Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry - Softcover

Fulton, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555972861 ISBN 13: 9781555972868

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1999

Synopsis

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, award-winning poet and critic Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. How does poetry create feeling? What are fractal poetics?

In a series of provocative, beautifully written essays concerning "the good strangeness of poetry," Fulton contemplates the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome, the aesthetics of complexity theory, and the need for "cultural incorrectness." She also meditates on electronic, biological, and linguistic screens; falls in love with an outrageous 17th-century poet; argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters; and calls for a courageous poetics of "inconvenient knowledge."

Contents

Preamble

I. Process
Head Notes, Heart Notes, Base Notes

Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook

II. Poetics
Subversive Pleasures

Of Formal, Free, and Fractal Verse: Singing the Body Eclectic

Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions

III. Powers
The Only Kangaroo among the Beauty

Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle

Her Moment of Brocade: The Reconstruction of Emily Dickinson

IV. Praxis
Seed Ink

To Organize a Waterfall

V. Penchants
A Canon for Infidels

Three Poets in Pursuit of America

The State of the Art

Main Things

ri0
VI. Premises
The Tongue as a Muscle

A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge

About this title

Review

"The better part of fairness is the willingness to move toward what is given rather than impose one's own aesthetic on a book. This approach--a sympathetic leaning toward the work coupled with patient rereading--is the one I've tried to realize." In this collection, poet Alice Fulton looks at her craft from a critic's perspective, exploring the "good strange or eccentric" world of postmodern poetry. In order to do this, Fulton has divided her book into five parts; the first, "Process," explores the multitudes of filters that stand between the writer/reader and the work--everything from the computer screen to that judgmental internal editor "invested with the power of entry and exclusion." "Poetics" investigates the forms postmodern poetry takes, supporting the "free and fractal" with an in-depth examination of prosody, linguistics, and even the relationships between quantum physics and poetry. In "Powers" Fulton takes a look at two misunderstood poets: the 18th-century Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and the 19th-century Emily Dickinson--both considered "eccentric" in their own times. "Praxis" is a meditation on the author's own work, and she follows it up with the final section, "Penchants," which contains three essay-reviews on a number of modern poets. Anyone interested in the state of postmodern poetry will find much food for thought in Alice Fulton's Feeling As a Foreign Language. --Margaret Prior

About the Author

Alice Fulton is the author of the poetry collections Sensual Math, Powers of Congress, Palladium, and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina. She has received several major honors, including MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1555972861
• ISBN 13: 9781555972868
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320