Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
"Endlings"159 views
Author
Lawson, Emily, Creative Writing - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia
Advisors
Spaar, Lisa, AS-Creative Writing, University of Virginia
Dove, Rita, AS-Creative Writing, University of Virginia
Orr, Gregory, University of Virginia
Abstract
Our current moment, marked by mass extinction and apocalyptic imagination, demands poetic response. Adrienne Rich writes: “In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.” What does it mean to witness the last of a kind? How should we approach daily life while, elsewhere, destruction is constant and imminent? These concerns with ephemerality and simultaneity meet in "Endlings," which juxtaposes spectral voices and environmental elegies. The project is situated between the ethereal and the real; it sets oneiric journeys alongside attempts to construct a secular interpretation of the notion of “afterlife” through phenomenology, dreams, and memory.
Lawson, Emily. "Endlings". University of Virginia, Creative Writing - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, MFA (Master of Fine Arts), 2020-04-14, https://doi.org/10.18130/v3-c80s-6b23.
