First Advisor

Michele Glazer

Term of Graduation

Spring 2022

Date of Publication

7-9-2022

Document Type

Closed Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Creative Writing

Department

English

Language

English

Subjects

Human beings -- Extinction -- Poetry, Extinction (Biology) -- Poetry

DOI

10.15760/etd.7954

Physical Description

1 online resource (iii, 51 pages)

Abstract

The poems in Well of Endings are the result of three years scribbling within the context of a typical mid-life crisis, but stewed with whispers of fascism, ecological collapse, mass extinction of species and languages, the Martian sky of wildfires, and a global pandemic. What felt like an apocalypse in my own life seemed to manifest with ruthless frequency in our wider world. It's safe to say every people in every era believed their civilization stood ready to throw itself from the cliff's edge. I admit, that millenarian impulse--to feel special and guilty that I might live to witness a truly post-human planet--ensouls many of the poems here. Yet, I'm certain their more pressing project has been to help me think well of our many endings as they unfurl, to make peace with extinction, which is a kind of forgetting, a source of unlearning. Along the way, I deepened my relationship with several preoccupations: talking to trees, the myth of memory, Agnes Martin, prophecy, birds, capsized boats, antique words, geological timeframes, and the primordia of life within whose borders already germinates an ending.

Rights

© 2022 Jason Michael Stieber

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

Comments

This thesis is only available to students, faculty and staff at PSU.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38259

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