreams but was written much later. I’ve been living with the core poems of Cycle of Dreams in some form since college (2005–2009), whereas I wrote Chanties in 2023. A difference between the books is that Chanties is exploring the prose poem form, while Cycle of Dreams is more interested in couplets and the sonnet. Also, Chanties is themed where Cycle of Dreams found a medieval interlocutor in William Langland. It’s like the difference between a concept album and an interview.
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I guess I have always been a poet and a reader of poetry, from the time I could. And for me reading poetry and writing it are two sides of the same activity. I don’t remember a time before poetry. I admire short stories and novels that are done well, but they rarely inspire me to write fiction.
How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Most of the righthand-side poems of Cycle of Dreams, the original ones, have been percolating for over a decade. The project was languishing for the longest time—its themes and gestures made sense in my head, but not to readers, until I realized that what it needed was a second dimension, something to simultaneously ground it and question it. I found that in William Langland’s fourteenth-century dream vision Piers Plowman. The lefthand-side poems are free adaptations of passages from Piers Plowman. The work of Anne Carson (who says she never works with fewer than three desks full of different materials) helped me see the energy that could come from combining things. Christian Schlegel’s Honest James (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 phrase that 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 if you listen to it poetically. I find this to be true of all language: it’s constantly coming at us, and it’s the poet’s job to catch language as it screeches 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 unclear to me for most of the composition process, I’m always writing toward something larger than a poem.
Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy doing readings. I’ve read at the Brookline Booksmith and at Trident in Boston, as well as at Boston College alongside colleagues. I’m thankful to have many poet-friends in my department: Allison Adair, Allison Curseen, Sarah Ehrich, Kim Garcia, Suzanne Matson, James Najarian, Maxim Shrayer, Andrew Sofer.
Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your 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 questions rather than the questions leading the poems. With Chanties I noticed that a lot of poems ended with references to climate change—like “Forecast” does in Cycle of Dreams. In Cycle of Dreams some themes that emerged were the politics of memory and the practice of annotation or commentary. A late addition to the manuscript that I felt really opened things up was the addition of italicized glosses or marginal notes here and there, often taken from other, non-poetic texts. This mimics how medieval readers marked up their manuscripts. It allowed me to bring extra voices into the poem without having to create a tunnel between voice A and voice B: A and B can simply sit side by side on a single line of type, because all readers intuitively grasp what it means to write or type in the margins. There’s power in the margins, and the margins are places for questioning power.
What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
There’s a long tradition of (a privileged 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 the institution of the MFA continues that tradition, as does, in a low-brow mode, MasterClass’s videos by subscription. In response to this, the zeitgeist in 2024 suggests that writers (even poets) are just like anyone else. That claims structures Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry (2016). “Don’t worry, I, a published poet, also find poetry weird and aggravating.” I think writers are among the people doing the work to question our world and realize a better one, but lots of other people are also doing that work: activists, parents, teachers of all kinds.
Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As you know, unlike fiction, poetry generally isn’t edited too heavily by the press. I have a small group of writers I share work with; it has taken a lot of time and happenstance to find them and figure out what to trade in kind (since they are not all writing poetry now), but it’s working. I began searching more actively for fellow writers around the time when I began teaching creative writing workshops. It didn’t make sense to host this formative intellectual community with my students, which resembled my experience of poetry in college, and not work to create something similar for myself in the present.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Allison Adair visited my class and told my 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 move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
In hindsight I can see that I gravitated toward the Middle Ages because it was the great era of self-theorized literature. It was only much later that “poetry” and “critical writing” diverged. As Ingrid Nelson writes, “Where a modern reader sees in a literary text something to be analyzed in a separate critical work, medieval literature itself serves the purpose of dilation and explication typical of much modern critical analysis” (“Form’s Practice,” 38). So I suppose I have always been interested in how poetry and critical thought can speak to each other instead of just blocking each other. We are all familiar with the poem that thinks it has all the answers, or the essay that buries the poem under irrelevancies. Cycle of Dreams achieves a poetry/criticism meld in one way, by placing lines of poetry and sentences of criticism on the same line of type; my current monograph project, which compares fourteenth-century and contemporary poetries, does it in another way and in another mode. That’s not to say it is easy to do. There’s an inescapable asymmetry between poetry (even critically inflected poetry) and criticism, because poetry is fundamentally an event, but criticism is fundamentally a commentary.
What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Teaching creative writing has reopened my creative writing practice. I write along with my students, then do deep revisions over the summer.
When your writing gets stalled, where do you 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 of Small Houses (1998), Solmaz Sharif’s Customs (2022), and Prageeta Sharma’s Grief Sequence (2019). Studying medieval literature, so much of which is translated from or otherwise derivative of earlier texts, has given me permission to be directly influenced by writers whom I admire. Billy Collins once read at BC, and in the q&a he said he found his voice in poetry by deleting all other influences. The poet in a vacuum: I thought it was bad writing advice as well as a shallow account of how poetic voice is made (though unsurprising, coming from Collins, whose poems have an annoying sameness).
What fragrance reminds you of home?
Salt air! I grew up on the shores of the Long Island Sound.
David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music is a close second to poetry for me. I listen to music all day and tend to binge on individual singers or groups, going deep into their catalog to get a comprehensive sense of their sound. 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 manuscript I have drafted contains ekphrastic poems about Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch. The poem is a kind of song, less because of the shared lineage of lyric than because it’s words in time. My current monograph project has a chapter on Dylan.
What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
See my answer to your question about getting stalled.
What would you like to do that you haven’t yet 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 goes pages 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 Mysteries of Small Houses are mysteries to me. I can already feel the poem I’m writing subdividing itself into sections. I’m essentially a lyric, not a narrative, poet.
If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I could have imagined a career as a lawyer or a mediocre guitarist.
What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’m uncertain how to answer, as I don’t experience writing as a choice. It’s a compulsion I have always felt, since I learned to read and write. For most people, there is a certain autumn when they are no longer returning to school, and reading and writing therefore take on some new professional, instrumental significance in their lives, or else reading becomes strictly for pleasure. Because this turn never happened in my life, I’ve never really reassessed my relationship to writing or reading. The closest was in graduate school, when I went on a long creative-writing hiatus to become an expert in medieval literature and write a dissertation. I would have 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 is like a synthesis of my college and graduate-school selves.
What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I think it is not too early to call Elizabeth Willis’s Liontaming in America (2024) “great.” An extraordinarily multifaceted and moving book, it’s destined to become a classic of American literature. It’s part critical history of Mormonism, part spiritual biography, part defense of poetry. Willis doesn’t write remotely like Nabokov, but her book has a Nabokovian (or Langlandian) kaleidoscopic quality, as if all of life has rushed into the prose. I’m more of a TV-series junkie than a film buff, 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 be revising in the new year. Working title: Sisyphus the Completist. And I’ve just this semester begun writing toward a second full-length poetry book, possibly combinable with Sisyphus. Too early to say much about it, but I am drafting it on blank pages in a rare book of mine from 1745.
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