Thursday: a livestream of this event is available! (KNOW HOWE: Kythe Heller on Fanny Howe's "Bewilderment")

 

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 by errancy, vulnerability, and heightened presence, where language becomes strange enough to remain alive. This way of proceeding invites mystical inquiry and ethical attentiveness, offering a form of lived resistance grounded not in certainty but in listening, permeability, and form. We will read key excerpts together and reflect on questions such as: What does it mean to write from a place of not knowing? How does bewilderment shape our ethical relation to others, to history, and to the self?

Participants are encouraged to read the essay in advance if possible, though all are welcome to join this informal, generative conversation. Here is a scholarly-use link to Fanny Howe's "Bewilderment" (from The Wedding Dress, University of California Press, 2003). 

In-Person Attendance: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330. Free and open to the public. Seating is limited, arrive early if possible. 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel.