Customer Reviews

Feeling as a Foreign Language

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I've got to admit that I'm beginning to lose my patience with a lot of Alice Fulton's critics, many of whom seem to toss disparaging words her way with the flippant anxiousness of young children encountering and smothering something new and intimidating. "How do you know that you don't like broccoli if you won't *try* it," and how will these writers ever lend a thoughtful critical perspective if they can't stop harping on Fulton for refusing to tow a more conventional, accessible critical stance? Their generic vision ought not be Fulton's problem. It's not my mission here, however, to get into a long dialogue about the critics (Amazon wouldn't post it anyway), but to instead come to the aid of an engaging, challenging, and vital new book of essays. Fulton's volume circumscribes a theory (let's make it more approachable)--a notion--of poetics that stands to breathe new life into a discipline that is fast becoming a solipsistic basketweaving in and around the zillion MFA programs of our nation's universities. Her implicit enthusiasm for sharp words (she bitingly assigns an anonymous, well-known poet the name Halcyon Angeltongue) and for poetry's good *potential* in these pieces is so forward-thinking and refreshing that I found myself, ruffling through the pages, suddenly grandly optimistic for poetry's contemporary cause. In these pieces: Fulton lights on the "screens," both figurative and literal, that fall between reader and object, individual and elements. She comes to the generous aesthetic aid of famous and unfamous poets alike, reorganizing conventional approaches to poetic criticism with precision and concerted care. And Fulton envisions an exciting, strenuous new school of "fractal poetry" (challenging and quite seaworthy), which "looks to chaos and complexity theory as touchstones for contemporary aesthetics. These pieces suggest that as free verse broke the pentameter, fractal verse can break the poem plane or linguistic surface." This writing is gleamingly new and often makes for difficult maneuvering, but it's always a dance worth learning, worth the work.

Not since I read Wallace Steven's 'The Necessary Angel' 25 years ago have I felt such a wide-ranging intelligence in a book of essays on poetry. Fulton uses theories of science in absolutely startling ways. Readers with any interest in rich metaphors will find much here that is positively exciting and new. Her two essays on what she's calling "fractal verse" are solid, thoughtful, and full of possibilities for where poetry can take us. So far as I know, no poet has ever before described the "poem plane" and how poets are at the threshold of "breaking" through it. To me, this is as significant as Pound's idea of "breaking" the pentameter was when it was first proposed. This book is the work of a true visionary.

Let's keep it simple: this is a challenging but accessible and rewarding book. It's not surprising that some professional reviewers have carped; the book takes them (often deservedly) to task for preaching "karaoke poetics," parroting with increasing volume and decreasing originality things that were said -- and tired -- a decade ago. Fulton's chapters on her own poetry and on Dickinson are outstanding, but the whole rewards even a casual reading. Though it's prose in format, the book is still a poem -- a fractal poem -- in the way it plays with its subject matter, diverges on flights of fancy and whimsy, reveals the poet as a person rather than a cold auctorial voice, etc.

Alice Fulton here offers beautifully crafted essays on poets and poetry, emphasizing the power of estrangement that gives lyric much of its interest. Emily Dickinson plays an important role in this book, but above all the reader will find elegant and telling formulations about poetry's exploration of possibilities of feeling.