The Zeitgeist and Me with Jeanne Heuving

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED DUE TO WEATHER. Please join us Wednesday, March 6.

The zeitgeist, loosely translated as “the spirit of the age,” was once a popular term to evaluate directions in experimental and avant-garde art. Now, it’s largely has fallen into disuse. In this talk, Heuving resurrects the term, so steeped in the past that its nostalgia provides an apt platform for discussing her work—in step and out of step with the defining ventures of her time.

As a scholar and creative writer, Heuving has been committed to thinking through the protracted gestures and ephemeral possibilities of her peers and her own work. She discusses how her earliest work was called into existence through the infectious, alienated voices of the experimental fiction of the 1970s before finding in poetry and cross-genre writing a set of possibilities apart from these voices.

Her recently published book, The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, explores a revisioning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the exalted tradition of Western love poetry, millennia in the making, such that its male and heterosexual proclivities are bypassed. In between is a protracted period of Incapacity, a condition she at once courts and that delivers its own fisticuffs. She concludes with “What now?,” talking about her soon-to-be-published prose and poetry work, Mood Indigo.

Agenda

6 pm: Doors and cash bar open
6:15–7:30 pm: Presentation and Q&A
7:30 pm: Reception

This event has been produced in partnership with UW Bothell.