FUGITIVE SEMINAR: GROPING FOR THE COPPER LYRE

In this seminar, Jennifer Scappettone, poet/translator/scholar and UVa alumna, will discuss the circuitous trajectory of curiosity and dread—beginning with University-sponsored excavations at Morgantina—that led to two books about toxic waste sites across the street from her childhood home: a copper-rod mill and adjacent Superfund-listed landfill, and their kin in remote landscapes of colonial extraction. How the elusive and ultimately indigestible information she unearthed became poetry (and a series of outtakes in other media, from collaborative dance at Fresh Kills to mixed-reality performance surrounding copper boom and bust in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) is a story that involves the inspired pedagogy of UVa professors, years spent in more legibly striated landscapes, a family of cancer diagnoses, and off-hour studies in industrial history and radical environmentalism.

The seminar will feature a presentation by Professor Scappettone and an interactive discussion with workshop participants. Suggested readings and links to her work may be found here: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/FUGITIVE/copper/scappettone/