Laura Kasischke: The End: A Lecture (July 2004)

Though as a culture we place a great deal of value on the idea of closure, many of our most important experiences, Laura Kasischke argues, don’t have it; instead, they “linger, fester, [or] echo.”  Referencing Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s book Poetic Closure, Kasischke conducts close readings of poems by Robert Browning, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden to explore different kinds of endings and how writers can allow their endings to continue to resonate—and perhaps, in a sense, not end at all.