Peripety and/or Tronies

  Thursday, February 12, 6:00PM (Eastern, I think?) KNOW HOWE: Kythe Heller on Fanny Howe's "Bewilderment"   Join us for the second meeting of the Fanny Howe Memorial Book Club, dedicated to the work of  Fanny Howe  (1940-2025). In this session, poet and scholar Kythe Heller will lead a discussion of Fanny Howe's idea of  bewilderment . A central concept in Howe's poetics and prose, bewilderment is neither mere confusion nor disorientation, but an ethic--and a radical aesthetic--that asks us to enter the world and language without prefigured meaning. Drawing from Howe's influential essay  "Bewilderment,"  first delivered in 1998 and later collected in  The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life  (2003), we will explore how bewilderment beomes a way of being, writing, and thinking that resists certainty and welcomes the unknown. In Howe's formulation,  bewilderment  is "a poetics and an ethics": a state of attentiveness marked b...