Join us for the second meeting of this creative, catalyzing book club, dedicated to the work of Fanny Howe (1940-2025). In this session, 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 becomes 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).

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Kythe Heller is a poet, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist. She is the author of Firebird (Arrowsmith Press), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra (Stenen Press), a collection of poetry translations and a Bronze Winner of the 2024 Independent Press Book Awards. She received her Th.D. from Harvard University in Comparative Religion, with a secondary field in Art, Film, and Visual Studies / Critical Media Practice. Her work moves fluidly among poetry, essays, multimedia texts, and critical studies, with recent publications in The American Poetry Review, Tricycle, the Denver Art Museum, Cambridge University Press, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, and with support from the Mellon Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, MacDowell Colony, Harvard University, and others. She is the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, an international art and research collective founded at Harvard Divinity School and is currently on the faculty at Bard College's Language and Thinking Program.

Persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access may contact Houghton Library's Administrative Coordinator Le Huong Huynh by email or at 617-495-2443 in advance of the seminar.