Forgotten Ground Regained

Contributor

Jeff Sypeck

Jeff Sypeck taught medieval literature at the University of Maryland University college from 1999 to 2009. He works as a writer and editor for PhotoAssist, Inc., where he has helped the U.S. Postal Service research and develop more than 200 stamps on a dizzying range of subjects, including African American history, Islamic holidays, military history, and fine art. His published nonfiction includes Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800, and he co-authored I Have Started for Canaan: The Story of the African American Town of Sugarland. He lives in an agricultural reserve in rural Maryland.
His alliterative verse includes The Beallsville Calendar (alliterative verse for each month of the year), and the alliterative poems “Mearcstapa”, “Theodicy”, and “Riddle" in his poetry collection Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles. He has also published a translation into modern English alliterative verse of the medieval alliterative romance, The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier and a translation of Paul the Deacon's alliterative poem, Epitaph for the baby Hildegard, daughter of Charlemagne and Queen Hildegard in AbleMuse. In 2026, Uppsala Books published his book The Little Garden of Walahfrid Strabo: A Carolingian Poem in Verse Translation, which employs four-foot metrical, alliterative lines in a relaxed manner marked by (as described in the book's introduction) "a muted mid-line caesura, liberal use of anacrusis, medial alliteration, and alliteration between consonants and consonant clusters when meaning so dictates."
His alliterative poetry on this site includes:
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