The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics by Jeanne Heuving (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics by Jeanne Heuving
Instead of writing of love, or about love, or even for love, Heuving in these pages simply "writes love," as if she would have us believe that love were created in the act of writing itself—as if "writing love" were a phrase like "making dinner" or indeed "making love," in which love becomes a direct, rather than an indirect, object. If, as she writes, we live in a time of "much cynicism and skepticism about love. The flourishing of love in Western poetry is thought to be in decline. Love itself is understood to be a mere ideological overlay or imaginary formation for a more 'real' desire and sex," then this study of "love and avant-garde poetics" may be reckless as well as courageous. It can, then, be thrilling to watch Heuving summon her considerable resources, as poet, as critic, and as scholar of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis, to argue that romantic love is—because it must be, even in our time—the essence of poetry. [End Page 167]
Belle Randall has been poetry editor of Common Knowledge since its inception. Her poem "A Child's Garden of Gods" is included in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine, and her own books include 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems; The Orpheus Sedan; Drop Dead Beautiful; and The Coast Starlight. She is coeditor (with Richard Denner) of Exploding Flowers: Selected Poems of Luis Garcia.
