Barely Composed: Poems

by Alice Fulton

"Fulton is exactly the kind of poet Shelley had in mind when he said 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' " ― Verse In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems―her first in over a decade―Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects―time, death, love―and imbues them with fresh urgency and depth. Barely Composed unveils the emotional devastations that follow trauma or grief―extreme states that threaten psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate the deepest suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, the "formal feeling" described by Emily Dickinson. Elegies contemplate temporal mysteries―the brief span of human/animal life, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, the enduring presence of the arts―and offer unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural suppressions of truth. Under the duress of silencing, whether chosen or imposed, language warps into something uncanny, rich, and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription―coloring book to redacted document―enact the combustible power of the unsaid. Though "anguish is the universal language," there also is joy in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity, intellect and intimacy. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics merge with incandescent contemporary registers, and this recombinant linguistic mix gives rise to poems of disarming power. Visionaries―truth tellers, revelators, beholders―offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling. Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," Barely Composed bears witness to love’s complexities and the fragility of existence. In the midst of cruelty, a world in which “the pound is by the petting zoo,” Fulton’s poems embrace the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and "the principles of tranquility."

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

112 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2015

About the author

For a photo gallery, the story behind the stories, and a reading group guide for The Nightingales of Troy, please visit alicefulton.com

Reviews

[Carol Painter · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are some stunning poems, and I mean that in several very positive ways: they are sharp, gut-wrenching, and just plain visceral. Having just finished this, I'm certain that I will return to many of these poems several times. There are so many lines that hit me dead center with their emotion that I feel as if I've encountered a soul who has the ability to put into gorgeous words what I cannot express myself.
I have to say that I am very grateful for poets such as Alice, and thank her for sharing these with all of us.

[Steven Critelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Barely Composed Alice Fulton mourns the loss of our individual freedom, empathy and social community, which evidences itself in the deterioration of the environment and the culture of death that has enveloped the world. She attributes this state of affairs to the dehumanizing aspects of the religious and secular myths of Western Civilization and their extensions into our political, cultural, sexual and psychological domains. Fulton performs the poetry in a variety of discourses, voices, moods and modes, and displays an intensity and technical sophistication that is all but non-existent in U.S. poetry today. Importantly, Fulton reimagines herself in this volume. She is no longer the “android ballerina,” as she ironically caricaturizes the commanding persona that occupied center stage in her previous books. Here, Fulton makes a stunning emotional commitment that emphasizes the seriousness of the stakes. As the title warns, Barely Composed is a book wrapped in the distress of its subject matter. Its emotional tide begins in the recondite spheres of the self and moves outward toward the public spheres of family, work, society and the world at large. In the process, she comes to grips with family tragedy, including the death of her mother, and finds a certain amount of peace in Eastern mysticism and a renewed dedication to her profession and personal life. Many critics will consider the poetry “difficult” and offer vague praise or disdain. Whatever. Barely Composed is nothing less than a supreme work of art and in a class of its own. From this point forward, Alice Fulton not only talks the talk, but walks the walk of a heavyweight contender.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just want to find you, reader, in the book. Please meet me there, among the machines, the coinages, the redactions, the characters in the dark night... . Here, it is so intimate. When you ask me, "Does it say that which is forbidden?", I will answer with the word "supersubjective," as an oblique response, and ultimate compliment.

What we will understand together is that the lexicon, diction, syntax here is fresh, a rare (but not rarified), unique version of English. Most other writing (even "good" writing), we'll think, is in a rut of jalopyesque sameness. It's like they're cutting out the alphabet from a shipping carton with child's scissors...What words were we using before? Where did we find them? Were they in a sack with other money, whose dye pack long ago exploded? We leave them behind, escapists. We found ways of communicating here that allow something different, and beyond.

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing throughout, this collection struck me as deeply personal as it is brilliant. Be prepared for meanings lifting from their ruts and shapeshifting before your eyes, newness and immediacy all the reader's to experience. "Barely composed" indeed! And yet so very much and so fabulously.

[Jessica Harrocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore reading made-up new invented words and there were several peppered through this collection. Really fresh, and deep.

[Cedric · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're looking for a challenge, this should be a sufficiently heavy lift. A few poems in, I found it was best for me to examine the poems I would have to look up along the way (example markup here in "A Tongue Tie of Vet-Wrap"- https://www.instagram.com/p/B-81BP8B3ke/) Even in so doing, by the poem's end I often found that only my vocabulary, and not my understanding of the piece, had been augmented. Some of the longer poems took me an hour to read-but for the most part that can be blamed on all the interesting rabbit holes I went down looking up so many of the allusions.

Prof. Fulton, who teaches at Cornell, has done interviews and has pieces on her website that anticipate that some readers may find her work difficult. As she says in one of these interviews from 2010, five years before this book came out: "The poems are so oblique that they don’t seem highly political...Poetry is inherently unpolemical because it leaves so much unsaid. A didactic poem is a failed poem, as I see it. If the poet builds in complexity, linguistic layers that make the poem rich and interesting, the problem of potential didacticism is solved. You can’t do all that and be pedantic at the same time. You can’t have depth and also have a t-shirt slogan. A poem beautifully, seductively, and partially resists the reader. Without some resistance, it’s not a poem. When poetry resists successfully, it sends you back up the page as much as it sends you forward. It’s recursive. Prose, in contrast, has an ineluctable verticality; it pulls you down the page. The poems I’m describing are political, but the politics are nuanced and subtle, just like any other content in poetry." I think I may have been better prepared for the work had I happened upon these interviews before I took up the book. I don't agree with the first half of that excerpt but I love that she said it (for instance, "poetry is inherently umpolemical" needs the qualifier "My") and it's good fodder for conversation. I'm ok with didacticism and slogans if they're true, honest, pure, and perhaps lovely, for example. And I'm ok with work that's merely honest and none of the rest of that list, frankly (of course, you may be honest in your writing about a sentiment others hold you think they shouldn't hold though it's not "true" for you.)

I encountered Prof. Fulton on Twitter having a spirited discussion about the intersection of feminism and race and I was impressed by her candor. Based on that Twitter convo I'm sure she'd feel quite comfortable telling me "everything ain't for everybody" and it's ok if I didn't receive all she wanted to communicate; to use her words, "Writing poetry is probably the best way to teach people to love language and words. But whether it’s needed or found or appreciated within academia, poetry will continue. It’s a force, a pleasure. A beautiful complexity. Beginning poets often blame poetry for its peripheral status. But it seems to me that our culture’s lack of appreciation for poetry says more about cultural deficiencies than it does about poetry. What would it mean to be popular in a context that mostly prizes formulaic, easy reads?"

My faves include the aforementioned "A Tongue Tie of Vet-Wrap," which seems to be part ars poetica/part entreaty for writers to write without fear (Beholder, be sparkscript,/object of ignition. Say you must flame/through that restriction or who will who will/story the horror, if not you?...With this biro, bic, pixel./With this papermate. I thee." I also liked "Claustrophilia" which seems to take up romance, and employs one of the frequent appearances of rhyme ("But never mind the downside/mon semblable, mon crush./Love is just the retaliation of light./It is so profligate, you know, so rich with rush.") Other highlights for me were "Triptych for Topological Heart," "Still World Nocturne" (a villanelle, essentially), and "There are A Few Things I Need to Get" (no shade intended).

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

"On a thinkable rampage, on a tear, I grow my passions into a candle."

Like some of the most creative, most vibrantly strange poets in U.S. literature—Dickinson and Ashbery, for two—Fulton teases playfulness from paradox. Here, in this line, we don't expect to find "candle" at its end. A candle seems all too wan, too timid to be "grown" into; it comports awkwardly with "rampage." "Torch" or "pyre"—incidentally, both words also come up elsewhere in this book—would seem more natural, more fitting here.

Fulton, again like Ashbery and Dickinson, frequently uses both the imperative command and the rhetorical question to mix the reader into the swirl of the poem; we are suddenly ensnared, but we don't know how tightly, and we have no idea where we are. It is a delirious, delicious (twice in this book Fulton mentions "mouthfeel" and tongues loom large in several poems) experience.

[Alex Bilzerian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fulton will be taking a trip to Stockholm one of these years. Incredible.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long awaited volume of new poems. Extraordinary! My favorite living poet.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

These impressive poems are avant-guarde but not daunting--even though Fulton says "the more myself I become the less intelligible I seem to others" ("Wow moment") and "every transparency gives onto an opacity" ("A Tongue-Tie Of Vet Wrap"). She seems interested in scientific phenomena and feats of modern engineering, but ultimately I sense that she is exploring her own desires, regrets, and aspirations; sometimes also relationships. Her mother's death is also a very emotional theme. Only occasionally does the poetic effort seem strained, as in "You Own It."

[Nancy Ann]

I just can't bring myself to "rate" this -- as if it was possible to compare it to other things and judge. I'll just say it made me feel less alone. One quotation that I'll carry with me for a long time: "...the more myself I/become the less intelligible I seem to others.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obsessed. Still reading and rereading. I want to hear more people talking, listening. There is something good here, specific, that isn't found in other places. Like Lorde said, Poetry is Not a Luxury....Fulton's words feel urgent. <3

[Em]

read for a book challenge, it was fine?

[Mary Herrington-perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand why so many critics love this book: Because it holds true to the dictum of the poem called "Make It New" (something Ezra Pound advised). No doubt--NO doubt--Fulton has a way with words. She wrangles them together to make them new (how about "pyropathologist" or "fangling" or "protogeegaws"?). And I respect that. But the wordplay gets in the way too often, and the poems that work the best ("Forcible Touching" is SPECTACULAR, and "Still World Nocturne" is damn good, too) don't rely on it. Still, it's a rich read, full of allusions to myth, other poems, pop culture, and Tibetan Buddhism. It even includes a poem written in the Doha tradition called "Doha Melt-Down Elegy."

[Alyssa Lentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems are similar in style and theme, and in that sense they make sense as a collection, but some of these really pulled me in and spoke to me while others I couldn't be bothered to try and make heads or tails of. I especially connected with poems in parts IV and V ("Sidereal Elegy", "Daynight, With Mountains Tied Inside", "You Own It"), but on the whole, I think this book was too opaque for me.