Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry

Fulton, Alice

ISBN 10: 1555972861 / ISBN 13: 9781555972868

Published by Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, 1999

About this Item

8vo, 309 pp.

Seller Inventory # 122427

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry
• Publisher: Graywolf Press, Saint Paul
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555972861
• ISBN 13: 9781555972868
• Binding: softcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Fine copy
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

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 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.